Years of love and harmony unravel and rewind until Maya sees herself lying broken on a bed, crying so many tears that they tumble into her hair, turning it from poker straight to forever wavy.
‘Are you OK?’
Maya puts her palms on her thighs and takes deep breaths into the sand. The shore just about laps at the edge of her trainers. Not getting wet was a win.
‘Yeah… yeah… I’m OK. Just confused. What are you doing here?’
‘What am I doing here? What are you doing here more like?’ he laughs.
Jon Vincent is smiling. His glacial eyes are as bright as the sea, but not as warm. His once-shorn hair is now longer, his hairline higher, as an arc of blond rises upwards from a curved widow’s peak. Gone is the tennis-ball fluff of a buzz cut Maya used to give him at university. They both look different.
Maya catches her breath.
Those eyes.
‘I’m travelling. With my boyfriend,’ she adds a bit too hastily to be as casual as she intended. ‘What are you doing here? How did you spring out of nowhere? I didn’t see you.’
‘Yeah, I realise,’ Jon says, pummelling the red patch on his chest with one fist. ‘I didn’t see you either. But this is my morning walk. I love this stretch, especially when it’s so peaceful.’ Maya and Jon look up and down, surveying the empty beach. ‘Although, weirdly, I prefer not to have a beautiful woman run full pelt into my chest.’
Jon’s fist opens into a flat palm and he circles his torso to soothe the impact point. Maya doesn’t apologise.
‘Are you staying at The Haven?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I come every year. To kick back. Cleanse. Get out of London and all the…’ he waves erratic hands around his face to gesture craziness.
‘London? You’re still in London?’
Maya was relieved that she had never bumped into Jon after he dumped her. Not once. On the late July morning she last saw him, when she packed him off for the final day of his Shakespeare summer school course at RADA with a muffin and a kiss, she didn’t know that he was going home with his Ophelia that night, with just a text to say it was over and that he was sorry. And he never contacted her again. The £5,000 flat deposit was gone; it had paid for Jon’s course. Over the summer he had fallen in love with sonnets and someone else, he had quietly and gradually moved all of the things he wanted out of their shared rental flat in Finsbury Park without Maya even noticing. Maya cried and cried until her hair turned wavy, until she got up, moved back to Hazelworth, started running with her father. And she never saw him again.
‘Well, London, Stratford, Toronto, LA… Wherever work takes me really. You could say I’m a bit of a nomad.’
Maya stands tall and puts her hand to her brow, to shield her eyes from the rising sun. To check if this is actually Jon Vincent standing in front of her on a secluded corner of a secluded beach in a secluded part of another continent.
Dammit, it is.
‘Want to walk?’ he gestures beyond the karst at the end of the beach to the next bay around the cove.
I need to Skype Nena. She won’t believe it when I tell her I bumped into Jon Vincent.
‘OK,’ Maya shrugs, to her surprise.
This coincidence is definitely worth a conversation, even if she doesn’t know where to begin. Maya doesn’t want to carry on running in front of Jon anyway. He’s never seen her run and she’ll feel too self-conscious in her shorts and vest. Running was something she did After Jon, to cure herself of heartache. Anyway, her forehead is pounding and her knees feel a bit weak. Walking is good.
‘Just until I catch my breath,’ she says, giving herself a get-out.