good news is, we’ve already been walking for twenty minutes,’ I replied with a tentative smile. ‘And it’s only fifty minutes away altogether.’
‘Fifty minutes!’
Liv stopped dead in her tracks, looking at me as though I’d just told her she had to walk the rest of the way barefoot, over hot coals.
‘I can’t walk another half an hour in these shoes.’ As she leaned forward, her blonde hair fell in front of her face, showing off her long neck as she messed around with the miniscule gold buckles. I hated those shoes but I loved that neck. I wanted to kiss it. But this really was not the time. ‘My foot is killing me.’
I bloody knew it.
‘Well, take your shoes off and we’ll walk on the sand,’ I suggested, looking at the uneven path that ran down the side of the beach. Even my leathery Hobbit feet wouldn’t fancy that much.
‘I can’t,’ she said, wincing as she removed her left shoe. ‘My foot is a bit of a mess.’
‘Oh my god, there’s a hole in your foot!’ I made an involuntary gipping sound as she pulled the shoe away to reveal what must have been a particularly nasty blister about fifteen minutes ago. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘You were in such a rush.’ She leaned against the low tidal wall and poked gently at the weeping mess formerly known as her foot. ‘I didn’t want to be late.’
‘I told you not to wear those shoes,’ I said, mad at her foot, mad at Google and possibly, very slightly mad at myself.
‘You also told me the restaurant was ten minutes away,’ she snapped back. ‘I can’t help it.’
I checked my phone one more time before taking another look at Liv’s gammy foot. It was utterly disgusting but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
‘If we walk around the beach, we’ll be there in ten minutes,’ I said, enlarging the map to make sure of my short cut. ‘Then we can clean that mess up there.’
‘There’s no way I’m walking down the beach,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest. ‘It’s filthy. Do you want me to get an infection in my foot? Do you want me to get septicaemia?’
No, I almost shouted, I want to bloody propose to you! Instead, I took a calming breath, put my phone away and smiled.
‘Have you got a plaster?’
‘Of course I haven’t got a bloody plaster!’ she exploded. ‘Why would I have a plaster?’
‘Because you’re a vet?’ I suggested. ‘Don’t you carry that sort of thing?’
‘What, in case we pass an Alsatian with a splinter?’
I turned my back on her and looked out at the setting sun, the last sliver hovering over the sea, and fingered the ring in my pocket. We were supposed to be there by now. We were supposed to be drinking champagne, surrounded by white roses and enjoying all the other amazing things I’d paid an arm and a leg for Pablo the events manager to organize in The Arse End of Nowhere, Mexico. I should have been the one down on one knee with a ring in my hand, instead Liv was crouching on the floor and tending to an open wound.
‘Maybe we should go back to the hotel,’ I suggested weakly as the sun drowned itself in the ocean. ‘It’s dark; it’s late. We’re not going to get there on time.’
‘You want to go back?’ she asked, hesitating over every word. ‘You don’t want to go to dinner?’
‘Well, I don’t want to sit here,’ I replied. ‘What would you suggest?’
Do it now, hissed the little voice in my head. Do it now, do it while she’s not expecting it.
‘Fine,’ Liv pursed her lips and stood up, limping along to the edge of the path. ‘We’ll just go back.’
That’s right. For some reason, the voice sounded an awful lot like my big brother. Go back to the hotel, don’t propose, wait for Liv to leave you then you can die alone with a massive beard, tissue boxes on your feet instead of shoes and hundreds of bottles full of your own wee to keep you and your eighteen cats company.
‘Fuck it,’ I murmured, fishing around in my pocket for the ring and bending down. Slowly. I really needed to see someone about my back.
‘There’s a taxi!’
Before I could stop her, Liv hopped off the path and into the street, flagging down a white car with a red stripe down the side. It screeched to a halt at her side. I watched her, the headlights of the car lighting up her flowing white dress as it swirled around her slender legs, her hair flying out behind her. She was beautiful. She was clever and caring, she made me laugh, she took care of me even when I didn’t know I needed taking care of and she always watched Star Trek Next Gen with me, even if we’d seen it a dozen times before. Olivia Addison was perfect.
And I couldn’t even get her to a bloody restaurant on time.
‘I can’t,’ I realized, staring at my grandmother’s engagement ring. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Adam?’
It was too late, Liv was already inside the taxi, staring back at me. ‘What are you doing?’
It felt as though everything inside me had stopped working, like even my organs were waiting to see what came next before they bothered to carry on keeping me alive. Her eyes widened and she blinked at the sight of me kneeling on the dusty street.
‘Fastening my shoelace,’ I replied, dropping the ring on the floor and covering it with my shoe. ‘Sorry.’
Better start saving up my tissue boxes and adopting those cats, I thought, as I stood up, stashed the ring back in my pocket and forced one foot in front of the other to join her in the back seat of the taxi. You couldn’t just walk into an RSPCA and take eighteen. Could you? Surely there was a limit.
The taxi driver pulled out into the speeding traffic, turning the radio up full blast and soundtracking my misery with a song I had loved until that moment. Now I was going to have to hunt down Mumford and all of his sons and murder them all to death.
Liv stared out the window with her shoes in her lap as I closed my eyes, trying to work out just how I’d managed to get everything so wrong. Slipping my finger into the tiny pocket of my jeans, I traced the setting of the sapphire in my grandmother’s engagement ring and squeezed the bridge of my nose, trying not to cry.
Well. That went well.
‘Have you got everything?’
‘Yeah,’ Adam replied, looking back over his shoulder. ‘I think so.’
‘Did you check all the drawers?’ I asked. ‘The little ones in the nightstand?’
‘I’ll double check,’ he said, disappearing
