Page 72 of The Summer Swap

Lily thought about that.

And then what? A miserable marriage and a divorce? You couldn’t force love, could you?

“I was cowardly.” Todd topped up his glass. “I should have said no right away. I should have said that it wasn’t the time or the place, but I was taken by surprise. I didn’t want to humiliate her. I ended up doing that anyway, and by the time I found the words and the guts to end what never should have begun, she’d already picked a date and found a venue for the wedding.”

Knowing Amelie as she did, Lily could easily picture it.

She could just imagine how much pressure Amelie had put on him.

But in the end, he’d resisted.

“She’d found a venue after just a week?” Cecilia sounded astonished. “Not a woman to hang around.”

“At last count my mother had twenty voice mails from her mother. Probably a good thing you steered clear of your party. She turned up and threw champagne over me.”

Cecilia gave a faint smile. “I saw that.”

“You did?”

“I was in the window, looking at the gardens.”

“And you didn’t come and rescue me?”

Cecilia’s smile widened. “You’ve always been able to take care of yourself, Todd. And having your grandmother riding to your rescue probably wouldn’t have enhanced your reputation. Also, I had no idea what was going on and I’ve made a point of never interfering in other people’s relationships. Your Amelie seems like a young woman who likes to live out the big life moments in front of an audience.”

“Not my Amelie. And as I’m a person who likes a laid-back lifestyle, I think you can see we weren’t a match made in heaven.”

Lily said nothing. All she could think was that Todd hadn’t proposed to Amelie. Todd hadn’t even wanted to marry Amelie.

And that didn’t really change anything of course, but somehow it made her feel better.

“So now it’s your turn, Nanna.” Todd removed his sunglasses and leaned forward. “Seth.”

“Seth.” Cecilia breathed the name like a sigh. “He was my first boyfriend. I was here for the season, with two girlfriends. There were a bunch of artists living here and we all spent time together. We hung out on the beach—painted, swam, ate, drank, talked about everything.”

“You met Seth before you met my grandfather?”

“Yes. We arrived in spring, and Cameron appeared on the scene late in the summer.” Cecilia paused. “Life was delightfully uncomplicated. We came from all over, but Seth was local. His father owned a gallery. He was influential in the art world, but I didn’t know that then. We didn’t care about things like that. We didn’t think about the future. We lived for the day. None of us thought ahead. It was self-indulgent, but at the time we didn’t see it like that.”

Lily could picture it easily. Long summer days and lazy summer nights. Milky dawn mornings and rose gold sunsets. A group of young people with no commitments and no responsibility.

She felt a twinge of envy. She’d never experienced that carefree lightness. From the moment she’d moved to the exclusive school her parents had chosen for her, she’d felt the weight of expectation. Occasionally she’d felt as if she was drowning, and that the weight of those expectations was going to pull her right to the bottom.

Todd lounged back in his chair, his attention on his grandmother. “You were together. You and Seth.”

“We were together for that whole summer.” Cecilia gazed out across the ocean and Lily wondered which part of that time she was remembering.

Todd was obviously wondering that, too. “What happened?”

“What happened?” Cecilia turned to look at him. “We got a little too serious a little too quickly. Seth didn’t want that kind of relationship. He ended it. And Cameron and I became involved.” She said it as if that short statement should have explained everything, but of course it didn’t.

“He broke your heart.”

There was a long silence. “Yes.” Cecilia gave a sad smile. “And that’s when I started spending time with Cameron.”

“Whoa.” Todd sat back in his chair. “So you and my grandfather—major rebound relationship.”

“I suppose it was, yes. At least, at first. But then it deepened to something more. You’re going to ask me what it was about him, and I’m going to struggle to find the words to describe it. He was handsome and charming of course, but it was so much more than that. He had a fire inside him that drew me. At the time I saw it as passion. It was only much later that I understood that the fire was insecurity. That part of the reason he strived was to prove to people that he was good enough.”

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