He smiles. “You ever had this carrot cake before?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s pretty amazing. Would you like to try some?”
She laughs nervously. “No, thank you, I...”
“Look, I have a clean spoon, right here.” He pushes it across his table toward her. “Go on. I’m never going to eat all this.”
A blade of light passes across the café at that moment, bright as torchlight. It touches the spoon and makes it glitter. The cake has the indents of his fork in it. The moment is curiously intimate and Laurel’s gut reaction is to back away, to leave. But as she watches the sparkles on the silver spoon she feels something inside her begin to open up. Something like hope.
She picks up the spoon and she scoops a small chunk of cake from the end that he has not touched.
His name is Floyd. Floyd Dunn. He offers her his hand and says, “Pleased to meet you, Laurel Mack.” His grip is firm and warm.
“What’s your accent?” she asks, pulling her chair closer to his table, feeling the blade of sunlight warming the back of her head.
“Ah,” he says, dabbing his mouth with a paper napkin. “Whatisn’tmy accent would be a better question. I am the son of very ambitious Americans who chased jobs and money all around the world. Four years in the U.S. Two in Canada. Another four in the U.S. Four in Germany. A year in Singapore. Then three in the U.K. My parents went back to the States; I stayed here.”
“So you’ve been here for a long time?”
“I’ve been here for”—he scrunches closed his eyes as he calculates—“thirty-seven years. I have a British passport. British children. A British ex-wife. I listen toThe Archers. I’m fully assimilated.”
He smiles and she laughs.
She catches herself for a moment. Sitting in a café in the middle of the afternoon, talking to a strange man, laughing at his jokes. How has this happened, this day? Of all the days, all the hundreds of dark days that have passed since Ellie went? Is this what closure does? Is this what happens when you finally bury your child?
“So, do you live around here?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “No. I live in Barnet. But I used to live around here. Until a few years ago. Hence the hairdresser.” She nods in the direction of the shop a few doors down. “Total phobia of letting anyone else touch my hair, so I trek down here every month.”
“Well...” He eyes her hair. “It looks like it’s worth it to me.”
His tone is flirtatious and she has to ask herself if he’s weird or not. Is he? Is there something odd about him, anything a bit off? Is she failing to read warning signs? Is he going to scam her, rape her, abduct her, stalk her? Is he mad? Is he bad?
She asks these silent internalized questions of everyone she meets. She was never a trusting person, even before her daughter vanished and then turned up dead ten years later. Paul always said he’d taken her on as a long-term project. She’d refused to marry him until Jake was a toddler, scared that he was just going through a phase and would stand her up at the register office. But she asks these questions even more these days. Because she knows that the worst-case scenario is not simply a terrible thing that isn’t likely to happen.
But she’s staring at this man, this man with gray eyes and gray hair and soft skin and nice shoes, and she cannot find one thing wrong with him. Apart from the fact that he is talking to her. “Thank you,” she says in reply to his compliment. And then she moves her chair back, toward her table, wanting to leave, but also wanting him to ask her to stay.
“You have to go?” he says.
“Well, yes,” she says, trying to think of something she needs to do. “I’m going to see my daughter.”
She is not going to see her daughter. She never sees her daughter.
“Oh, you have a daughter?”
“Yes. And a son.”
“One of each.”
“Yes,” she says, the pain of denying her gone daughter piercing her heart. “One of each.”
“I have two girls.”
She nods and hitches her bag on to her shoulder. “How old?”
“One of twenty-one. One of nine.”