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‘Couldn’tyouhave done that? If they can make it a success, surely you would have been able to as well?’
For the first time, Finn looked uncomfortable. I’d clearly touched an exposed nerve.
‘It was time to move on.’
He turned to me then, his hand gentle as it cupped my cheek. His voice was so low, it was hard to hear him above the sound of the waves. ‘What I couldn’t have imagined was meeting someone who’d make me regret that decision.’ His lips were soft as they kissed me. ‘I can’t help thinking this thing between us could have gone somewhere – if things had been different.’
‘And your plans are fixed? There’s no possibility you’ll change your mind?’
‘I have a feeling I’ll be wanting to change it every single mile between here and Sydney, but I have to do this. I have to go.’
‘What will you do in Australia? Open another coffee shop?’
Finn looked a little hesitant before replying. ‘Actually, I’m going to try my hand at writing a novel. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and selling the business has given me the financial security to actually try it.’
I bit my lip on the comment that writing was just about the most portable job in the entire world. You could do it practically anywhere. Clearly, Finn had made up his mind to return to the country of his birth. Whatever this was between us just wasn’t meant to be.
‘I guess you and I were right people, wrong time,’ I said, determined not to ruin our first and last evening together by being miserable.
I slipped my hands behind his neck and drew his head towards me. All thoughts of getting arrested had worryingly disappeared from my head as we fell back on to the sand.
If one single, perfect night was all we had, I wanted to make it count.
14
I was sitting on the floor of my hallway with my back propped against the front door. Waiting. My attention was split between the letterbox and checking through the emails in my phone’s junk folder. It was almost 3 p.m., which was when the post was usually delivered to my building, and I’d spent the last fifteen minutes lying in wait for the mail, like a postman-hating Rottweiler.
Even so, when the flap eventually rattled and a handful of letters landed in my lap, I had a moment of pure panic. If Hannah was right and Finnhaddecided to post me a letter before leaving the country for who knew where, today was when it would logically arrive.
My neck felt stiff as I forced myself to look down. Never had I been so pleased to see a pile of junk mail and a collection of bills.
I got to my feet just as my phone pinged with an incoming message. Trepidation and hope fought an interesting battle within me. I desperately wanted to hear from Finn, but only if he was going to say the things I wanted to hear and not what Hannah was convinced he’d been drafting on those screwed-up pieces of paper.
It was a relief to open the message and discover it hadn’t come from Finn after all but from my airline, reminding me that I still hadn’t completed the online check-in for my flight to Sydney later that day.
‘That’s because I’m not going,’ I told my phone screen. ‘You don’t get to go on the honeymoon when the wedding didn’t happen.’
Or do you?
I froze, hearing my words as though they’d been spoken by someone else. Had Finn just received exactly the same message as me? Or was the advice redundant, because he’d already checked in?
The idea was so overwhelming, I sat back down on the hallway floor with a resounding thump. We’d booked our flights separately, as Finn had a load of air miles he’d wanted to use. And while I had absolutely no intention of getting on the flight to Australia that day, could I honestly say the same for Finn?
Had I done this? Had I been so focused on creating the wedding my mum would have wanted me to have that I’d somehow pushed Finn into doing something so desperate? Too late, I remembered him saying more than once, ‘It’s not the wedding day I’m looking forward to, it’s the lifetime of days that will follow it.’
The wedding plans had been all mine, down to every last small detail, but Finn had totally owned the honeymoon arrangements. He had a passion for Australia. He’d lived there as a child, and then later for several years as an adult. He’d certainly made no secret of the fact he hoped our visit would make me fall in love with the idea of living there one day. With the benefit of dual nationality from an Australian mother, Finn was technically able to move back there whenever he wanted. Was today the day he intended to do that?
Suddenly, the notion of Finn choosing to live in any other country seemed ridiculous. If he wanted to leave the UK –if he wanted to leave me, a voice in my head quietly corrected – the country he’d choose would be Australia. Especially as he already had a ticket booked for a flight in – I glanced at my watch – three hours’ time.
If I stopped to think it through, I’d find a hundred reasons why I should immediately abandon this plan. Keeping moving seemed the best way of staying two steps ahead of the many objections queued up in my head.
I hopped around my bedroom on one leg, pulling on a clean pair of jeans and searching for sandals. I tugged a comb through my hair, but there was no time for make-up. It wasn’t the way I’d wanted to look the next time I saw Finn. But he’d chosen to miss the excellent job the hairdresser and beautician had done on our wedding day, so this was going to have to do.
I grabbed a cardigan because it could get chilly inside the cabin of a plane. A bubble of almost hysterical laughter escaped me. Was I seriously contemplating getting on the plane if Finn was there at the airport? If he wanted me to, then I would, I told the flushed woman staring back at me in the bedroom mirror. All the rest could be sorted out later. There was only one thing I knew for sure. If Finn Douglas was going to Sydney today, then I wanted to go with him.
*
The terminal was crazy busy. It was only to be expected in the middle of summer. I immediately became that annoying person who loiters just inside the doors and then stops dead, creating an obstacle for suitcase-hauling travellers and kamikaze trolley pushers. I was possibly still stunned after working out how much my daily parking tariff would be if I really did get on that plane and didn’t come back for three weeks.
