Page 29 of The Village Midwife
‘I can see you’re busy,’ he said. ‘I’d better be off anyway. Thanks for the drink – and for seeing Billie earlier today.’
‘Oh, that’s…thank you for the chocolate. You really didn’t have to, but—’ Her sentence was cut short by a knock at the door. A wave of dread swept over her. ‘Could you wait here for a moment while I see who it is?’
Zoe left Alex in the kitchen without waiting for his reply. If Ritchie was at the door, what did it matter? They weren’t together, and she had nothing to hide, so why did she feel guilty for having another man in her house? And what did she hope to achieve by asking Alex to wait? Was he going to cotton on and climb out of the window so he’d be gone by the time she’d shown Ritchie in? And why did the prospect of it being Ritchie make her heart sink like this? They’d agreed to stay friends, and they still got along well, so there was no reason for it.
There was a second knock at the door.
‘OK, OK!’ Zoe called, and this time she knew for sure. There was nobody else in her life with that kind of impatience.
She threw open the front door and there he was, Ritchie, on the doorstep with a bunch of flowers and a grin that blindly assumed she must be pleased to see him.
‘Housewarming,’ he said, shoving the bouquet at her. ‘This place is a bugger to find. What do you want to go and live up here for? It’s like that village out of theLeague of Gentleman– you know,This is a local shop for local people…’
Zoe had never regretted a decision quite so much as she did at that moment. What had possessed her to give Ritchie her address when she’d taken possession of Kestrel Cottage? At the time, she’d thought nothing of it – she had nothing to hide, after all – but what kind of idiot had she been not to have seen this coming?
Things were made worse when she heard Alex’s voice in the hallway behind her.
‘Sorry,’ he said, glancing from her to Ritchie and then back again. ‘I see you have…I should go. Thanks again for the coffee.’
‘Right…’ Zoe flattened herself against the wall of the hallway to let him past, flowers right under her nose making her want to sneeze. Ritchie paused and almost seemed to make himself bigger as Alex approached the front door, and then, after a strange, charged moment, he moved aside to let him out.
Nobody said a word as Alex made his way down the path and away from the house.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Ritchie turned back to Zoe. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’
‘Yes, I was …yes, come in.’
Ritchie followed her inside and closed the door behind him. ‘God, this is tiny!’
‘There’s only me so it’s big enough. I wasn’t expecting you…I’m sorry, I’m still a bit upside down.’
‘I said I was coming.’
‘You said you wanted to. I didn’t realise that meant immediately.’
He paused as she led him to the kitchen. ‘You want me to go? After I drove all this way?’
‘I didn’t say that. I meant I wasn’t expecting company.’
‘Except forhim.’
‘What?’
‘The bloke who just left. So you had company. Is that why you didn’t want me to come over?’
‘I never said I didn’t want you to come over – you didn’t give me a chance!’
‘So what was all that about your door always being open? When you moved away, you said you wanted to stay in touch and you wanted us to be friends because you hated to see whencouples threw away big piles of memories they’d made with someone because of a divorce.’
Zoe pulled in a long breath to steady herself. She had said all of that and she’d meant it, but she hadn’t realised Ritchie would take it quite so literally. She’d always wanted them to be able to speak to one another civilly if their paths were to cross, and she didn’t want to taint the good memories from their marriage by turning what they’d once had into hatred. And while she was happy to have a relationship of sorts with him, surely he understood that didn’t mean he should have a presence in her life that was almost as big as it had been when they’d been together?
At first, she’d understood they needed one another – they’d both been grieving the loss of their baby even as their marriage had disintegrated, and she’d wanted to be there for him. But there was a time limit – there had to be. She couldn’t be there for him forever. She needed to move on, and so did he, and that was hardly likely to happen if he kept turning up every time he was bored or lonely.
‘I only wanted to make sure you were all right,’ he said as she put the flowers into the sink and searched for a vase. ‘Is that so bad? I still care about you, even though we’re not together. And is it so wrong to worry about you? You did go a bit crazy for a while after the baby…’ He shrugged. ‘You know, all that business when we lost it…’
It still stung. It stung that Ritchie could talk about those times as if they were a minor inconvenience instead of the earth-shattering, soul-crushing weeks that they were.
‘Him!’ Zoe snapped. ‘When we losthim! Because our little boy died!’
