just low enough so Annie couldn’t hear.
‘Aunty Annie, are you going?’ Gerty came running out the door and down the path. Wearing lemon-yellow jeans and a fluffy pink jumper, she looked as sweet as the frosting on a cupcake.
‘Yeah, honey, I have to go back.’
‘I thought you were staying for ever now?’ Gerty said, big blue eyes staring up at her like a guppy.
‘I’m not sure the island could handle me,’ Annie laughed, pushing Gerty’s fringe back so it stuck up at crazy, curly angles and then walking away down the path and through the gate.
‘I’d like you to stay,’ she heard Gerty call from where she stood, and Annie turned so she was walking backwards and waved at the sweet little face.
Then, as she was still walking the wrong way, her attention focused on Gerty, watching as she bounded back into the house, she felt herself collide with a solid wall of person. Felt strong hands steady her as she stumbled.
‘God, sorry,’ she said, turning and trying to get her balance. She found herself staring at the bobbles of an old black woollen jumper. Glancing up, the guy’s face was obscured by the shadow of a baseball cap pulled low, and it took a moment for her to realise it was the man from the cafe, Matthew.
When she’d got her bearings, Annie stood back from his grip, smoothed down her top and said with a half-smile, ‘You following me?’
‘No,’ he replied, deadpan. ‘Buster had to take a pee,’ he said, reaching up to break off a sprig of blossom.
Annie glanced down and saw an ancient-looking pug dog cocking its leg against one of the colourful wooden planters packed full of evergreen shrubs that were dotted along the path between the cherry trees.
‘Nice,’ she said.
‘Well, when you’ve gotta go…’
The evening was just tipping into twilight. Objects had a hazy edge and the streetlights had come on over the path. Old Victorian ones that flickered with moths, their bulbs laced with spiders’ webs.
‘Well I’m walking this way,’ Annie pointed to the path ahead of her that led past the cottages to a patch of parkland that opened out onto the cafe road.
‘Us too,’ Matthew replied, twirling the sprig of blossom between his fingers and clicking for the pug to follow.
‘OK then.’
‘OK.’
In her whole life Annie had never been quite so aware of her breathing. It was like, with every step, that she forgot how to do it. And it seemed so loud. Matthew didn’t seem to be breathing loudly. If anything he was silent. Silent footsteps, silent breathing. Just a presence next to her that she was finding really difficult to ignore. Every couple of steps she glanced his way, but didn’t want to look too obvious so just caught the swing of his arm or the flick of his flip-flops. In the end she looked down at the dog, lumbering along between them, wheezing like it might drop dead any second. Looking at the dog gave her an excuse to look at Matthew’s calves. Tanned the colour of honeycomb, he had a tattoo up the inside of his leg. It looked like waves. No not waves, mountains. Maybe. Annie didn’t have any tattoos, she’d almost had one many times but never had the nerve and worried that she wouldn’t be able to pull it off, but he was managing to pull his off. Like it was part of his skin, like he was born with it.
‘You don’t strike me as a pug dog man,’ she said for something to say, instantly regretting it for its inanity.
Matthew looked down at the floor, clearly holding in a smile. ‘No?’
‘No.’
‘What does a pug dog man look like?’
‘I don’t know. Just not like you,’ Annie rolled her eyes inwardly at the conversation.
‘He’s not mine. He was Enid’s. I seem to have ended up with him.’
‘That’s nice of you.’
‘Not that nice. I couldn’t get rid of him. I tried to convince your mother to have him but he kept escaping and ending up on my doorstep. But it’s OK, I don’t think he has long left to live.’
‘You can’t say that?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s just there,’ Annie pointed to the dog.
‘He’s a dog.’
‘So?’
Matthew didn’t reply, just raised his eyebrows and looked away with a smirk. Annie couldn’t quite tell if he’d been being serious or not.
‘I didn’t know you’d wanted to buy the wasteland off my brother,’ she said after a while of silence.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s probably a lot of things you don’t know about me.’
‘That is such an unhelpful answer,’ Annie said, stopping abruptly.
‘Why?’
‘Because I was making conversation. You’re meant to say something like, yes, I’d wanted to preserve it for the next generation and I would have said, me too. Annoying that they built ugly yellow brick houses on it, isn’t it? See, conversation. Now we have to carry on in silence.’
Matthew frowned at her for a moment, then his lips twitched with the hint of a smile. He clicked for the dog and they walked on in silence.
Where the path joined the main road on the island there was a big wooden gate that creaked on its hinges like a horror film. She remembered swinging off it as a kid, her dad pushing it like a swing. Her brother once running up behind her, stopping too late and thwacking her head against it. Both her front baby teeth were left behind in the wood. She was pretty sure the marks were still there, two little indentations, but she certainly wasn’t going to point them out as Matthew stepped forward to open the gate for her. Instead she looked at the width of his shoulders. So broad that his jumper seemed to stretch at the seams. And she looked at the way his hair curled at the nape of his neck, blond flicks that brushed the collar of his jumper.
‘After you,’ he said, a wry smile on his lips like he’d caught her staring.
‘Thanks.’
He tilted his head to one side and said, ‘My pleasure.’
Annie rolled her lips together, tried to think of something clever to say but drew a blank.
‘Well have a good evening,’ Matthew said as he leant over and flicked the lock on the gate.
‘You’re not walking any further?’ Annie frowned. There was nothing else around except the cafe, a couple of shops and the massive new state-of-the-art eco house that was bolted and gated like Fort Knox.
‘Nah, this is me,’ he said, gesturing to the huge oak doors that secured the mansion.
‘You live here?’ She said it before she could stop herself. It was the type
