Page 68 of Not in a Million Years

Daniel’s face flickered in something that was almost a wince then became still again. ‘Okay. If you’re sure.’

‘If anything changes, you’ll be the first to know.’

But something has changed, my mind screamed. It has! I just need to find a way to unchange it.

Except there wasn’t a way. I could only ignore the seismic shift that seemed to have affected the way I saw not just Daniel but my entire life. Ignore it, and hope it went away, the tectonic plates settling back into their old pattern, or me making peace with the new landscape I seemed to be inhabiting.

‘Come on, then. I’m done for the day – let’s get to this dinner you and Andy have been bigging up.’

While we were talking, the sun had dipped below the rooftops opposite and heavy grey clouds had descended, dimming the light in the workshop to a blueish, twilight glow. The dancing motes of dust in the air were invisible now and the squares of light on the floor had become elongated, silvery oblongs.

Daniel gestured ‘after you’, and I walked slowly back across the room, my trainers silent on the concrete floor; his work boots louder behind me. I pushed open the door to the living room and we walked through.

‘Christ, you two took your time,’ Andy said. ‘I was beginning to worry you’d chopped Katie babe up with a bandsaw, mate.’

‘I’m still in one piece,’ I assured him.

‘Well, you’d better get your skates on. That wild Alaskan salmon isn’t going to cook itself, you know.’

‘I’ll just jump in the shower,’ Daniel said (and, right on cue, my brain conjured up an image of his naked body, water sluicing down the chiselled planes of his torso, flattening the sun-bleached hair, coursing over his ridged abdomen towards—). ‘I’ll be out in five minutes.’

‘No rush. Kate’s got parsley to chop and lemons to zest, and her knife work’s always been shit.’ Andy picked up a glass of wine from the kitchen island and took a long swallow. ‘Drink for the sous chef?’

‘Andy.’ Alarm filled me like icy water. ‘Are you sure you should be—’

‘Babe, have you seen the dose of tramadol I’m on? A drop of Pinot frigging Grigio is neither here nor there. Now peel that garlic – we’ll need four plump cloves.’

Daniel and I looked at each other, then I looked at Andy and the glass of wine in his hand. I wanted to snatch it, pour the contents down the sink and follow up with the rest of the bottle for good measure. But I couldn’t police him forever – or even for the rest of the night. He might not be a hundred per cent steady on his crutches, but he was more than capable, once I’d left to go home, of getting himself down the road to the off-licence – or persuading Daniel to go for him.

I turned back to Daniel, who gave an almost invisible shrug before opening the door to the bathroom and closing it behind him. But I knew he’d realised, same as I had, that the consequences of Andy’s Turkish adventure and our impulsive rescue mission would be more far-reaching than any of us could have predicted.

Twenty-Five

There was no contact between me and Andy, or Daniel, for a couple of days after that dinner. I met Abbie and Rowan for drinks (Naomi sending her apologies, because Patch was visiting his grandmother, and her usual babysitter had gone on strike), and I updated them on Andy but said nothing about what had happened between Daniel and me.

The Airbnb guests left, or checked out or whatever, and I had a night of blissful peace and decent sleep before a new group arrived. On their second evening in Jintao’s apartment, they had a barbecue on their balcony, filling my flat with a miasma of burning meat. Normally, I’d have gritted my teeth and told myself to unclench and be more tolerant, but their music had kept me awake all the previous night (clearly, whoever had been designated DJ this time round had a major penchant for power ballads, and I’d woken up after three hours’ sleep with ‘I Will Always Love You’ looping relentlessly through my aching head). And also, I’d actually gone to the trouble of ironing a dress to wear on my date with Claude that evening, and it had acquired a smell of grilling sausages that clearly wasn’t going to shift in time.

By the time I’d selected something else to wear, taken the pink polish off my toes and replaced it with green, because the skirt I’d picked to wear was pink and I’d had a wobble about the overall effect being too matchy-matchy, done my make-up and blow-dried my hair, I was running late. Resisting the temptation to position a speaker against my bedroom wall with the Dead Kennedys playing at full volume, I locked the flat and hurried out.

There’d be no hot-air balloons involved in this date – I was confident of that, because I’d booked the restaurant myself. And not just any restaurant – a swanky French place in a newly opened City hotel so exclusive I was willing to bet even Claude hadn’t been there before. I’d only managed to get a table through what had felt like the blindest stroke of luck – I’d gone onto the booking engine with scant hope and predictably found there were no tables to be had. Then, on a whim, I’d checked back two minutes later and voilà (as Claude might say) a table for two at seven thirty had appeared. It was located close to where Claude and I used to work, and close enough to home for me to walk. But I was wearing high heels in honour of the occasion, and besides, I no longer had time, so I summoned an Uber and reached my destination only ten minutes late.

And there, waiting in the lobby, was Claude.

He greeted me with a slightly shame-faced smile. ‘I’m so sorry, Kate. My last meeting overran and I didn’t get a chance to change. I basically sprinted here from the office.’

‘I’m late too, so I’m not about to judge you for it,’ I assured him, taking in his broad shoulders in his immaculately cut suit, his sharply barbered hair, the scent of expensive cologne that came off his skin even after a day at the office and a last-minute rush through the hot, crowded City streets.

He was seriously attractive; everything I wanted in a man: smooth, successful, sexy. So why could I not help thinking of how Daniel had looked in his workshop, the sun shining on his dusty skin?

‘The twelfth floor, right?’ Claude gestured to the doors of a lift at the far end of the lobby.

Hold on – a lift? The twelfth floor? In my frantic haste to secure a table, I had neglected to find out the exact location of the restaurant. And none of the reviews I’d glanced at had mentioned that the damn place ought to come with a health warning for acrophobics. My knees began to tremble as I followed him into the lift – and not in a good way.

As we whooshed upwards, I tried to make cheerful conversation while wondering when my stomach, which I appeared to have left behind on the ground floor, was going to join the rest of me.

‘We’ve put you outside on the terrace,’ the maître d’ said, leaning in conspiratorially. My stomach reappeared abruptly, with a queasy lurch. ‘Since it’s such a beautiful evening. You’ve got the best view – it’s the table everyone asks for.’

‘Impressive work,’ Claude murmured to me. ‘Friends in high places?’

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