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He looked away, studying the broken roof tiles on one of the holiday cottages. ‘She knows that I don’t really need to hear village news anymore.’ Once again, the Abel Temperance had expected was overtaken by this strait-laced, sombre, buzzkill of a man. There was a stinging behind her ribs.

‘Right.’ Temperance stretched out her T-shirt an inch further. Of course he didn’t care. He left this place so long ago. The old Abel would have cared: the teenage Abel that Temperance had once known inside out. The boy who used to give her his last Dorito from the bag and always helped Susie with her Brownie badges. But that boy overnight became the kind of man who just disappears on his friends, never to be heard of again. So why expect anything more?

In one of her many rehearsed scenarios, Temperance played this cool: barely making eye contact, perhaps casually sipping a Negroni with impeccable coral lipstick. But Abel was so laid back, so unruffled, that he seemed to suck all the cool out of the air, leaving Temperance a twitchy, awkward and strangely sweaty mess. And far from barely making eye contact, she found her gaze glued to this very adult version of Abel. She could have been studying an impressionist painting in a gallery: searching for clarity, for meaning, for the secret. That patchy but golden stubble. A new tiny scar under his left eye. His skin was no longer that impossibly soft, peachy perfection of teenage youth: it had texture, it had a story.

A story Temperance wasn’t part of.

‘So, you’re . . . still here?’ he asked flatly, not really dredging up enough polite energy to make it sound like genuine curiosity.

Another nail in the coffin for the old sunny, silly and open teenaged Abel. This grumpy sod had risen from his grave.

Her pride stiffened. Her defence mechanisms coiled back on their springs, ready to pounce. She was used to her college friends and bad dates laughing at the fact that she’d never left her tiny, cutesy village, and had no aspirations to, but she didn’t expect that kind of snobbery to come from one of their own. Well, someone who had once been one of their own, anyway. She winched up her best cheesy smile. ‘Absolutely! There’s no place like home. I’d say you’ve got to be dead inside to want to walk away from this place.’

As if on cue, a loud roaring crash of the waves on the beach reached their ears. Like the East Prawle tourist board were listening in and wanted to play their part.

‘Hmm,’ he started to walk away before he’d even finished talking, ‘well, I’d best just check on Gran, to be safe. See you.’

Temperance watched the retreating back of Abel Gulliver, taller and broader these days than she’d imagined. See you?! Twelve years vanished off the face of the earth and ‘see you’ is all he’s got to say?! In her daydreams of a time when Abel might saunter across the green again, she’d imagined shouting and insults and fireworks, but she’d never imagined a dull whimper like this. Even if it wasn’t rosy, she thought she might get some answers.

Why did you go, Abel? Why did you leave us?

She watched his back walking further away as the words echoed in her head.

Temperance knew she should feel relieved, that the awkward reunion was finally over: she never had to do that again. Maybe she should feel angry, that he clearly gave zero fucks about seeing her and even sneered about the fact that she still lived in the village. Or maybe some stirring of old love or lust or even nostalgia should be whirring around inside her heart?

No.

Her heart said something else as her eyes were trained on that cobalt shirt, looking bobbled in places but still invitingly soft.

Her heart said doom. Very loudly, it said doom.

Already panting, Temperance burst in the front door and took the stairs two at a time. ‘Get out of the bathroom if you’re in there, Susie!’

‘I’m not,’ came a reply muffled by toast crumbs.

‘Good!’ Temperance slammed the wonky bathroom door and threw her clothes off her body and onto the floor as she started the shower.

Susie crept up the stairs, munching on her sourdough and honey. She plonked herself down on the top step. ‘What’s going on? You weren’t sick on yourself, were you?’

‘Ugh,’ Temperance thought for a beat as she stepped under the steaming water, ‘worse.’

‘Oh sis! Like . . . a code brown?!’ Susie swiftly put down her plate.

‘No! Imagine the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen when your hair is a sandy greaseball and you smell like stale rum.’ She scrubbed the shampoo bar deep into her roots.

Susie picked up her breakfast again. ‘You bump into someone you fancy.’

‘Or?’

‘An ex. But you don’t have any exes round here.’

‘No, but what about one that we assumed was far away, never to return.’

‘No!’

‘Yes.’

‘NO! Abel?! Here?’