smiled at him.
‘I just cannot believe how many stars there are. I know they are there, in the city and we just don’t see them for the other lights, but out here...’
She waved her arms around as if to encompass the beauty she couldn’t put into words.
‘And all yours,’ Andy said, wondering if she remembered his promise to give her the moon and the stars...
And looking at her, her clear skin luminous in the starlight, her golden-brown hair framing a face he’d always thought perfection, he wanted to take her in his arms again, take her back to that time, make her really his once more.
‘Did you ask me something?’
Her question broke the moment, although he knew the moment he’d felt had never been possible.
Thought back to his question.
‘Oh, I just wondered if you still hated surgery?’
She’d started forward but now paused again, turned back to him.
‘I’ve never really hated it so much as felt very uncomfortable. It seems so intrusive to be fumbling around inside someone else’s body.’
Ellie sighed, and shook her head as if to chase the thoughts away.
‘And speaking of bodies, I really need to talk to you about something that came up today. Shall we get a pizza and sit in the park to eat it?’
‘You’ve hidden a dead body somewhere, and need my help to bury it?’ Andy said, hoping the teasing words hid a sudden panic inside him.
Was she tired of their pretend marriage?
Was she leaving him completely?
Did she want a divorce?
Nonsense! he told himself. She’d mentioned bodies. It was something from work she wanted to discuss.
But the tension she’d aroused remained with him as he ordered their pizza, half with anchovies and half without, took extra paper napkins as they’d be eating in the park, and waited while Ellie chatted with the young girl behind the counter, blithely unaware of the torment her words had caused him.
Their marriage as a marriage might be virtually over, but could he live without the woman he loved?
The woman, he was fairly certain, who still loved him?
And could their marriage really be over?
He thought of the times when they’d tried to talk about it, as two intelligent people working out their differences. But the problem with loving someone was that you knew their sore and vulnerable spots—knew the words that would stab them in those places...
Worse still, you used those words as weapons.
So not talking had seemed easier, although Ellie deciding to make the move downstairs had left him feeling hollowed out inside. He was aware it could be a prelude to her leaving altogether for all she’d said they both needed their own space for a while.
Andy carried the pizza up to the park, which was deserted at this time of night, and set it down on a table, aware as he always was of Ellie’s warmth by his side.
But worry about this ‘talk’ now nibbled at his mind so, as he placed a piece of pizza—from the anchovies’ side—on a napkin, and passed it to his wife, he said, ‘Okay, talk. What’s up?’
Ellie turned, questions in her night-dark eyes, and he realised he’d spoken too abruptly.
‘Right!’ she began, apparently reading his anxiety in his face. ‘Chelsea arrived this morning—your cousin Chelsea—and she’s pregnant and wanted to get away from home and people who know her until after the baby’s born. Apparently both her parents are off somewhere and Harry’s been looking after her—’
‘Not very well, if she’s pregnant!’ Andy muttered. ‘Does he know she’s here?’
‘Apparently so,’ Ellie said, ‘although I will phone him when we get home to tell him she’s arrived safely. I tried earlier but his phone was switched off.’
‘But where’s her mother, for heaven’s sake? I know her father’s probably off saving whales somewhere, but her mum? And Harry’s what? All of nineteen, I imagine, and far more involved in his own life at university than caring for his sister. Of all the irresponsible—’
He realised he was yelling now and it really wasn’t Ellie he should be yelling at, but she simply smiled at him and said, ‘She’s off finding herself, apparently.’
‘Mad, they’re both mad, they always have been. How Dad and Ken can possibly be brothers beats me. And as for Jill, why isn’t she at home, looking after a kid who’s barely out of childhood? I would have thought teenage years were when young girls, in particular, needed their mothers around.’
‘She’s sixteen,’ Ellie told him, ‘and twelve to sixteen weeks gestation. A bit hard to be precise at that stage and she has a very slight build.’
She paused, and Andy wondered what worried her about the situation. Apart from it being Chelsea. Teenage pregnancy was far from uncommon these days.
Was she thinking of their arrival here in town—of the coincidence of her being sixteen weeks pregnant when they’d first begun their move to Maytown?
Andy watched as Ellie ate her slice of pizza, chewing and swallowing it before she smiled at him, then shrugged as if uncertain where to begin.
‘I can understand her turning to a boyfriend for comfort, with her parents gone, and that the pregnancy was an accident, but I didn’t want to push her to talk too much about the future.’
He saw the worry in the little crease between her eyebrows, and read it in her voice.
‘The thing is, Andy, we’ll take her in, I was sure you’d agree with that, but I wondered if she—if we...’
It was so unlike Ellie to be this hesitant over something that he reached out and took her hand, feeling her fingers curl into his, warm and sticky from the pizza but accepting his support.
‘I wouldn’t like your mum to find out about our marriage right now and be upset, which she will if I’m downstairs and you’re upstairs while Chelsea’s with us. I mean, it’s a bit like shouting it to the world.’
Her head lifted so she could watch his face as he considered it.
‘Easily fixed,’ Andy said, barely suppressing his delight because the top part of the house was desperately empty without Ellie in it. A cool, contained and even frosty Ellie was better than no Ellie at all.
If only he’d realised that before she’d made the move downstairs. He should have talked to her about feeling shut out; about his own pain, and how much it had frightened him; about feeling cast adrift after she left —
‘You’ll move back up? I’m still sleeping in Dad’s old room, so you can go back into Mum’s.’
She
