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Freya looked surprised when she saw the other children. She held back for a while, staying close to Kate until a little boy wearing a hearing aid came across and held out a wooden puzzle to her.
‘Can I?’
Kate nodded and watched, her heart aching as the solitary little girl responded with growing confidence to the approaches of the other children there.
She didn’t really register Marco’s presence until he was at her elbow. She rose to her feet, a question in her eyes.
‘Well, you will be pleased to hear you have been proved right, they concur with your diagnosis.’
Kate frowned at the direct attack. ‘I would have been happy to be proved wrong.’
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead and cursed. ‘I know, that was...extremely unfair. I should be thanking you. They were very impressed that you had picked up the markers so quickly,’ he admitted.
‘Apology accepted. Ready to go, Freya,’ she yelled.
‘Wait a minute!’ Marco and Kate watched as she hugged the little boy standing beside her.
‘What is she doing?’ Marco asked, watching as his daughter waved her hands.
‘Signing,’ Kate said with a watery smile. ‘There is an audiology clinic going on this morning. I think sign language should be taught in all schools; children pick it up so easily.’
‘Do you sign?’
‘I have the basics.’
Freya reached them, smiling. ‘That’s my friend, Simon. He’s teaching me how to talk with my hands. Can he come to play some day?’
‘I don’t see why not, if your papa...?’
‘Don’t ask me, I’m just the driver,’ Marco said drily as they walked to the waiting car, flanked by two cars containing the inevitable security detail.
On the beach, empty but for them, which Kate suspected was not accidental, Kate supervised Freya’s application of suncream before she slogged up the slope to a stall selling ice cream. He was not doing much business, so he looked happy when she ordered twenty and he put them in a box for her.
Kate ferried them up to the waiting parked cars and tapped on a blacked-out bulletproof window.
‘Thought you might like some ice cream,’ she shouted as the window rolled down.
Juggling the three remaining rapidly melting ice creams in her hands, she went back down to the spot where she had left Marco and Freya spreading a blanket on the sand. ‘One for you...’ Freya snatched the proffered ice cream out of her hand.
‘And one...’ She switched one ice cream to her free hand.
‘That,’ Marco observed, nodding to the cars, ‘was straight out of my mother’s playbook. You trying to win friends?’
Kate flashed him a look. ‘Eat it quickly, Freya. It’s melting.’ She went to hand over one to Marco, holding it at an angle as she licked the melting ice cream off her wrist. ‘Oh, my... I’m so sorry.’ She giggled as the melting ice cream landed on his immaculate trousers.
From where she stood Freya let out a loud guffaw, Kate’s lips quivered, then flattened in shock as her own ice cream made a similar bellyflop and landed in a greasy smear down her front. The child fell about laughing.
‘Not so funny now,’ Marco said, his mocking voice against her ear sending a shudder through her body.
She dabbed ineffectually at the melting blob, alarm flaring in her eyes as Marco produced a large tissue and approached her. She felt a tiny beat of heat as she visualised his hand against her breast and reacted in panic to stop it happening, snatching it out of his hand with a prim thank you.
‘Spoilsport!’ he whispered under cover of kneeling down to retrieve a towel. ‘Are we going for a swim, Freya?’
‘You and me?’
The astonishment in her voice could have been laughable but it wasn’t. Marco felt a surge of emotion he could not put a name to, or was too ashamed to.
He could face down a room of critics in dark suits willing him to fall flat on his face and not stumble, not put a foot wrong. His confidence was impregnable, but here on a sandy beach with his own child the things he wanted to say he could find no words for.
