‘God,’ I say aloud, as I’m hit with the naked truth.
‘Thought so,’ he replies.
30
The sun seems to be taking an inordinately long time to rise over the ocean, but I’m not one of those people who gets up and leaves halfway through a performance. Hugh and I are watching it together, in silence. Glued to it. We’re concentrating so hard, and so silently after our little exchange just then, we’ll be fully-qualified astrophysicists by the end of this. Anything to avoid looking at each other. I’m dreading the moment when the sun breaks free of the horizon itself, and one of us has to make the first move. Off the beach, I mean. Get it together, Kate.
I’m trying to think of a conceivable version of events where Hugh didn’t read my mind just then, and where my mind didn’t think what it thought. I need a sanitised, safe version of reality in which the impossible isn’t threatening to unfold, right in front of my eyes.
Falling for someone else? I can’t. Falling for Hugh? No words. None.
Although, having said that, I do seem to have words about it. Many, many words. They’re all tumbling in and piling on top of each other in my astonished head as it overthinks this situation, as if it’s an Olympic event. No schoolgirl with her first real crush could hold a candle to my current level of giddiness. Because no schoolgirl with her first crush could understand what this possibility feels like after the depths of hell that I’ve been dragged through. I’ve been to the place where love isn’t gifted upon you gently, but torn from you. Torn from each individual cell in your body in turn, one agonising extraction at a time – torture far beyond what any human can reasonably be expected to endure. Why would I willingly place myself into a reckless position where I risk that happening again?
The sun has lifted off the horizon now. The waves are encroaching too, with the tide. The ocean is coming for us, threatening to break our stalemate. Someone needs to say something. I hope it’s him. I know if it’s me, I’ll say something inane. Particularly as I’m now envisaging those steamy scenes in 1950s movies where the couple rolls around on the shoreline in their clothes, kissing . . .
I psych myself up to look at him. Surely it’s safe? I’m not about to tear his clothes off right here like some sort of sex-starved sea monster, am I? Am I? It’s been—
His phone starts blaring with an incoming call. Who on earth would be calling Hugh at dawn?
He looks at the screen and hands it over. ‘It’s your mother.’
He can’t be serious. It’s like the time she barged into my teenage bedroom, unannounced, the first time I kissed a boy. I have to admit this is impressive, even for her. My brain has barely dared to even imagine leading me into the romantic fray here with Hugh. A man who hasn’t actually confirmed or denied his interest, now I think about it – and Mum is already sticking her nose in, from hundreds of kilometres away.
‘Mum?’ I start tentatively, as if ducking from a moral lecture.
‘Mummy!’ Charlie says animatedly. ‘My tooth is wobbly!’
Wobbly? Is that normal at five? I can’t remember when I lost my first tooth. What if it’s decay? Have I let his dental hygiene lapse in my grief-clouded haze?
I scramble inelegantly to my feet in the sand and, while trying to brush the sand off myself and the blanket, I drop Hugh’s phone, then pick it up and have to brush the sand off it, too, and then start pacing backwards and forwards in front of him, asking surreptitious questions about what Nanna thought when Charlie told her his tooth was wobbly, in an attempt to gauge whether she was startled and phoning the emergency dentist, or unfazed.
‘Yes, of course the tooth fairy will come!’ I promise, making a mental note to research current exchange rates for teeth while also researching childhood dental development. ‘How exciting!’
Hugh is sitting now, trouser cuffs rolled up over his cyclist’s calves, elbows resting casually on bent knees, hands interlinked like he’s fully relaxed, just watching me. It is extraordinarily attractive, and I lose all of my bearings for a second, staggering backwards a little to put some distance between us in case I’m overcome by an urge to throw his phone, and by extension my own son, into the depths of the ocean while I tackle him. In a romantic way, of course. If I could possibly manage something approximating that.
In backing off, though, I step into the water, unexpectedly, and it is freezing. I jump out of it and squeal in a way I haven’t squealed since I was nine. I drop the phone again in the kerfuffle, but this time I catch it before it hits the water, like a fast-reflexed sporting genius. And that’s when Hugh gets to his feet, walks over to me and holds out his hand like he’s about to confiscate his phone from me, but instead he confiscates me, from the ocean. He picks me up, crochet blanket and all, and carries me about ten metres up the beach and puts me down on the sand. In the naughty corner.
‘I want to tell Uncle Hugh!’ Charlie announces in my ear, and I reel in horror. In the temporary departure I’ve had from reality, caused by the bombshell reveal that I apparently have a thing for the man, I totally forgot that Charlie thinks of him as his uncle. Because that’s what Daddy called him, when Daddy was confused and thought Hugh was his brother, and not my potential future leading man in more ways than one, or Charlie’s potential stepdad. I can’t even begin to think how the inevitable future psychologist will start to unpack these tangled circumstances for Charlie, or indeed the fact that I’ve cast Hugh as stepfather of my child already.
Thankfully Mum gets on and asks why I’m not answering my own phone. ‘I tried you five times!’ she tells me. ‘And gave up and called Hugh and how fortunate that you appear to be right next to him. At six o’clock in the morning, Katherine.’
‘Mum! We’re on the beach, watching the sunrise. For fu— goodness’ sake!’
Hugh’s still standing in front of me in the sand. Watching me squirm through this phone call. Trying not to smile.
‘Is it normal for a five-year-old to lose a tooth?’ I ask her nervously.
‘Perfectly normal, Katherine. You were precocious as a child. Lost your first teeth at fifty-eight months.’
Fifty-eight months? Why can’t she speak like a normal person?
‘Anyway, Charlie’s run off now. I don’t want to interrupt your sunrise. I’ll call you later. Love to Hugh! Bye!’
She ends the call and I hand his phone back, exhausted and nervous. It’s just the two of us on the beach now, and the giant admission I carelessly implied, which I’m wondering if I can somehow retract. I’m not remotely confident, now that I replay it in my mind for the eight hundredth time, that it wasn’t all one-sided . . .
‘God,’ I had said.
‘Thought so,’ he had replied.
Not ‘I hear you’。 Not ‘Ditto’。 Not ‘Me too, Kate, for the longest time . . .’
Just ‘Thought so’， which I’m now translating to mean ‘Your unfortunate and inappropriate infatuation couldn’t be more obvious or unrequited.’
I hope he realises what he’s dealing with here: a widow’s heart. It’s just like a normal heart, but made of a million shattered fragments, patched together in a mosaic. Reclaimed glass. Transparent. Easily broken.