SUNDAY MORNING WAS Rachel’s first ‘first date’ in nearly a quarter of a century, and she wasn’t sure whether she was more excited or apprehensive about it. Part of her was dying to tell her best friend about it; but on the other hand she and Tim had agreed to keep this just between them, for now. Which made sense. If things went wrong, then Jenny would see the fact that Rachel had actually dated someone as the green light to set her up with someone else—whereas if things went wrong, she’d want a lot more time to regroup.
Despite what she’d told Tim about being more comfortable in jeans than in a cocktail dress, she made an effort with her hair and actually wore lipstick. She glanced out of the window, noting that it was frosty outside, and opted to wear her walking boots, slipping an umbrella into the pocket of her waterproof jacket.
Tim was waiting for her outside the train station. ‘Hi.’ He greeted her with a smile, then bent to kiss her cheek.
‘Hi.’ And it suddenly didn’t matter that it was cold and damp and grey. It felt as if the sun had come out. Just being with him made the day feel brighter.
He held her hand all the way on the train to Richmond, and on the bus to Richmond Park itself. It was sweet and cherishing and endearing, all at the same time.
‘It’s the perfect autumn day,’ he said. ‘I love this time of year, when it’s frosty and a bit misty, and you can crunch through the leaves.’
‘“Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness”,’ she quoted. ‘I used to love taking the girls to the park, all wrapped up in scarves and gloves and coats, and we’d look for conkers.’
‘So did we. It feels like five minutes ago and twenty years, all at the same time,’ he said. ‘Let’s head this way and see if we can find the deer.’
He held her hand as they walked through the park, too. If anyone had told Rachel when she was fifteen that it was just as thrilling to hold hands with someone in your fifties as it was when you were in your teens, she would never have believed them; yet it really was just as heady and exciting. She could feel the blood thrumming through her veins and butterflies in her stomach. It was crazy. She hadn’t been looking for a relationship. And she definitely didn’t want to repeat the heartache she’d felt after Steve’s final betrayal. Yet at the same time, she was enjoying the anticipation and excitement of a first date: those fizzy, sparkly feelings about all the possibilities opening up before her.
The sun finally broke through the clouds, dispelling the mist and turning the frosted grass and bracken into glittering silver where its rays shone through the branches of the almost bare trees. Here and there, the last few leaves hung from the branches in shades of yellow and copper and ruby, the colours bright against the darkness of wet bark; fallen leaves had drifted like copper snow beneath the trees. It was the most gorgeous late autumn morning; then they rounded a corner and saw a red stag standing in the bracken, his head lifted and his antlers looking as if they were crowning him.
‘Oh, look at him! He’s beautiful. So majestic.’ Rachel took her phone from her pocket and took a few snaps of the deer at a safe distance.
A second deer came to join the first, and then a third and fourth, the colour of their coats almost blending with the bracken; the females grazed with the stag looking over them, and Rachel stood watching them, with Tim’s arms wrapped round her and his cheek pressed against hers.
‘Aren’t they stunning? This is the perfect Sunday morning,’ he whispered against her ear. Then he kissed the spot just behind her ear and sent desire licking up her spine. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that heady, powerful need to kiss someone. Part of her worried that she was rushing into things, but the impulse to kiss him was too strong; she turned round in his arms so she could kiss him thoroughly.
When she broke the kiss, they were both shaking.
‘I think a whole herd could’ve stomped past us, just now, and we wouldn’t have noticed,’ he said huskily.
She stroked his face. ‘You’re telling me.’
Was this weird, long-forgotten feeling blooming through him happiness? Tim wondered. He’d spent the last two and a half years burying himself in work, keeping himself too busy to think and to feel. But with Rachel, he was content. Something as simple as walking through the park, enjoying the autumn landscape and each other’s closeness, had made him feel so much brighter.
His first proper date since he’d lost Mandy.
And there was something about Rachel Halliday that drew him, that made him want to step out of the shadows with her and seize the brightness. Maybe this could be his second chance. And this time he’d try harder to get it right, to balance his work and his life a bit better and reconnect properly with his daughters.
But in the meantime, he was going to live in the moment. Enjoy the gorgeous surroundings of the park with someone who noticed things, but who didn’t feel the need to fill every moment with chatter. The more time he spent with Rachel, the more he liked her.
By lunchtime, they’d walked up an appetite; they found the café and loaded their trays with hot soup, fresh bread and a shared bowl of rosemary salted chips.
Rachel smiled as they sat down at one of the tables. ‘Jenny would be nagging us about our salt intake if she saw this. But I think that hot, crispy chips need salt.’
‘Agreed—plus we have wholemeal bread and vegetable soup, which is good for our gut biome,’ Tim said. ‘I reckon that cancels out the chips.’
‘Good point,’ she said.
There was a dimple in her cheek when she smiled; it was so, so cute. He smiled at her. ‘I was wondering what made you decide to become a doctor?’
‘I wanted to be a nurse or a doctor right from when I was tiny,’ she said. ‘I was always bandaging my teddy bears when I was a toddler, and my favourite Christmas present ever was a doctor’s kit from my godmother. I used to take everyone’s pulse and pretend to listen to their heart through my stethoscope.’
He could just imagine that.
‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘Mum always championed me, even though it was a bit of a struggle for money for me to go to university.’
‘What about your dad?’
She shook her head. ‘He hasn’t been in my life for a very long time.’
Tim winced. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up difficult memories.’
‘Not a problem,’ she said. ‘I was lucky in having the best mum in the world. I have no regrets. So how about you? What made you want to be a doctor?’
‘I was fascinated by science when I was at school,’ he said. ‘You know, all the kitchen science experiments—the vinegar and baking soda volcano, making a battery for a clock with a potato and zinc and copper wire, that sort of thing. My gran had been a chemist, so she encouraged me to do the experiments. But then she died from a heart attack when I was about ten. I missed her hugely, and it made me want to be a doctor, so I could save other people from having to lose their grans.’
‘But you chose emergency medicine rather than cardiology?’
‘The emergency department was my favourite rotation, in my houseman years,’ he said. ‘I like the mad pace, and the fact that we can actually see the difference we make to people’s lives. What made you pick emergency medicine?’
‘It was pretty tough to choose between emergency medicine and obstetrics,’ she said. ‘I really loved bringing a new life into the world, those first moments when you look into a baby’s eyes and see all the wonder. But even more than that I love being able to save someone’s life, being able to give people hope when they’d been expecting the worst.’
‘There’s nothing like it,’ he agreed.
‘Was anyone in your family a medic?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘As I said, Gran was a chemist, but it was industrial rather than pharmaceutical. I come from a long line of lawyers. That’s what I was supposed to be, too—especially as I was my dad’s only son. Even though my older sister has made a much better lawyer than I would ever have been, he wasn’t very happy when I sat him down and explained that I wanted to be a doctor and I wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps. I don’t think he ever forgave me.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I always felt I was a disappointment to him, and I guess that’s one of the reasons I worked so hard early on—I wanted to make him proud of me.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess it became a bit of an ingrained habit, and I carried on. Though I swore I’d never be like him with my girls—whatever they wanted to do, I’d support them and make sure they knew they’d always have my backing.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Hannah, my eldest, is an English teacher; she followed in her mum’s footsteps. She’s about to start maternity leave.’
‘When’s the baby due?’ she asked.
‘The middle of December,’ he said.
‘A Christmas baby. How lovely.’ She smiled. ‘Christmas will be really special for you, this year,’ she said.
Tim had been blocking that out, because he had no idea how he was going to cope with it. He found Christmas hard enough as it was. Adding his first grandchild as well, a reminder of all the things he couldn’t share with Mandy any more...
But Rachel had asked him about his daughters, and he didn’t want her to notice that he was brooding. ‘Sophie, my youngest, has set up her own digital marketing consultancy for small businesses. Don’t ask me what she actually does, because she talks about stuff I really don’t understand,’ he said. Hoping to head the conversation far away from Christmas, he asked, ‘What about your girls?’
‘Meg’s reading music in Manchester. She’s already sorted out a place for her PGCE next September because she wants to teach music—the subject, that is, not an instrument.’
‘What does she play?’ he asked.
‘Piano and guitar, though actually she can play any instrument she picks up. I think she’s good enough to make a living professionally, but she says hardly anyone makes a decent living as a musician, and she doesn’t want to be a session musician. She’d rather have a settled job in teaching and play in a band on the side for fun.’
‘It sounds as if she’s very sensible and practical,’ Tim said. A lot like Rachel herself.
‘She is,’ Rachel said.
‘What about your younger daughter?’
‘Saskia’s at Sheffield, reading biochemistry. She wants to work in a research lab and save the world—I think she’ll do it, too, because she has a huge heart.’
Also like Rachel herself, Tim thought. The more he was getting to know her, the more he liked her.
They went for another wander through the park, and then Tim saw Rachel back to her house and kissed her goodbye on the doorstep.
‘You’re very welcome to come in,’ she said.
‘It’s kind of you to ask,’ he said, ‘but Hannah’s expecting me.’ Part of him was tempted to ask Rachel to come with him; he knew his daughter wouldn’t mind. On the other hand, he didn’t want to rush this—and a selfish part of him wanted to keep Rachel to himself for a little longer. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at work,’ he said, ‘and maybe we can go to the cinema in the week? I don’t mind what we see, though I’m not a huge fan of gory stuff.’
‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘I was planning to go and see that new comedy drama—the one that’s been tipped for several awards.’
‘I’d quite like to see that, too,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘All right. I’ll check the listings and book something. Which evening’s good for you?’
‘I’m on early shifts Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday,’ he said, ‘so any of those work for me.’
‘OK. I’ll sort it out and let you know,’ she said.
Another date. Part of Rachel worried that this wasn’t a good idea. She wasn’t looking for a permanent relationship, and her experiences with Steve had made her wary of trusting her heart to anyone else. On the other hand, she liked what she’d seen of Tim, and she wanted to get to know him better. And it would be nice to see a film with someone else, so they could chat about it afterwards.
In the end, she booked tickets for the Thursday evening.
‘Do you want to grab something to eat, first?’ Tim asked.
‘I thought we could eat at the cinema,’ she said.
‘There’s a café?’
‘Not exactly. Instead of normal cinema seats, they have sofas with tables, so you place your order on their app, and the staff bring the food and drink to your table,’ she explained.
‘What a great idea,’ Tim said. ‘As you bought the tickets, I’ll buy the food and drink.’
They shared several dishes between them and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, and Rachel thoroughly enjoyed the film. And most of all she enjoyed holding hands with Tim all the way through the second half: being with someone who was actually present, instead of checking his phone every five minutes.
As the screening finished reasonably early, Tim suggested having coffee at his place.
‘I’d love to,’ she said.
They chatted about the film all the way on the Tube and then as they walked to Tim’s house. He led them down a tiled pathway to a large Edwardian terraced house with a large bay window.
‘It needed a bit of work when we bought it, but it had so many original features and we fell in love with those,’ he said. ‘Those six-over-two panes in the windows, the spandrels in the porch, and the leaded lights in the door.’
‘It looks lovely,’ she said.
‘Let me give you the guided tour,’ he said, opening the front door. ‘Hallway, obviously.’ The hallway had its original geometric tiled flooring, with the wooden panelling beneath the dado rail painted a soft dove grey, and the wall above painted cream. He gestured to a door on the left. ‘Obviously the downstairs toilet isn’t original, though we went for Edwardian-style fittings when we could afford it.’ He led her through the first door. ‘Living room.’ The walls were painted Wedgwood blue, with cream paintwork; there was a huge mirror over the original cast-iron fireplace, and overstuffed bookshelves either side of the chimney breast. There was a large geometric-patterned rug on the polished floorboards, and the navy sofas with their cushions embroidered in jewel-like colours looked incredibly comfortable. It would be the perfect reading nook, she thought.
There was a collection of photo frames along the mantelpiece. ‘Can I be nosey?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’
The photos were a similar mix to the ones in her own house: Tim’s wedding to Mandy, graduation photos of themselves with their own parents and then with their daughters, and a couple of what were clearly much-loved candid family snaps taken in the garden or on holiday. She could see that Tim’s daughters had inherited his dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes rather than Mandy’s blonde hair and lighter blue eyes. And they seemed a warm, close, loving family—much like she’d tried so hard to make her own to be.
‘Mandy looks a really lovely person,’ she said. There was a sunniness about her in the photographs that made Rachel think they would’ve been friends, if they’d ever met.
‘She was,’ Tim said. ‘But I’m not comparing you to her. You’re very different. Both lovely, in your own ways.’
Rachel smiled. ‘I wasn’t fishing for a compliment.’
‘I know. But it’s kind of awkward...’ He tailed off.
She knew what he meant: his very new girlfriend seeing photographs of his late wife. Yet this was still very early days between them; and she’d never been the jealous type. Right now, there was nothing to be jealous about. And, even if it did work out between them, she believed that hearts expanded and there would be room in his life for both herself and his memories of Mandy. ‘It’s fine. I’ve always thought that feelings aren’t like a piece of cake where you have to grab the plate back and chop off a corner to give to someone else.’
‘Because then all you’d be able to offer someone is a pile of crumbs,’ he said.
‘I’d be more concerned if you’d put all the photos away in a box and were pretending that Mandy never existed. I still have a couple of framed photos in the house with Steve, the girls and me, because there were some good times as well as the rough bits. At the end of the day, he’s still their dad and I don’t want to cut him out of their lives.’ Her ex was doing a good enough job of that by himself, she thought.
‘Fair point. This is obviously the dining room,’ he said as he took her through to the next room. The walls were painted sage-green; again there was cream paintwork and polished floorboards, an original cast-iron and tiled fireplace, and there was a large table in the centre with eight chairs. The curtains were a green Morris print; there was a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lily Pond on one wall, and another of two little girls in a garden of lilies.
‘John Singer Sargent,’ he said, noticing her gaze. ‘Mandy loved that painting since the moment she first saw it in the Tate. I bought her a proper art print, and had it framed for her birthday a few years back.’
‘It goes really well with this room,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ He took her through to the kitchen. ‘Mandy was the cook. I’m afraid I just shove stuff in the microwave or the toaster,’ he said with a wry smile, ‘and even then, you can’t assume that I checked the toaster settings before I shoved the bread in.’
It was the kind of kitchen that cried out to be the hub of a family home, with its grey-painted cabinets and beech worktops and a matching table and chairs at one end. Though it looked more like a showroom kitchen than one that was used, Rachel thought; there were no herbs or plants growing on the windowsill, and there wasn’t so much as a newspaper on the table. There was a calendar on the wall, but there were no dates filled in, and she noticed that the page on display was still that of the previous month. Rachel could’ve wept for him; it was obvious that he was lost without the centre of his family.
He took her through to the final room, which led off the kitchen. ‘This is the garden room. We had it built when the girls were teenagers, though we did re-use the original back door.’ The wall that wasn’t glass had been painted cream, with a large clock set on it, and the whole thing was light and airy. There was a large potted palm in one corner, and an oversized clock on the wall; fairy lights were draped artfully round the window frames and the top of the painted wall, and the sofa and chairs looked incredibly comfortable, piled with cushions. She could imagine his girls here with their friends, just as her daughters would’ve been: mugs of coffee on the table and music playing as a background to chatter and laughter.
‘Righty. I promised you coffee.’ He led her back to the kitchen. ‘Take a seat.’ He measured coffee into a metal gadget she assumed was the reusable pod he’d told her about and set the machine running while he took two mugs from the cupboard.
‘Tell me about Mandy,’ she said.
‘We met at uni. Mandy was doing her teacher training year, and I was in my last year—I was a year older than her,’ he said. ‘We were both out with a group of friends. Someone jostled her at the bar, and she ended up spilling the best part of a glass of red wine over me.’
‘A bit of a different way to meet,’ she said with a smile; though she was pretty sure that Tim would have laughed it off rather than having had a hissy fit about wine spilling over his clothes.
‘She asked if she could take me for a pizza, the next night, to apologise for covering me in wine. I said she didn’t need to apologise, but I liked the way she smiled so I said yes to the pizza, and we’d go halves on the bill.’ He looked wistful. ‘We just clicked, and we talked for hours, that night. We just didn’t notice the time, and the staff ended up having to ask us to leave because they wanted to close the restaurant.’ He smiled. ‘We got married just after we graduated. The first year was a bit tough—you know what junior doctor hours are like, and it was her first year as a secondary school teacher—but we got through it. We were a team. The plan was that she’d make assistant head of department and I’d be a registrar before we started trying for children—but Hannah had other ideas and made her appearance a year or so earlier than we’d expected.’ His face softened. ‘Becoming a dad—I thought I knew it all, being a medic. I mean, I’d even delivered a baby. But nothing prepared me for how it felt when I looked into our little girl’s eyes for the first time. That rush of love just blew me away. And it was the same when Soph arrived. I’m not one to cry in public, but I bawled my eyes out when I first held them,’ he confessed. ‘And both our girls have been brilliant, this last couple of years.’
‘The perfect family?’ she asked lightly.
‘No, a normal family,’ he corrected. ‘We don’t always agree on things. Mandy and I used to row over me working too hard, and I admit I missed most of the girls’ sports days.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘I was late for parent-teacher evening a few times, but I never missed one of their performances—whether it was one of the girls singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at an end-of-term nursery school concert, right through to Hannah playing Lady Macbeth in sixth form and doing the whole “out, damn’d spot” bit. I was always there, as near to the front as I could get, and made sure they could see me clapping and cheering them on. We used to take them out for dinner after the performance to make a fuss of them and tell them how proud we were of them.’
Meg and Saskia couldn’t say the same about their own dad, Rachel thought with a pang. Two times out of three, Steve had found an excuse why he couldn’t make it to a school performance, and he’d almost never made parent-teacher evenings, saying that Rachel was much better at dealing with them than he was. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight, had Rachel realised it hadn’t been work keeping him away: it had been a stolen date with his latest mistress.
Tim put a mug of coffee in front of her.
She took a sip. ‘This is perfect,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’ He opened a tin marked Biscuits and wrinkled his nose. ‘Stale digestives. Not the sort of thing you should offer a guest.’ Then he rummaged in a cupboard and emerged waving a packet of biscuit curls, which he decanted onto a plate. ‘I hoped I still had these. I’ll replace them before Hannah drops round next—it’s her latest pregnancy craving,’ he said.
Tim Hughes was definitely the sort of man who’d notice something like that and act on it, she thought, touched. The little things added up and made a lot.
‘Tell me about Steve,’ he said.
‘We met at a party when I was doing my last year as a house officer,’ she said. ‘He was a friend of a friend. He worked in advertising, so he had the gift of the gab and a boatload of charm—and the most soulful brown eyes. You know how it’s impossible to resist a spaniel?’ At Tim’s nod, she continued, ‘It was like that with him. One look and I’d just melt. And he made me laugh. I thought I’d found my perfect partner. We’d been together for almost a year when he took me to this little café opposite the Eiffel Tower for breakfast. I’d ordered an almond croissant, and it came out on a plate with Veux-tu m’épouser? written in chocolate beside it, and on top of the croissant there was a tiny paper case with a solitaire diamond nestled in it.’
It was nothing like Tim’s own proposal to Mandy on a beach in Northumbria, when they’d gone for a walk, got totally drenched in an unexpected rainstorm, and he’d apologised but she’d just laughed off the fact that they were both soaked and freezing. That moment, he’d realised she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, and he’d asked her to marry him. No ring, no witnesses, nobody to document the moment. Just the two of them, a kiss and a promise they’d both kept until she’d died.
Then he realised Rachel was waiting for him to respond. ‘Very romantic,’ he said, trying to be diplomatic. Though if she wanted grand, flashy gestures from him, she’d end up very disappointed. That wasn’t who he was.
‘It did kind of sweep me off my feet. I said yes. And I thought we were happy,’ she said. ‘Steve was working his way up the ladder at work, so he had to put the hours in; and, as you said, there’s never any time when you’re a junior doctor because you’re always on call. But then I fell pregnant with Meg, and I had really hideous morning sickness. Not quite hyperemesis but getting on that way.’ She paused. ‘That was when he had his first affair.’
Tim stared at her, shocked. His first affair? That meant her husband must’ve had more than one fling. And the timing, when Rachel had been so vulnerable, pregnant and suffering with morning sickness... Even though he knew it was none of his business, he couldn’t help asking, ‘Why did you stay with him?’
‘I was going to leave him,’ Rachel said. ‘I talked it over with Mum, hoping that she’d let me come back to stay with her until I could find a flat for me and the baby. But she’d been there, too. When she found out my father was actually working his way through her friends, she left him. But her parents were from the generation who didn’t believe in divorce—they said she’d made her bed, so she had to lie on it.’
‘Harsh,’ Tim said.
She nodded. ‘My dad was about as reliable at seeing me and making maintenance payments as he was at being faithful, so we struggled a lot when I was little. Mum didn’t want my life to be as tough as hers had been, and she talked me round. The way she saw it, being a single mum is really difficult. Not just financially, but the fact that you’re the one who has to make all the decisions, and you haven’t got anyone to share the worries with, or anyone who can take over and let you sleep when you’re bone-deep tired and terrified of letting yourself drift off in case you’re sleeping so heavily you don’t wake when the baby cries. And she persuaded me that maybe Steve had made a mistake because I’d had a tough pregnancy and he simply wasn’t coping with seeing me so poorly and knowing he couldn’t really do anything to help me.’
Tim didn’t think that was anywhere near a good enough excuse, but it wasn’t his place to say so.
‘Except,’ she said quietly, ‘Steve did exactly the same thing when I was pregnant with Saskia. For him it was more of a three-year itch than a seven-year itch. He was good with the girls when they were little, and I wanted them to grow up in a stable home rather than waiting for a dad who never turned up, the way I had, so I put up with it.’ She grimaced. ‘I always knew when he’d started an affair, because he’d be late home all the time and suddenly start having to work weekends at the office; and I always knew when it ended because he’d be back to being home at a normal time and he’d bring me flowers every Friday night.’
Tim had always brought Mandy flowers on a Friday night: not because he’d had a guilty conscience, but because he knew how much she loved fresh flowers and he’d liked to see the pleasure in her eyes when he gave them to her. It had been one of the little rituals that helped cement a marriage.
‘Looking back now, I guess I’d always known that Steve was selfish, but in the early years I managed to justify it to myself,’ Rachel said. ‘He had a high-pressure job.’
And a doctor in the emergency department had a low-pressure job? Tim didn’t ask the question, but he felt cross on her behalf.
‘He was busy at work.’
That went for doctors, too. Tim’s crossness intensified. ‘So I guess you wish you hadn’t listened to your mum?’ he asked.
‘Sort of,’ she said, ‘though Mum did give me one really solid bit of advice: to keep my money separate from Steve’s and have a joint account just for bills. She’d had money when she got married to my dad, but everything had been in their joint account, and he cleaned her out when she left him.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘Steve was almost as bad with money as my dad was. He liked designer clothes and very posh restaurants. When he bought me flowers, the bouquets were always really fancy ones from an expensive florist. I always felt so bad about him spending so much money on something so frivolous; I would much rather have had a cheap bunch of daffodils or what have you and given the rest of the money to charity.’
Oh. So she didn’t like flashy gestures. Tim was relieved. ‘So what made you finally leave him?’
‘I didn’t. He left me,’ Rachel said. She shrugged. ‘Ironically, I had been planning to leave him once the girls were both settled at uni. But then Mum was ill with dementia.’ She grimaced. ‘I’m not proud of myself for manipulating Steve, but he’d just come out of an affair, and he was always a bit more likely to agree to things when he was feeling guilty. I told him I wanted to take a sabbatical and move Mum in with us for a few months, to look after her for as long as I could. The girls wanted her to be with us, too. But then Mum started calling him by my dad’s name, and Steve got really upset about it. He couldn’t see that she was confused and didn’t mean to call him by the wrong name.’
‘It sounds as if you married a man like your dad, and maybe when your mum was ill, she could see that,’ Tim said carefully.
‘And maybe he realised it, too. He definitely resented the time I spent with Mum, thinking I should’ve been focusing on him. Eventually he gave me an ultimatum: either I had to put Mum in a home, or he’d leave, because what we had wasn’t a marriage any more.’
Tim winced. ‘I know I shouldn’t judge, but that’s incredibly mean-spirited. Your mum was ill and you wanted to support her and spend time with her.’
She nodded. ‘I called his bluff. And he left.’ She looked away. ‘It turned out he was seeing someone else. I’d just been so busy with Mum that this time I’d missed the signs. It was before the no-fault divorce rules came in, or I would have agreed to that. But Steve decided to sue me for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour.’
The more Tim heard, the more he disliked Rachel’s ex. How could anyone be that self-centred?
‘Unfortunately for him, my solicitor was very good, and Steve discovered that the courts didn’t see things in quite the same way that he did. Adultery, on the other hand, did count as unreasonable behaviour—on his part. It got a bit acrimonious, though we’re just about civil now, for the girls’ sake. And because, once probate from Mum’s flat had been agreed, I bought him out of our house.’ She looked bleak. ‘Actually, I did move my mum into a nursing home, towards the end, and I felt so guilty about it. But Mum needed more care than I could give her, and I wanted her to be comfortable. I visited her every single day. The staff were brilliant—when I came into the reception area, they used to tell me what kind of night she’d had and what sort of mood she was in, and whether she’d taken part in activities. They were so upset when she died. A dozen of them came to her funeral.’
Tim reached across the table to squeeze her hand. ‘I’m sorry about your mum. And I’m sorry your ex didn’t support you through her last illness. No wonder you’re wary of starting another relationship. It must be so hard to trust again when someone’s treated you like that.’
‘Yes—and that’s trusting my own judgement as well as trusting someone else,’ she said. ‘But it’s been hard for you, too. You were happy with Mandy until she died, and you never expected your life to change so suddenly.’ She looked at him, her grey eyes wide with sincerity. ‘I hope you know I’m not trying to step into her place in your life.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘It’s different—and it’s kind of weird, dating again after all these years with one person. I’ve no idea what the dating rules are nowadays.’
‘Neither have I,’ she said. ‘So let’s make a pact. We’ll just be ourselves and not what we think each other wants us to be.’
‘That works for me,’ he said, and chinked his empty coffee mug against hers. ‘Here’s to getting to know each other and being honest with each other.’
‘Getting to know each other and being honest with each other,’ she echoed. ‘And ourselves.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I really ought to be going.’
‘I’ll see you home,’ he said immediately.
She shook her head. ‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll be fine.’
‘At least let me walk you to the station,’ he said. ‘I know you’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself; but, apart from the fact that it’s the way my parents brought me up, there’s a very selfish bit of me that means I don’t quite want to let you go.’
To his relief, she agreed; and he walked hand in hand with her to the station.
‘Thank you for this evening. I really enjoyed it,’ he said.
‘Me, too. And thank you for the coffee.’
He kissed her lightly. ‘My pleasure. See you tomorrow.’
And he was smiling all the way home. It was still early days between them but letting her a tiny bit more into his life felt good. Maybe, just maybe, she was the one who’d help him move on from the yawning ache of loss—just as he might be the one who could help her move on after an unhappy marriage to a truly selfish man.