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Her tongue darted out and licked her lower lip, as she tried to frame a response. “No,” she smiled as memories flooded her. “It wasn’t even on my radar until – then.”
“What did you think you’d study?”
“Gosh, it’s so long ago. I feel as though it happened in another lifetime.”
“A lot’s happened since.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes. So much. I can barely remember the person I used to be.”
“How are you different?”
She stared up at him and the word came quickly. She’d been happier. Before Thom got sick. Before their marriage and the waiting for the inevitable. Before she’d had a crash course in reality.
“I was less aware of life’s turns, I guess. I’d been pretty sheltered, growing up, and while my parents didn’t have a lot, and we didn’t have a big extended family or anything, we had each other and I thought it was all I’d ever need.”
“And you had Thom,” he murmured, and she was pleased at his observation and the way he’d voiced it so casually.
“Yes. We were inseparable. Life was simpler. Easy.” She put her head back against his chest, her eyes fixed on the gently simmering ocean, the frothy waves encouraging her to speak freely. “I grew up in Bickton on Thames, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it?”
She felt him shake his head.
“It’s a small village, about an hour by train out of London. Most of the town was built in the nineteenth century, all stone buildings hobbled close together, tiny doors, fine-glass windows. It’s beautiful. Quintessentially British,” she added, pride infiltrating the sentence. “But at its heart there’s a church that was built in the thirteenth century. It’s beautiful and old, timber, and when I was a girl, only eight or maybe nine, it was painstakingly restored, beam by beam. I would walk past every day on my way home from school and stop to stare at it, to watch the work. I felt a great sense of ownership of the church, I suppose – all these workmen had come in from London, and other villages, and none of them understood – or so I arrogantly presumed – the importance of the building. So I would watch them, prepared at any point to chastise them if they weren’t taking enough care.”
She laughed softly and heard a similar sound rupture his chest. “And were they?”
“Oh, I guess so,” she wrinkled her nose. “At least, I never had to rouse at them, so that’s a good sign.”
“I’d have loved to hear what you might have said.”
She grinned. “Who knows?” She ran her fingers through the hair at his nape. “But I decided I wanted to do that for a living.”
“Do what, exactly? Yell at careless tradesmen?”
Her smile was wistful. “Restore old buildings. I became obsessed with architecture, and particularly historical reconstruction.”
“And now?” The gravelled question pulled at her.
She sobered a little. “It was just a pipe dream. A child’s fantasy.”
“Why?”
“Well, because – it was twenty years ago.”
He stopped moving, their dance ceasing. She lifted her face to his. “Have you ever chased down a path for some time and then realised it was the wrong one?”
His implication was clear. She’d followed the wrong path with her current occupation. She brushed the question aside. “Have you?”
He brushed his thumb over her cheek. “No.”
The answer surprised her. “No?” She bit down on her lower lip. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t have any regrets about my life, Lauren. I have strong instincts and act on them accordingly.”
She frowned. What would it be like to have that degree of confidence?
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Because you do have regrets?”
