His face darkened again, and it took him so long to respond that I was already thinking of a change in topic before he spoke. “I was on my honeymoon.”
I choked on the bread and cheese and had to take a gulp of the champagne to wash it all down. “You’re married?”
“Oh no. No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply . . .” He stopped, looked embarrassed. “I’m divorced. I was married eight years ago and have been divorced for three.” He grimaced. “I found out after we were married that she didn’t want children. And since I do, well . . .” He reached for the bottle and refilled our glasses.
“That’s awful.” I closed my eyes, the memory of our conversation in the Ritz bar filling me with mortification. “And that night we met, I kept going on and on about my children. I even forced you to look at their photographs. How perfectly dreadful you must have thought me.”
“Not at all. I actually liked hearing about them. Since I will most likely never be a father, I live vicariously listening to other people telling me about their kids.”
“What do you mean you’ll never have children? You’re still quite young. What are you, thirty?”
He grinned that toothy grin of his that I was beginning to find quite irresistible. “Either you’re trying to flatter me, or you’re a terrible judge of people’s ages. I’m actually thirty-five.”
“Oh, I assumed you were so much younger than me . . .” I quickly took another sip of champagne to hide my blush. “Sorry, it’s just that I have always felt I was the oldest person in the room, even when I was a child. I think I have an old soul or something. Or maybe I’m not sure how old I’m supposed to feel because I didn’t have the girlhood I was meant to have had. I was never a debutante because of the war, and then I was a wife at nineteen, a mother at twenty, and running the Women’s Institute at twenty-one. I went from pinafores into tweeds it seems and skipped all that middle part of being a girl.”
He nodded slowly, his brow furrowed in concentration. “I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. However, it’s not really my age that makes me reluctant to think of future fatherhood.” He slowly slid an oyster into his mouth and I couldn’t avert my eyes from his lips as they moved around the bivalve. After chewing slowly and deliberately, then swallowing, he continued. “About a year after we divorced, my ex-wife remarried and now has two children. So it wasn’t that she didn’t want children, she just didn’t want any with me.”
“Oh, Drew—no! I’m sure that’s not it at all. Who wouldn’t want to have children with you?” His eyes widened. “Oh, er, I meant that I think you’d make a wonderful father, that’s all. With anyone. Or I mean, your wife. Not your ex-wife, of course, as she’s married to someone else, but your new wife. I mean, if you had one.”
At the look of confusion on his face, I drained my glass and reached for my baguette.
“And I just found out that she’s pregnant with baby number three.” He sighed. “I think that’s why I was so eager to come to France. Yes, I want to do this for my dad so he can have peace before he dies. But hearing about my ex . . .” He shook his head slowly. “It’s made me feel so unsettled. Not unhappy or anything—I love my job, and I enjoy living in New York, but it just feels incomplete somehow. Like I should do something to shake up my life a bit, you know?”
“I know exactly. It’s why I didn’t throw your letter away.” Our eyes met as a spark of mutual understanding passed between us. Flustered, I returned my focus to eating my baguette. A clump of brie clung to the end and as I lifted the bread, the cheese began to fall. Despite all of my mother’s teachings, I couldn’t stand the waste and instead of allowing it to fall to the blanket, I caught it with my tongue and licked the cheese off the tip of the bread.
I glanced over at Drew, who was watching me closely, his face gone suddenly red.
“Are you all right? Was it the oyster?”
He swallowed and shook his head, then crossed his legs. “No. I’m fine.” He cleared his throat. “But it’s getting late and we should go.” He began hastily wrapping up the food and I joined him, even though I wasn’t finished eating. The champagne and the warm sun had made me feel heated so I discarded my jumper as we packed up, curious as to Drew’s silence and hoping it wasn’t anything I’d said.