Page 111 of Midnight in Paris

‘Yes?’

‘Can you come here for a sec?’ It was hard to keep the tremble out of her voice.

She heard his quick tread on the stairs and then he was there. ‘What’s up? Need me to do up a zip or something?’

‘No, I’ve barely started,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’

‘What, love?’

Wordlessly she handed the paper bag to him and, with a confused expression, he drew out the picture and looked at it.

‘That’s lovely,’ he said. ‘Did you get it when…’

‘Yeah.’

‘She’s… you look beautiful,’ he said. ‘Shall we get it framed?’

‘It’s not that, it’s…’ she indicated with her finger and he looked again at the drawing, the stalls, the artists and their easels, the tourists that populated the square every day.

‘Sorry, I can’t see…’ Then he stopped. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

She nodded, barely able to speak.

In the picture, the woman sits on a bench, her legs crossed in front. The other seat is empty. But behind her, leaning against a tree, his eyes fixed on her, there is a man. A man with black hair and an easy smile.

‘It’s Tom.’

And it was. Behind her in the picture as she sat on the bench, dressed just as he had been in her visions of him, Tom stood and looked at her and smiled.

61

NOW

‘Honey, that isnotTom,’ Libby said later when she’d come over to inspect the picture. She was sitting on the sofa in their living room, sipping from an enormous glass of wine.

‘How could you say that?’ Sophie cried, picking up the picture and scrutinising it again.

Libby shrugged. ‘Sorry, I just don’t see it.’

‘But he’s wearing what he was wearing… you know, that day.’

Libby looked at her kindly. Her face softened. ‘Well, then maybe I’m wrong,’ she said, brushing a strand of hair back from Sophie’s forehead. ‘Maybe it’s him. Maybe he was there, kind of saying goodbye.’

‘It sounds nuts.’

‘Yep. But you know, I’ve heard stranger things, been open to the idea of it,’ Libby shrugged. ‘I’m just surprised thatyouare, I suppose.’

‘It’s amazing what a few months of hallucinations will have you believing!’

Libby sat back on the sofa, sipped from her wine. ‘And the scattering went OK? With his parents?’

She nodded. Rather than the sterile, somehow impersonal crematorium gardens, they’d chosen to scatter Tom’s remaining ashes in the copse at the end of their enormous garden. ‘He loved it here as a child,’ Julie had told her. ‘I think he’d like to be here.’

Sophie had worried a little that they might eventually sell the plot, that it might end up being the site of hundreds of identikit new build houses. But she told herself not to. Because she couldn’t control the distant future. Had to just let it happen. And although when people said this sort of thing in movies, it had always sounded a bit corny to her, she had started to realise what they meant when they said that people live on in your heart.

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