Chapter 28
“It’s not so bad,” Charlie said, testing out the makeshift bed he’d made up on the sofa a few minutes later.
Kate leaned down to turn the lamp out and jumped back when an electric shock buzzed her fingertips.
“Static from the storm,” Charlie murmured.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs. “Night, Charlie,” she said into the quiet darkness.
“Goodnight, Darrowby.”
—
Kate stood at her bedroom window watching the quiet harbor beneath the clear, star-studded sky.
How could the universe throw them together for one night in this place that was neither his life nor hers and ask them to still play by the rules?
She thought of all the years spent doing the right thing as a wife and a mother, and of her makeshift home over the fancy-dress shop.
She’d spent her whole life reacting to circumstance rather than directing the action.
Sitting on the edge of her bed, she studied her toes, remembering sitting on the edge of her bed on other portentous nights of her life.
Her wedding night. The first night in the hospital after giving birth to Alice.
Her first night alone in the flat above the shop.
All first nights, all scenes written in bold black ink.
Pressing her fingers to her lips, she realized something. She couldn’t bring herself to get into bed.
Tiptoeing back across her room, she stood at the top of the stairs, racked by indecision, then moved before she could lose her nerve.
She didn’t speak as she sat silently beside the sofa on the wooden floor, resting her head on his blanket.
He didn’t speak either, just smoothed his hand over her hair.
Pale shafts of moonlight spilled across the floor, stars hanging in the midnight sky over the harbor.
“You said ‘Goodnight, Darrowby,’?” she whispered. “I wanted you to call me Kate.”
He lifted the edge of his blanket. “Come here.”
She climbed up and he settled the blanket over them.
He turned his back against the sofa and shifted her into the crook of his arm, her head tucked beneath his chin.
“It’s been a long day,” he said. “Get some sleep now, Kate.”
She was exhausted to her core, his heartbeat a lullaby against her ear. She curled herself deeper against him, her mouth close to his neck, his arm warm around her shoulders.
“I wrote the scripts,” he said, so quietly she wasn’t sure if she was dreaming as she fell beneath heavy layers of sleep. “I’m pretty used to ignoring whatever people say about me, but not that.”
“I believe you,” she breathed.
—
Charlie had already gone by the time she woke the next morning. He’d left a brown paper bag of croissants on the kitchen table, beside a bottle of champagne and a copy of that morning’s Sunday Times.