Page 56 of Matilda’s Summer of New Beginnings

We drew away and he grinned at me. ‘Thanks. I mean it. Thanks for not saying “well done” because — yeah . . .’ He pulled a face and I pulled one back and then we laughed and hugged again. Quickly. ‘We missed you this weekend,’ he said.

‘Don’t lie.’ I nudged him. ‘I think you’ve enjoyed not having me around. I had a lovely weekend though. I kind of — didn’t want to come back.’

Ugh, was that me starting a heart-to-heart with Damien? I hoped not.

‘I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. I just have one thing to ask.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Don’t ever run away from us again, okay? Sure, we were a bit worried.’

‘Okay.’ I paused and we looked at each other. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Our emotional connection verbalized.’ I pointed towards him, then me, then back again.

He paused thoughtfully. ‘Yes. That’s it really.’

‘Good.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll have a latte when you’ve worked out how to use it.’

‘Cool. Cool.’ He turned and began puzzling over the machine again. I watched him for a moment and smiled.

Yep. The old Damien was still in there somewhere.

Chapter Twenty-One

July

I must confess, I was counting down the weeks until I could go back to Padcock. It was now the beginning of July, and my stolen weekend seemed so long ago.

Five weeks to go before I could return.

Well, five weeks and six days.

But who’s counting?

I’d gone back to work, and although it was lovely to be with Angelina again, and see my regular customers, I couldn’t help but compare the Italian café to Cerys’ tearoom. It was a completely different pace of life.

I had finished the alterations to Polly’s top, and posted it to her.

‘This is awesome!’ she texted back. She didn’t send me a photo of herself in it, which made me a bit twitchy, as a) I needed to know it fitted and b) I wanted to know what she looked like in full costume. Also c) that would have been an excuse to ask her how things were going with Jay and her singing lessons.

Of course, I could have asked Jay myself, but did he really want to hear from me? Did he really want to engage in a conversation with me? I tortured myself thinking about him over and over again. He didn’t come up to London, and although we spoke a couple of times on the phone when he was after Rosie, it was all very general, although his voice was as warm and friendly as ever. He was so enthusiastic about Polly’s singing as well, I couldn’t help but smile down the phone as he told me about her confidence building up.

Ugh. I wasn’t a stupid teenager, so why couldn’t I just get a grip and sort myself out? Stop pining over him — that would be good.

But when I found myself working on the line and wash pictures for Padcock, he was always at the edge of my consciousness.

And, I knew that only sixty miles or so away, Padcock was bumbling away, doing what it did best. They had a film crew there doing a production of I Capture the Castle, and although Padcock Court wasn’t exactly a castle, it had a certain air of genteel neglect that would look good on screen. I knew they were filming because Jay had sent me a photograph.

‘How do we look as extras?’ he captioned it. It was clearly a selfie, with him, Sam and Cerys dressed up as if they were in the 1930s, and baby Elin held up like the baby lion from The Lion King. Elin looked cross in her knitted bonnet, but the rest of them were laughing.

I kept looking at that photo. Jay was just so gorgeous in it. He — or a make-up artist — had tamed his hair in a sort of side-parted fashion, and I don’t know . . . he looked so handsome and so timeless in it, that I had quite a few weird dreams about me running down a train platform and waving him off somewhere. Which was fine until I inevitably fell off the end of the platform, and the train disappeared out of sight, and nobody rescued me from a big muddy puddle. I had to scramble out of the mire myself.

Yes, I realize this was likely my subconscious telling me that I needed to pull myself out of the dissatisfaction I was in, and do something about it. But it’s easy to say that later, isn’t it, once you’ve realized what you need to do and then you’ve done it.

But my weird dreams continued for the present, where Jay kept chuffing off into the distance and I never caught up with him.

I had cropped Sam, Cerys and Elin off the picture and put it on my phone as a screensaver, but then realized that would appear weird if Rosie or Damien or Angelina saw and they would definitely start asking questions . . .

But I kept a copy of the cropped image in my photo gallery anyway.