To Sophia
One
Lily
Lily took a long sip of her wine, beamed at her friends and gestured at the white-sand beach immediately on the other side of the low wall next to their restaurant table, and the gorgeous glistening sea beyond.
‘Look at that yacht,’ she said. ‘The one calledThe Butterfly. Next to the really big one. It’s got a slide from the deck straight into the sea.’
‘That’s so cool,’ her friend Aaliyah said. ‘I did a home visit recently to a family who had a slide instead of stairs. I couldn’t decide whether it was weird or fabulous.’
‘I love visiting amazing and unusual houses.’ Lily took another sip of wine. ‘If I hadn’t been a midwife, I’d have liked to have been an estate agent.’
‘Ora rich business person who could afford a yacht like that.’ Their friend Meg pointed at one of the other very swish white boats bobbing around and said something about it, but Lily didn’t hear what she was saying because she was too busy choking on her wine.
Aaliyah, who was sitting on the same side of their four-person table as Lily, started whacking her hard on the back.
‘Heimlich?’ Meg pushed her chair back and stood up. Since she’d left nursing to become a Pilates instructor, she was always keen to put her medical skills to good use.
‘No,’ Lily spluttered, holding her hand up. ‘I’m fine.’ She was fine in the sense that she wasn’t going to choke to death right now. She wasnotfine in the sense that she was pretty sure that her ex, Matt, was one of the large group of men who’d just walked into the restaurant.
Matt was her best friend Tess’s cousin. Tess was getting married on the island on Friday. Lily hadn’t asked Tess about him, but she’d been expecting that Matt would be coming to the wedding, and she’d – more or less – psyched herself up for that. She had not psyched herself up for seeing him now. At least she was wearing a nice ‘I’m on holiday with my girlfriends for the first time in yearspartayyyy’ dress and had gone fancyish on her make-up this evening. Although not fancyenough. If she’d known there was any chance of seeing him, she’d have gone full-on glam.
It had to be him. He had his back to her, plus she didn’t want to be too obvious with her staring, so she didn’t have agreatview of him, but it would be a very big coincidence for another wide-shouldered man with dark, wavy hair and perma-stubble to have pitched up on this small island in a group of English-speaking men, who mainly looked to be in their thirties, four days before his cousin Tess’s wedding to her thirty-something fiancé, Tom. Who Lily had just clocked in the middle of the group.
Lily had thought that, like Tess, Tom would be spending a few days before the wedding holidaying on the island with just his best friends. This looked more like a full-blown stag.
The man who she thought was Matt did a quarter-turn to greet someone and now she could see his profile properly.
And yes, it was him. Of course it was. It was eight years since they were last together but everything she could see of him was instantly achingly familiar. The shape of his nose, chin and cheekbone, his long eyelashes, the way he tipped his head back slightly when he laughed. She couldn’t see his eyes from here but she knew that they were a deep brown, and held kindness, and often laughter, that drew you in. They’d drawn her in, anyway. And clearly his ex-wife.
He turned very slightly in her direction and for a moment she thought he’d seen her, but he turned away again and, no, he seemed totally unaware of her.
‘Lily?’ Someone was speaking to her but she couldn’t process what they were saying. There was a loud whooshing in her ears and she was finding it really difficult to remember how to work any part of her body.
‘Lily?’ It was Meg who was speaking. She was saying her name.
With difficulty, Lily consciously moved her gaze away from Matt and towards the table in front of her. She was shaking. She lifted one of her hands and held it above the table flat in front of her. Yep, literally shaking. At this rate she was going to need to get her inhaler out and take some extra puffs for the first time in a while.
She picked up her glass and gulped some more of her wine and started coughing again.
‘Are you okay?’ Meg asked.
‘Totally fine,’ Lily spluttered.
She really wasn’t.
She should probably have paid more attention to the minutiae of Tess’s wedding preps over the past few months. She was fairly sure that Tess would have mentioned Tom’s pre-wedding plans.
It had been difficult, though, juggling work, her best friend morphing into a bridezilla and the challenge of living in London while helping to organise a wedding on a Greek island. Not just any wedding, either, but an elaborate one. And not just any island, but a tiny one, Antiparos, that could only be reached by boat from the neighbouring island of Paros, which you could only reach either by plane or boat from mainland Greece. So she hadn’ttotallylistened to everysingleconversation about things she wasn’t involved in – like the groom’s holiday and stag plans.
She adjusted her sunglasses against the low July evening sun and sneaked another look at the men as they sat down on the opposite side of the taverna’s beach-side terrace.
Matt was wearing a pale-blue shirt, open at the neck, and he looked even more gorgeous than she remembered. It was a struggle to look away from him. Because of her dark glasses, no one would be able to tell, as long as she kept her head turned towards her friends and just swivelled her eyes towards him, but it wasn’t doing her pride any good that she couldn’t help watching him while he apparently hadn’t noticed her at all. Or he’d noticed her but hadn’t even twitched.
She really didn’t want to sound too interested. She wasn’t going to ask.
She absolutely wasn’t going to ask.
