Page 97 of Midnight in Paris

53

NOW

Had it been that time in the cafe when she’d first started to realise how much Will had come to mean? Sophie wondered.

‘I’ve missed this, you know,’ she said, sipping her latte and feeling it warm her throat.

The rain still pattered down outside, but in the cafe everything was bright and welcoming. If anything, the dank, cloudy weather outside simply added to the cafe’s charm.

‘What, coffee?’ Will joked.

‘Ha ha. No. This.’ She paused. ‘You.’

His eyes met hers, questioning. ‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Look, sorry about how things went. It was a weird time.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said emphatically.

‘It still is, in a way,’ she added.

He nodded, taking a sip of his own drink. ‘I get that.’

‘But it’s OK. I’ve kind of realised that it’s always going to be,’ she said. ‘Weird, I mean. I thought things would eventually startto feel like they used to. But I don’t know. It’s as if I’ve lost a limb or something. It’s never going away.’

He was silent for a minute. ‘Yeah, makes sense,’ he said at last. ‘But maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s good.’

‘Losing a limb isgood?’

‘Ha. Well, no, but metaphorically, having that… absence. It’s normal that going through something like that would change you. It changed me too. Obviously I wasn’t as close to Tom as you were. But he was my friend. He was someone I thought I’d have in my life for years and years. Now… well, things are different.’

She looked at him. ‘Yes, I see that.’

They smiled sadly at one another.

‘Anyway, how are things going with you?’ she asked, determined to change the subject. Once the topic of Tom came up, she’d found conversations almost drifted away – it was hard to bring them back from the life-shatteringly awful to the trivial again. But she needed the trivial – it was what kept her in the moment.

‘Ah, OK,’ he said. ‘Still rowing.’

‘Yeah? Still the five o’clock starts?’

He nodded. ‘Can’t seem to help it,’ he admitted. ‘It’s an addiction.’

‘Pretty good addiction to have, as they go.’

‘Yep, slightly better than heroin, no worse than crack or cocaine.’

She laughed, the sound bubbling up from within her. ‘Yes, I think rowing probably doesn’t have its own support group.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Do you remember the rowing club lot?’ he joked. ‘More like a therapy group than a club half the time.’

She laughed again, it felt good. A silence descended, but it was companionable rather than awkward, and they both took a sip of their coffees.

‘Remember the party where we first met?’ she said. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dreamcostumes.’

‘Yeah,’ he smiled. ‘I’m still friends with some of the guys on Facebook. It seems like no time since we left, but some of them have got grey hair. Whereas I obviously haven’t changed a bit!’

She laughed. ‘I know. Neither of us have.’ She gave him a friendly nudge.

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