Daniel pushed a couple of pieces of gnocchi around his plate.
‘Come on. Whatever it is, I promise you I’ll have heard worse.’
‘They aren’t so much angry, as, well… that’s not true. People are angry. But at this stage it’s no more than chuntering over village gossip. The receptionist probably summed it up best.’
I braced myself.
‘She called you a deluded, impertinent pipsqueak and asked me to make sure you stop meddling in matters you know nothing about.’
‘So, I can probably show my face in the village without risking a stint in the stocks?’
‘In the Old Side, sure,’ Daniel shrugged, his eyes glinting. ‘I can’t vouch for those snivelling, whiny New Siders.’
It being a Friday, and us being wild and crazy young things, we decided to find a boxset on the TV. Carrying our drinks into the living room, we picked an old BBC detective series, and settled back to watch. I don’t know if it was because we were sharing a bottle of wine, but Daniel had sat next to me on the sofa. Positioned directly in the middle of his cushion, feet propped on the coffee table, I was nevertheless finding it increasingly challenging to concentrate.
About half an hour in, he picked up the remote and pressed pause. ‘You’re still fretting.’
‘I’m not! Honestly, I meant it when I said I’ve faced far worse. Part of writing articles means people not only decide they hate you, they get pathetic amounts of pleasure from repeatedly telling you that.’
‘Eleanor, you can’t sit still. It’s like sharing a sofa with a termite nest.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, tell me what’s up.’
Daniel’s face softened in the glow of the table lamp. His arm twitched a few inches towards me, and my breath caught as I wondered whether he wanted to reach for my hand. I longed to lean my head against him, bury my face in his jumper and tell him everything, but instead I leant back, summoned up a self-deprecating smile and rolled my eyes.
‘Sorry. I think it was “pipsqueak” that got to me.’
His eyes roamed my face, searching for the truth. I wished with a desperate ache that he could read my mind, even as I feared it.
Nothing could happen between us. It was a futile, miserable hope that the zaps of electricity were something he felt, too, when I was hiding so much. I could no longer pretend that my past life was irrelevant. But he’d made it clear how he felt about Nora Sharp, and imagining him feeling those things about me was more than I could bear.
To never know Daniel as more than a friend, I could live with. To lose that friendship would break me.
I took the remote out of his hand, ignoring the flutter of attraction when my fingers skimmed his palm. Pressing play, I wiggled further back into the sofa and picked up my wine. ‘I’m fine.’
* * *
It was a long night, spent twisting myself up in my duvet. After checking my old phone for the zillionth time, sure that this time I really had heard a notification ping through, I turned it off. I still heard the imaginary pings, but at least the remaining dregs of my rational self could now ignore them.
That wasn’t the only thing keeping my brain whirring. My restless thoughts constantly roamed back to Daniel. To his eyes, his smile, every time he’d ever spoken to me or looked at me or happened to walk down the hallway at the same time…
To where he lay, wearing scruffy lounge pants and a rumpled T-shirt, because even in March the farmhouse was still freezing at night, only a few metres away across the landing.
Most of all, I wondered whether he was thinking about me.
Nights like this, I ached for Charlie.
Hauling myself out of bed while it was still dark, I washed down a fortifying bowl of porridge with extra-strong coffee, stuck my hair in a ponytail, donned my scruffiest clothes, collected the necessary tools and climbed up to the top floor.
Since clearing Charlie’s old room, it had sat there empty of everything but the bare furniture. Some of it would stay – I planned to repurpose an old chest of drawers and a bookcase to put in the side room for Hope, along with her changing table from the study, and the rest would go in the barn in case we wanted to use it somewhere else later on.
But first, the unicorn wallpaper needed to go. I checked the steamer had reached boiling point, grabbed a scraper and got cracking.
I took a brief lunch break to watch Hope while Daniel went for a run. I felt him eyeing me, sensed the trace of concern and questions behind his veneer of normality. Daniel was ready to listen the moment I was prepared to talk.
Re-emerging from the clouds of steam much later, I showered and changed into a sloppy pair of lounge pants and went to rustle up something for dinner. Daniel was sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper.
