I opened the door to find that the man who’d introduced himself to me as Donovan had vanished.
But only for a second.
When I slipped on some shoes and ventured beyond our box hedge I found him kneeling on the pavement in front of our house. His back was to me. I moved closer and that was when I spotted the schoolgirl lying on the ground.
She’d fallen off her scooter and she was howling in pain. Her scooter was toppled over on its side nearby, its wheels still spinning.
‘Hey,’ Donovan said to her softly. His voice was deep and gruff. ‘Hey, it’s OK.’
He was gently cradling the girl’s wrists in his gloved hands. She’d skinned one palm and the bloodied graze was pebbled with grit, her upper body shaking. One knee of her grey school tights had been torn through and her shoe had come off. Her face was a tangle of tears, eyes huge and trembling.
‘Where did you learn to do a stunt like that? Because I have to tell you, that was impressive.’
She blinked up at him, lips wobbling, breath hitching. The air was so damp and chill that her breath formed misted plumes.
‘Oh, darling,’ cooed the woman crouched beside them, who I took to be the girl’s mother. ‘I told you to be careful.’
‘I don’t think it’s broken,’ Donovan told her. ‘Just a bruise.’
I wondered if he was a doctor. Close up, his eyes looked puffy with fatigue, his movements slack and weary. Perhaps he’d just finished a shift at Charing Cross Hospital, or Queen Mary’s. Maybe that was why he was hoping to buy in this area.
He must have sensed my presence because he looked up at me with a slow but spreading grin and I felt myself blush.
‘I’m from number 18.’ I pointed towards my open front door. ‘Lucy.’
‘Hi, Lucy.’ A flash of concern crossed his face as he looked at the girl again. ‘I don’t suppose you have a clean cloth, or some tissues, or . . .?’
‘Of course. Let me fetch something.’
I hurried inside and removed the first aid kit from under the sink, taking out a couple of wrapped antiseptic wipes and a sticking plaster. By the time I was back outside again he was fitting the girl’s shoe back onto her foot and the woman was thanking him profusely, placing her hand on his arm, fixing him with a lingering look.
‘Here.’ I thrust the wipes and the plaster at her and she took them, seemingly irritated by the interruption.
She had long blonde hair, recently styled. Immaculate make-up. She was slim and fashionably attired in a close-fitting dress over knee-length boots. I’d seen a lot of women dressed just like her dropping their kids at the school gates, driving by in luxury SUVs.
Not for the first time, I felt mismatched with the area – out of keeping with the otherwise wealthy residents of Putney.
Sam had inherited the house we lived in from his grandparents on his mother’s side. There was no way we could have afforded to live here otherwise. We’d had to stretch ourselves and dig perilously deep to modernize the place for sale.
As the woman tore open one of the wipes and used it to swab the girl’s knee, I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at our house. It was three storeys high with a mansard roof and a pair of French doors set into one of the dormers on the top floor that opened onto a small balcony concealed behind a triangular parapet. The brickwork was painted lemon yellow, the windows a crisp white. The front door was a deep, glossy red.
‘Thank you again,’ the woman said to Donovan. Her voice was husky and soft. ‘You’re incredibly kind.’
‘It’s nothing, really.’
Donovan helped the girl to her feet and righted her scooter, and as she hopped and winced, he stepped clear, cupping a hand to the back of his head, suddenly sheepish.
‘Well, take care.’
‘Oh, we will,’ the woman said. ‘It was so lovely to meet you.’
We watched them go – the woman still hadn’t really acknowledged me – and as she glanced back at Donovan one more time, the awkwardness built between us until he finally broke it by saying, ‘Sorry about that.’
‘No, you did the right thing.’
He gazed closely at me, as if my opinion genuinely mattered to him, and for a second I felt the full force of his charm, his looks, everything.
‘You’re the owner?’ he asked.
‘My boyfriend is.’
‘Ah.’ Another slow smile. ‘And is Bethany inside?’
I frowned. ‘She didn’t call you?’
‘About what? Oh, no!’ His eyebrows shot up and he patted his coat pockets, as if searching for his phone. ‘Has she cancelled on me? Have you already accepted an offer?’
‘No, it’s nothing like that,’ I told him, and then I explained about how Bethany was running late and had asked me to begin the tour in her absence.
There must have been something in the way I said it – some hint of my reticence or the discomfort I was trying to conceal – because he paused, then angled his head to one side.
‘And are you OK with that?’
‘I’m—’
‘Because if you’re not, I can wait. I don’t mind. I should probably warn you, though, that I have to be on my way in about half an hour. Did Bethany mention how long she’d be?’
She hadn’t. And my phone hadn’t pulsed from a reply to the text I’d sent her. I hoped that meant she was almost here but it was getting late in the afternoon, the October light was beginning to dim, and I knew that traffic in the area could be bad.
Instinctively, I went up on my toes, as if I might spot her racing our way in her branded company Mini, and that was when I felt a twinge in my chest.
There were two other ‘For Sale’ signs in our street. Sam and I had looked both properties up online the moment they’d come on the market. The first house had a fancy glass extension. The other had an extra bathroom and was competitively priced. There were also a number of other houses surrounded by scaffolding and plywood screens where teams of builders and tradesmen were at work. It was an easy guess that some of them would go on the market before long.
I sensed Donovan tracking my gaze, perhaps reading my thoughts, and in that moment I knew what I had to do.
‘No, don’t wait,’ I told him. ‘Please. Come inside.’