Page 33 of The Woman Who Said Yes

They part company and Sam starts to head away in the opposite direction. But a moment later he turns and watches her striding away. He wants to shout, ‘Eva, stop!’ – to run after her, even, and say never mind the lion’s mane and carpaccio. You can’t do this! Those people were lovely and I’m sure they’d return the deposit you just paid if you explained that you’d had a rush of blood to the head.

Sam doesn’t do this. Instead he pulls out his phone, about to text Andie, then realises he needs to hear her instead. She’ll be with her dad and Trudy but he knows she won’t mind if he calls.

‘Hey, everything okay?’ she asks, and instantly he feels better.

‘Yeah, guess so. It’s booked, though. The reception venue, I mean. Eva’s found a place…’

‘Oh, God, has she?’ Andie exhales.

‘Yep, it’s all sorted. So… are we still on for this thing tomorrow?’

‘Yep, definitely,’ she says firmly. ‘I’ll meet you outside the station at ten.’

19

WEDDING COUNTDOWN: 38 DAYS

Andie

Garish shops and neon-signed takeaways are jostling for attention around the station. We are out west, and it’s not an area we’re familiar with; not even Sam, who has lived in London his entire life. Having stopped to check his phone map, we make our way past a jumble of roadworks on the traffic-clogged thoroughfare.

‘So how’s it going with your visitors?’ he asks, as if what we’re doing today is totally normal, barely worthy of comment. Nothing to see here!

‘Fine so far,’ I say. ‘They’ve been out and about, doing loads. I think Trudy’s been too exhausted to check my skirting boards for dust.’

Sam chuckles. He has met my dad many times, and Trudy just once at my place, at another of my apparently substandard dinners.

‘They haven’t spotted the missing eye?’

‘No, thank God. I think I was just over-panicking,’ I say truthfully – because why should they notice? Gideon is just ‘there’ to them – part of the fabric of my home. A home which hadn’t been as clean and tidy since their last visit, prompting Marnie to remark, ‘Wow, Mum – it’s gleaming in here!’ when she arrived to see them last night. Her gaze rested momentarily on the fish and we exchanged a conspiratorial glance before she opened a bottle of pisco and knocked up delicious cocktails for us. ‘It’s from Peru,’ she announced.

‘Like Paddington!’ Dad enthused, and we toasted loveable bears in duffel coats and his widely travelled granddaughter’s intrepidness.

‘It’s delicious,’ Trudy noted, waggling her glass for a second round, and then a third. As a result – and on top of yesterday’s hectic whirl of sightseeing – they were grateful for a lazy morning. In fact, my wobbly loo seat has caused more consternation than the fact that I had an errand to run. ‘Just sit on it very carefully,’ I’ve reminded them several times, ‘not with all your weight.’

‘All my weight!’ Trudy spluttered, as if I’d made some disparaging remark about her ‘figure’.

‘Did you tell them where you were going today?’ Sam asks.

‘Oh God, of course not,’ I exclaim. ‘It’d seem a bit mad, wouldn’t it?’

‘Well, it kind of is,’ he concedes.

I laugh dryly. ‘It’s a lead, though, isn’t it?’

‘“A lead.” Guess you could call it that.’ Despite the steady drizzle, and the fact that we really don’t know what we expect to find, Sam seems quite accepting of the fact that we’re heading towards some random address. Although I suspect that he also thinks it’s pointless, as I do now. Eva’s wedding is forging ahead, and although Sam and I have tried to squirrel out more info about Dom online – using both of his surnames – we’ve come up with nothing new.

‘What does Dom actually do with property, anyway?’ he wonders aloud. ‘Does he buy and sell or let it, or what?’

‘He made it sound like it’s at the more salubrious end,’ I remind him.

‘Oh yeah. “Casting a final eye over things”, he said. And that stuff on the website… what was that again?’

I smile. ‘Something about redefining property through some kind of lens?’

‘That’s it!’

‘“A lens of considered sophistication and contextual awareness centring on the orchestration of space.” Or something like that…’