She preened a little.
‘You didn’t like being married?’ He drew the razor along his jaw.
‘If that’s a question about Simon wrapped up with a bow, I did like being married. I guess I felt safe for the first time in my life.’
Nik stilled and met her eyes in the glass. ‘You didn’t feel safe before that?’
‘I felt alone,’ she confessed. ‘For so long it was just me, and then Simon picked me up and carted me off to his life in the village with his parents and his sister, and their neighbours and friends accepted me just because I was his wife. It was an amazing time for me. And then, a few months later, he had the accident.’
Nik wrapped an arm around her. He didn’t mouth any pointless platitudes.
‘Can I tell you something?’ she asked.
He looked down into her eyes and Sybella knew she was about to take a jump into the unknown. She hadn’t told anyone this.
‘I cried for Simon, of course I did, but I remember at the funeral thinking, I’ll have to leave now. I’ll have to leave the village. And somehow that felt worse, that felt like the bigger loss.’
It was an enormous admission and Sybella waited to feel guilty, only she didn’t.
‘Makes sense. It sounds like when you married Simon, you married the life you needed.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’ She relaxed against him, relieved he understood.
‘Of course, thanks to Fleur I never did have to leave Edbury.’
Nik towelled his freshly shaven face and switched out the light.
‘When did you find out you were pregnant?’
He followed her across the hallway to her room. The house was quiet but for the usual creaks and groans of age. Fleur’s door at the end of the hall was ajar and Sybella could see the red glow of her nightlight.
‘The day after the funeral. Meg needed a tampon on the day, and it occurred to me I’d been carrying that little box around in my purse for several weeks. So I did a chemist test and then I went to my doctor and my life changed. Again.’
She climbed into her new bed and he stretched out beside her. ‘That’s the thing about life—it’s constantly surprising you.’
He put out the light and pulled her into his arms.
‘I guess the long and the short of it is I got married young because I was alone in the world, but I’m not alone any more. I have a daughter, I have in-laws, I have a whole village.’
‘And you have me,’ he said, and her body began to hum as he slid his hands over her bare skin and found all the places that made her squirm and gasp and sigh.
She woke some hours later, hot and disturbed after a dream. She couldn’t remember the contents, but a kind of anxiousness was knotting her chest and presently she got out of bed and quietly crept downstairs. She took her coat off the coat-rack and, wrapped up in it, stepped out of the back door and into her garden. It was the place where she did her thinking.
Spring would be here soon but it was still bitterly cold at night and she’d only stuffed her feet into her old slippers.
The sky over the Indian ocean had been so high and far-reaching. Here at home the sky was hugger mugger with the low hills, but that sense of snugness and enclosure made her feel safe.
‘What are you doing out here by yourself?’
Nik wore a pair of boxer shorts, but if he was cold he didn’t show it. His physical similarity to one of those more-than-life-size male sculptures the Italians liked to make in the Renaissance was all too obvious.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He didn’t ask her why she’d decided to come out into the vegetable patch.
‘Do you want to be by yourself?’ His deep voice was pitched low.
There was something about the way he was standing there, not coming any closer, that sent a shiver hightailing down Sybella’s spine.
‘No, I don’t. I don’t want to be by myself.’
Before she could move his arms were closing around her from behind and she was washed with the feeling of security and rightness the dream had upended. She’d already begun to take this feeling for granted with Nik.
It was so dangerous. He could hurt her and she didn’t know if she’d get over it.
But, Mrs Muir be damned. She couldn’t go through her life wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t let him in. The idea of keeping her heart locked up and on a high shelf held no appeal.