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‘YouTube,’ he says.
She decides to ask him outright. ‘Any romance on the horizon for you?’
He blushes the way he used to if he thought a girl liked him, and it endears him to her. ‘No. Nothing beyond the odd fling. I keep hoping.’
‘It’ll happen,’ she says. ‘Especially now you’ve discovered yourself a bit.’
‘I wasn’t a very attractive proposition before, was I?’
She considers how to reply because he can be touchy, but she doesn’t want to lie.
‘You were perhaps a bit lost,’ she says. ‘But they’ll be falling over themselves now.’
He smiles. ‘You think so?’
‘I know so.’
‘I hold up you and Tom as my ideal romance. I was jealous of you for a long time.’
I know you were, she thinks. ‘Your time will come,’ she says softly.
‘I thought we could have tacos tonight,’ Patrick says. ‘Does that suit you?’
‘Anything,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’
She stays on the sofa and watches him prepare their food. He puts on the lights in the kitchen. Everything glints: the knife, the surfaces. Deftly, he slices a pile of red peppers. It’s mesmerising but strange because he’s the wrong man in her kitchen. Thesight of him there is jarring. Life seems to have slid sideways into an alternative reality.
She finds she has a familiar, bitter taste in her mouth. It comes with unwelcome feelings. Like guilt. Or too much hope. But now it’s more or less permanent. She thinks of it as the taste of grief and she knows that Patrick’s food, however beautifully prepared and cooked, will taste like ashes to her.
He pours oil into a pan and when it’s heated he adds the vegetables he’s been prepping. She watches him stir with care. The smells are good, and she appreciates him doing this for her. Her guard drops.
‘Patrick,’ she says.
‘Yes?’
‘They found lipstick on one of the coffee cups in Tom’s den. They’re testing it for DNA.’
‘What?’ He looks disbelieving and she nods. ‘They did.’ Painful though it is, she lays out the evidence that Tom might have been cheating: ‘A card for a masseuse – Sadie – in his pocket, lipstick on a coffee cup in his den.’
‘He wasn’t unfaithful. He loved you from the moment he met you,’ Patrick says. ‘I knew I lost a bit of him the day you turned up in our class.’
‘We were only nine.’
Patrick shrugs. ‘I still knew.’
His answer emboldens her enough to ask him outright the question that feels as if it’s burning a hole in her: ‘Do you know if he’s ever been unfaithful to me?’
‘He never has. Not to my knowledge, and I can’t imagine it, quite honestly.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise, Nicole. You were everything to him.’
‘He was everything to me,’ she says. She turns away, not wanting him to see the tears that she can feel sliding down her cheeks. Outside, the evening has clouded over, and the cliffs seem to be dissolving into the flat, grey light. Seabirds shriek and wheel as if defending something.
‘Evening lights on,’ she tells the house. Nothing happens. She sighs.
‘We will get a handle on those systems,’ Patrick says. ‘I don’t want what happened yesterday to happen again. The lights and the music coming out of the pool was freaky.’
