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‘Yes. Divorced. And my ex …’ He let out a puff of air that signified his ex was problematic. ‘Well, you know, it’s messy, it’s complicated, my ex knows where to find me, but she chooses not to. She has a chaotic life. I offered to support her, her and the boy. But she pretty much ghosted me. So yeah. It’s sad. Marco, my God if you saw him, just the most exquisitely beautiful boy. But living a life that isn’t going to end well.’
Rachel saw Michael’s eyes glaze with tears, and felt the encounter shift into another gear, a shift that seemed as if it might impinge on the unspoken promise of inevitable sex that had laced every moment of their previous communications, but might also take them somewhere else, somewhere completely unexpected, somewhere grown-up and real.
She put her hand out to cover his. He turned his hand over and curled his fingers around her palm.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, his eyes dry once more. ‘It’s just a shame, you know, the way life can take you away from the things that matter.’
‘Did you ever try to get custody?’
‘No,’ he replied, caressing her hand gently. ‘No. It was a quickie divorce; she didn’t want anything from me. I thought we’d workthings out in the fullness of time. I saw Marco a lot at first. But then I went back to the US for a few weeks, on business, and when I returned to the south of France …’ He pulled his hand from hers and used it to describe a puff of smoke.
‘So, you live in the south of France?’
‘I live in a lot of places. But yeah, I have a house in Antibes. It’s pink. I have a pink house. You’d love it.’
‘What shade of pink? Not, like, hot pink?’
‘No. No. A very subtle pink – my ex used to say it was the colour of dead roses.’
‘Dead roses? Wow. That’s kind of bizarrely poetic.’
‘Yup, well, Lucy is a kind of bizarrely poetic woman.’
Lucy, Rachel thought.Lucy. That is the name of the woman. The woman who came before.
