It was a question that begged to be asked.
‘What is the first?’
‘Breaking your mother’s heart,’ he said simply.
I swallowed uncomfortably.
‘I told you the story some weeks ago about how Bee and I had met?’
I nodded, still struggling to superimpose my mother into every story of Bee that Henry had shared with me. He gave a long sigh and his eyes grew nostalgic, and I could almost feel the past tugging him back through the years.
‘There were many reasons why Bee and I should never have met.’
‘Because you were older than her?’ I’d already done the maths and knew he must have been almost twelve years her senior.
Henry inclined his head. ‘Yes. There was that too. But that wasn’t what I meant. I wasn’t supposed to be on the road where I found Bee with a punctured bicycle tyre that day. I was running late for a meeting with the man who was going to employ me for the summer. But I’d taken a wrong turn on the unfamiliar roads and was lost. Like I said, it was fate, pure chance that I was on the wrong road, at the wrong time, and came upon the one woman I was always meant to find.’
There was something in his story that reminded me very much of how Rhys and I had met. Fate had a way of intervening in the most peculiar ways when it wanted two people’s paths to cross.
‘As you know, Bee flagged me down and within minutes of meeting her, I realised I wasn’t lost anymore. I was exactly where I was always meant to be.
‘There have been some very difficult moments in my life, Ellie. But falling in love with your mother was one of the easiest things I have ever done.’ He turned to me, and there was something different in his face. It was as though the years were melting away and I was now seeing the handsome man my mother had met on a deserted country road on a sunny summer morning.
‘Of course, she should never have agreed to get in a car with a total stranger, but she did.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s just the way she was.’
It was absolutely not the way she was when she’d belonged to me and not him, but I was already sucked into his story now. I needed to hear what had happened to them.
‘She directed me to the place where I was meeting my new employer. But before hopping out of my car she pressed a folded square of paper into my hand with her address on it. “So you can drop my bike off later”.’ He tutted softly. ‘So foolish to give a man you don’t know your home address, but that was your mother. She always looked for the best in everyone. She only saw the good, never the bad.’
Not for the first time I wondered if he had actually muddled up the Elizabeth Harker I knew with someone else. If it hadn’t been for the irrefutable evidence of the photograph, I truly wouldn’t have believed we were talking about the same person.
‘After I was done with my meeting, I drove to her home, that piece of paper clutched in my hand.’ His smile emerged. ‘I still have it, you know. The ink is faded, you can hardly read it now, but I’ve carried it with me forever, along with your mother’s memory.
‘She was waiting for me. She’d packed a picnic lunch for us.’
Mum always hated picnics. She claimed there were too many flies and ants. Apparently, she hadn’t always thought that way.
‘I think I fell in love with her on that very first day,’ Henry said, his eyes looking a little misty. ‘She was a whirlwind of fun, laughter, and joy. A unique and remarkable gift of a person.’
‘If everything was so perfect, why did you break up?’
Henry had steered us across the immaculate lawns towards a rose garden. We passed beneath an arbour into a secret garden of fragrance and exotic blooms. There were several benches set around a small bubbling fountain.
‘Shall we sit?’ he asked, sounding suddenly tired, and if I hadn’t been so absorbed in his tale, I might have noticed sooner that he was now leaning more heavily on his stick.
We sat at opposite ends of one of the benches.
‘I told you there were a great many reasons why I should never have allowed myself to fall in love with Bee. But the greatest is that when I met her, I wasn’t a free man.’
‘You were already married?’ I didn’t bother disguising my shock.
‘No. Nor was I engaged, but I had known Caroline for almost all my life. Her family and mine were very close. We’d been nudged towards each other by them for years, and we’d eventually settled into a kind of understanding. I’d never proposed, but there was an expectation that was where we were heading.’
‘So you led my mother on?’ I couldn’t keep the icy disapproval from my voice.
Henry’s eyes flared wide. ‘Absolutely not. I told your mother about Caroline on that very first date. I told her that my life had somehow been heading in the wrong direction, but that I didn’t know how to find my way back.
‘“If you give me the summer, I’ll show you the way,” she told me. “Neither you nor Caroline should be with someone who doesn’t love you the way you both deserve to be loved.”’