Page 58 of Starry Nights over Dragonfly Lake

She smiled to herself, pleased that her friend was so happy in love, and wondered once more when she would ever know that easy bliss that seemed to appear when you met the love of your life. It certainly hadn’t arrived with Jeremy and with hindsight, she could see just how wrong he had been for her. How most of her boyfriends had been wrong, in fact.

She shook her head, mostly at herself but also to clear her mind. She was supposed to be concentrating on her magazine article, not on her lack of love life. In fact, it was the longest that she had ever gone without going on a date or starting a tentative new romance. Did she miss it? That initial thrill?Perhaps. But she didn’t miss the inevitable heartache that followed.

Deep in thought, her feet automatically gravitated towards the soft light in the woods coming from one of the barns, meaning that Noah was working on his boat as he often did in the evenings.

She opened up the large door and headed inside.

Noah was standing at the top of a small stepladder, pulling out some rotten wood from the hull of the boat. He turned his head to see who had come in and smiled at her.

‘Still avoiding your magazine article?’ he asked.

She laughed, thinking that he knew her better than most people.

‘Absolutely,’ she said, walking across to look up into the hole in the boat. ‘Won’t this let a lot of water in?’

He looked flabbergasted at her naïvety until he realised she was joking.

‘I guess it might affect the buoyancy,’ he replied, turning to carry on ripping out the planks of wood.

‘Archimedes,’ said Beth, nodding as she thought back to her studies. ‘Any object submerged in a fluid experiences an upward buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.’

Noah grinned. ‘I was just about to say the very same thing,’ he told her.

Beth smiled at his self-deprecation. ‘Did you know, even Galileo didn’t believe that Archimedes shouted, “Eureka,” leapt out of his bath and ran through the streets naked when he discovered the principle of buoyancy.’

‘Too bad,’ said Noah. ‘It makes for a nice story.’

Beth shrugged her shoulders. ‘These days he’djust get arrested.’

She shivered in the cool temperature before noting Noah’s thick cable jumper, assuming with his boatmaking that he was used to working in all weathers and seasons.

Noah looked down at her. ‘So what are you stuck on with your article?’

Beth sighed and went across to pick up one of the screwdrivers that were scattered across a nearby bench. ‘What to write next,’ she told him. ‘It’s hard to educate people without sounding preachy and a bit of a nerd.’

‘I thought you were an actual nerd,’ he countered.

‘I make nerds look good,’ she said, shooting him a grin.

She felt somewhat glad that he didn’t contradict her and went back to tearing off the rotten pieces of wood.

‘Maybe you just need to start at the beginning,’ he told her. ‘Tell the people reading the magazine all about you. Like, where did your love of stars come from?’

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ she said, putting down the screwdriver.

‘From your parents?’ he asked, before she had a chance to carry on.

She looked at him, realising that despite beginning to know each other quite well, he knew absolutely nothing about her past.

‘I like to think so,’ she replied. ‘That’s what I’ve always imagined, in any case.’

Noah looked back at her. ‘You don’t know?’ he asked, frowning.

Beth shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I never knew them, you see. I was left on the steps at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in London when I was only a few hours old.’

She said it as matter-of-factly as she could, despite the dull feeling in her heart as she said the words that she knew so well.

Noah had stilled, studying her with his dark eyes. ‘I had no idea,’ he told her. ‘That’s pretty tough to deal with.’