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How stupid was this?
Somehow Abigail got through the rest of the day. Though those roses haunted her every time she looked up and they caught her gaze. And they haunted her even more when she went home to put them in water on her kitchen windowsill.
She had enough time to shower, change into a little black dress and reapply her make-up by the time Brad rang the doorbell.
‘You look very nice,’ he said.
‘Thank you. So do you.’ He was wearing a formal shirt and dark trousers, with perfectly polished shoes; she knew that was from his father’s influence. ‘So where are we going?’
‘The Old Boat House,’ he said.
She blinked. The restaurant in Little Crowmell, the next village round the bay, took its name from the building it had been converted from. The food was amazing—unsurprisingly, as the chef had a Michelin star—and you had to wait weeks for reservations. ‘How did you manage to get a table?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a Tuesday night, so I guess it’s less busy than at weekends.’
It was somewhere they’d never been together—on a student budget it simply wasn’t affordable—but since she’d moved back to Great Crowmell Abigail had been there with Ruby for her birthday, and a couple of times with her parents as a major treat.
She needed to remind herself that this wasn’t a date date. It was simply sorting things out between them and setting the terms for a truce, for Ruby’s sake.
‘Ready to go?’ he asked.
No. She was panicking inwardly, worried that she was going to make a fool of herself over him. ‘Sure,’ she fibbed, trying to brazen it out.
She locked the door behind her and followed him out to his car. He didn’t say much on the way to the restaurant, but put the radio on to a classical station. It suited her not to have to talk, too, and to pretend to listen to the music while her thoughts were whirring round.
Just where did they go from here? she wondered. Had he bought those roses because he too remembered their wedding day and missed the love they’d shared? Did he miss her as much as she’d missed him? Was this the first step towards repairing the bitterness of the past, maybe even trying to rekindle their lost love?
They were both older now, wiser, maybe more able to cope with life. But, if they did try again, there was no guarantee that their life together would be perfectly smooth. Unexpected things happened; the odds were that they’d hit a sticky patch. So what would happen at the next bump in their relationship? Would Brad shut her out again, just as he had when his father had died? She couldn’t bear that, to make a fresh start but then go on to make exactly the same mistakes again.
Maybe it would be better to keep things between them just as friends.
And she’d tell him that tonight.
* * *
Abigail was as beautiful now as the day when he’d first fallen in love with her at their school prom, Brad thought. He’d gone as Abby’s date simply as a favour to his twin, who didn’t want her best friend to feel like a wallflower because Ruby was going to prom with her boyfriend. But there was something subtly different about Abby, that night. She wasn’t just the girl who spent almost as much time at their house as his sister did and who felt like part of the furniture. She’d haunted him a bit since he’d read the lines from that Shakespeare play out loud and seen the wonder in her eyes, but he’d told himself that he couldn’t possibly get involved with his sister’s best friend. They were only sixteen, and the inevitable breakup would have too much fallout.
But at the prom he’d danced with her all night, and for him there had been nobody else in the room. Just Abby.
And then he’d taken her out into the grounds and kissed her in the middle of the rose garden. He knew at that moment that he’d met his one and only. The woman he wanted to marry. The woman he did marry. The woman he’d been so happy with—until he’d ruined everything.
He really didn’t know where they could go from here. Maybe he could ask her to give him another chance, after Ruby’s wedding. But, then again, how could he trust himself not to ruin things a second time? He was the one who’d wrecked their marriage. OK, while life was smooth, things would be absolutely fine between them; but what would happen when they hit a rocky patch? Life wasn’t always perfect. Would they be strong enough as a couple to weather whatever Fate threw at them, this time round? Or would he end up letting her down again?
