Page 65 of Love Is: Two Bodies One Soul

Owen stared at him. This was not the man he remembered. He’d aged, almost beyond recognition.

‘Sit down, boy.’ Henry waved a feeble hand at the chair in front of his desk.

Ignoring the spike of irritation at being called boy, Owen moved into the study. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘If this isn’t a good time, if you’re not feeling well, we could leave it.’ He sat in the seat Henry had indicated, adding, ‘We might email.’

Henry shook his head, and a faint smile drifted over his blue lips.

‘No, no. I’ll be fine. It’s just age catching up with me. I’ll be sixty-nine next year.’

Feeling compelled to argue, Owen said, ‘That’s no age nowadays.’

Another shadow of a smile touched Henry’s mouth, and he tapped his computer screen. ‘It’s a fine book.’

‘You liked it?’

‘I did. Most definitely a thriller.’

‘Were there any mistakes with the legal stuff?’

‘A few minor ones. I’ve made some notes and sent the manuscript back to you. Sally helped me with that.’

‘Thank you.’ Shock and surprise, not to mention a fair amount of relief, made Owen feel light headed.

Henry went on, ‘I must be honest. It wasn’t really the book I wanted to talk to you about today.’

* * *

Lexie almost pulled backfrom the sitting room’s airless, overly hot atmosphere.

‘Can I offer you a drink?’ Sally asked as she walked towards a drinks table situated to the side of a large picture window, misty with condensation.

‘No, thanks. I’m driving,’ Lexie replied, distracted by a young boy sprawling on the sofa.

‘This is Mathew, my son.’ Sally ruffled the boy’s dark curls.

Briefly scowling, the boy looked up from his book and, seeing Lexie, he smiled shyly.

Lexie said, ‘Hello.’ Stopped from saying more; there was something eerily familiar about the boy’s scowl and the shy smile, not to mention the deep blue eyes.

‘Are you sure?’ Sally said.

‘Sure?’ Lost in her own troubling thoughts, Lexie looked again at Sally, who was shifting glasses and drinks bottles around the table.

‘A drink?’ Sally said, lifting a bottle as a reminder and adding, ‘Just a little one.’

‘No. I’ll be fine,’ Lexie said, feeling anything but fine. Owen’s tension, the stuffiness of the room, Mathew’s uncanny likeness to Owen, and Sally’s brittle edginess. Everything seemed wrong.

‘Lemonade then?’ Sally suggested. ‘It’s homemade. Mathew, go fetch it from the kitchen. There’s a lovie.’

The boy did as he was told. Loping out of the room on coltish, long legs.

‘Your son is a handsome boy.’

‘Yes, he is.’ Sally smiled. ‘He’s the spitting image of his father.’ She seemed to catch herself in an unwanted thought and for a moment looked warily at Lexie. Then she waved a hand at the various squashy chairs and sofas set out around the large room and told Lexie to make herself comfortable.

Settling on the edge of a chair near the open log fire, feeling unaccountably chilled in such a stuffy room, Lexie leaned towards the fire’s heat and watched Sally prepare herself a drink.

She seemed ill at ease. Moving glasses and bottles around – picking up her whisky, holding it to her chest – pacing the space in front of the window, occasionally glancing towards the wall that Lexie guessed separated them from the judge’s study.

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