Sardinian Heat

The suitcase was already by the front door when I came down from my shower, and Graham was sitting in his armchair with his leg propped on the footstool, the ice pack balanced on his knee like a small, melting crown. He'd been like that since Tuesday. Since the hospital called with the cancellation.

"Don't look at me like that," he said, without opening his eyes.

"Like what?"

"Like I've ruined your holiday."

I hadn't said a word. That was the thing about thirty-five years of marriage. He could read my face from across a room, and I could read his, and neither of us had to say anything at all. Which was, I suppose, why we'd lasted. And also why we'd stopped saying much.

"You haven't ruined anything," I said, which was true and wasn't. The flight was in six hours. The hotel in Sardinia was booked and paid for, two weeks of sun and sea and the little restaurant on the marina where we'd eaten grilled sardines the last time, four years ago now, before his kidney packed up and his skin started growing things that had to be cut out. He'd been on the waiting list for that knee for eighteen months. Eighteen months of limping and groaning and me rubbing Voltarol into his thigh at night while he pretended it didn't hurt. And then they rang, out of the blue, and said they had a slot on Thursday, and he said yes before he'd even put the phone down.

"I've told you," he said. "Go. Just go."

"On my own."

"Not on your own. I've sorted it."

I stopped, halfway to the kitchen, my hair still wet on my shoulders. "Sorted what?"

"Jon's coming with you."

I turned around. He still hadn't opened his eyes, but there was a small, satisfied smile at the corner of his mouth, the kind he got when he'd done something he thought was clever.

"Jon," I said.

"Charlene can't go, she's got lectures. But Jon works from his laptop, doesn't he? He can work from anywhere. I rang him last night."

"You rang him last night."

"You're repeating everything I say."

I walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on because I needed something to do with my hands. Through the doorway I could see him, still in the chair, still with his eyes closed, and I wanted to be angry with him, and I couldn't quite find it. He meant well. He always meant well. That was the problem with Graham. He was a man who did the right thing in the most inconvenient way possible, and you were never allowed to be annoyed about it because his heart was so obviously in the right place.

"Jon's forty-three," I said.

"I'm aware of how old he is. I was at his wedding."

"He's our son-in-law."

"He's our son-in-law who's been sat in that spare room of theirs for two years with nothing but a laptop and a wife who's too tired to talk to him. He could do with some sun."

I poured the water. The steam fogged my face. "And what's Charlene going to say?"

"Charlene suggested it."

That stopped me. I stood there with the kettle in my hand and the steam curling up and I thought about my daughter, who I hadn't seen in person since Christmas, who I spoke to on the phone every Sunday for exactly twenty-two minutes because that was how long she could manage before the exhaustion took her, who had married Jon Wallace in 2013 in a little church in Sussex and looked so happy that day that I'd had to look away.

"Charlene suggested it," I repeated.

"She said it was a shame to waste it. She said Jon needs a break and so do you. She said, and I'm quoting, 'Mum works nights, she never sees the sun, she'll come back looking like a ghost.'"

That was Charlene. Even from her sickbed she was managing everyone. Even when she could barely lift her head off the pillow she was still running the show, still organising, still making sure everyone else was all right. It was the thing I loved most about her and the thing that worried me most, because I knew where she got it from and I knew what it cost.

"And what about me?" I said. "What do I get a say in?"

"You get a say in whether you go or not. That's the only bit that's up to you."

I carried my tea back into the living room and sat down on the sofa, which was, by long-established custom, my side of the room. His was the chair. In thirty-five years we'd never once swapped. I looked at him, at the ice pack, at the grey stubble on his chin that he'd stopped shaving properly because his hands shook a bit now, at the scar on his forearm where they'd taken the skin graft, at the tired, patient face of a man who'd been falling apart for years and had somehow kept his sense of humour about it.

"You're not coming," I said.

"No."

"And I'm going to Sardinia with Jon."

"Unless you'd rather sit here and watch me ice my knee for a week."

I sipped my tea. Outside, the light was going, the last of the day bleeding out over the rooftops of the little terrace we'd lived in since we got married, since before Charlene, since before everything. The suitcase by the door looked patient. It had been packed for a week. I'd packed it with the specific joy of a woman who hadn't had a proper holiday in four years, folding sundresses and swimsuits and the good sandals, the ones with the strap that didn't rub, and now it was going to Sardinia without my husband.

"Fine," I said.

Graham opened one eye. "Fine?"

"Fine. I'll go. But you're not to ring him again. No more arranging."

"I've already arranged everything."

"Graham."

"I've told him to be here at seven. His flight's the same as yours. He's got the seat next to you."

I put my cup down on the arm of the sofa, which he hated, and stood up.

"You're impossible," I said, and went upstairs to finish getting ready.

---

Jon arrived at seven exactly, which was one of the things I'd always liked about him, and one of the things Charlene found most annoying. He was a man who was never late and never early, who did things precisely, who had a system for the dishwasher and a system for the recycling and a system, I suspected, for everything else as well. He stood in our little hallway with his suitcase and his laptop bag and his passport in his hand, and he looked at me the way he always looked at me, which was a way I'd spent twenty-two years not thinking about.

"Hi, Ness," he said.

Nobody else called me Ness. Not Graham, not Charlene, not the girls at the hospital. Only Jon. He'd started it the first time we met, when he was twenty-one and I was thirty-eight and he was standing in our kitchen with a bottle of wine, meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time, and he'd said, "Nice to meet you, Ness," and I'd said, "It's Vanessa," and he'd said, "I know," and that had been that. Twenty-two years of Ness.

"Hi, Jon."

"Graham," he said, nodding past me into the living room.

"Jon." Graham's voice came from the chair. "Look after her."

"I will."

"Don't let her drink the local wine. It's stronger than it looks."

"I'll keep an eye."

"And don't let her swim too far out. She does that. Thinks she's a bloody dolphin."

"I don't do that," I said.

"You do it every time. Every single time we go anywhere near water you swim out past the buoys and I have to stand on the beach like an idiot waving."

"I'll watch her," Jon said, and there was something in his voice, something quiet and steady, that made me look at him properly for the first time since he'd walked in. He was taller than Graham. He always had been. But he'd filled out in the last few years, the way men do in their forties, and there was grey coming in at his temples that suited him, and he was wearing a linen shirt the colour of sand, and he looked, I thought, like a man who needed a holiday.

"Right," I said. "Let's go before he starts telling you about my driving."

"Your driving's fine," Graham said.

"You've never said that before."

"I'm saying it now. Go on. Get out of here."

I kissed him on the top of his head, which was mostly bald now, and he patted my arm, and I didn't look back because I knew if I looked back I'd cry, and I wasn't going to cry in front of Jon Wallace in my own hallway at sixty years of age.

---

The airport was the airport. Jon took charge of the bags and the boarding passes and the queue for security, and I let him, because I was tired and because it was easier, and because there was something restful about being with a man who knew exactly what to do and did it without being asked. Graham would have made a fuss. Graham would have complained about the queue and the prices and the state of the floor. Jon just moved through it all like water, and I followed, and by the time we reached the gate I'd stopped feeling like a woman running away from something and started feeling like a woman going somewhere.

We didn't talk much on the plane. He had a book. I had a magazine. The seats were the kind of small that made you aware of your own body in relation to other people's bodies, and I was aware of his shoulder next to mine, and his knee next to my knee, and the way he folded his jacket and put it in the overhead bin, and the way he asked the stewardess for water instead of wine, and the way he fell asleep somewhere over France with his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open, and I looked at him for longer than I should have and then looked away.

I'd known him since he was twenty-one. That was the thing I kept coming back to. Twenty-one, and he'd walked into my kitchen with a bottle of wine and a nervous smile, and Charlene had been twenty and so in love with him she couldn't stop touching his arm, and I'd thought, he's a good one, this one, he'll look after her. And he had. For twenty-two years he'd looked after her. Through the diagnosis, through the bad years, through the days when she couldn't get out of bed and the days when she could but wished she couldn't. He'd stayed. He'd worked from home so he could be there. He'd learned to cook because she couldn't stand long enough to do it. He'd given up things I didn't even know about, probably. He'd given up a lot.

And I'd been there the whole time, on the edge of it, watching. Bringing casseroles. Sitting with Charlene on the bad days so he could go out and get some air. And somewhere in all those years, somewhere in the kitchen at Christmas or the garden in summer or the hallway at the hospital when we'd both been waiting for news, something had happened that I'd never named and never intended and never, ever said out loud.

He woke up when the plane started its descent, and he looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back, and neither of us said anything.

---

Sardinia in September was still hot, but not the punishing heat of August, the kind that made the pavements shimmer and the air feel like soup. This was a softer heat, a heat with a breeze in it, and when we stepped out of the airport the light was so bright it made my eyes water. Jon got us a taxi. He spoke a bit of Italian, which I hadn't known, and he negotiated the fare with the driver in a way that made the man laugh, and I sat in the back and watched the landscape go by and felt something in my chest start to loosen.

The hotel was up a hill above a little town I'd never heard of, white walls and blue shutters and bougainvillea spilling over the terrace like it had been poured there. Graham had booked it. He'd found it online, years ago, back when he could still walk properly, and we'd been meaning to come ever since. The girl at reception was young and pretty and looked at the two of us with the kind of polite curiosity that made me want to explain myself.

"Two rooms?" she said.

"One," Jon said. "Twin."

She looked at the screen. "Ah. Yes. Mr O'Hara. Twin room, sea view. Seven nights."

"That's us."

She handed over the key and Jon took it and we walked to the lift and neither of us said anything, and I thought about how it must look. A man and a woman, twenty years apart, checking into a hotel together. Not father and daughter, not quite. Something else. Something the girl at reception had already started to wonder about, and would probably wonder about all week, and would probably tell her colleagues about, and they would all probably laugh, and none of it would matter because none of it was true.

The room was on the fourth floor. Jon opened the door and stood back to let me in, and I walked past him into a space that was smaller than I'd expected and brighter than I'd expected and had, at its centre, two single beds pushed together so that they were almost touching.

We both looked at them.

"Right," Jon said.

"Right."

"I'll..."

"Yes."

He put his suitcase down and walked over and, without any ceremony, took hold of the frame of the left-hand bed and pulled it away from the right, a good three feet, so that there was a gap between them. A proper gap. A gap that said, we are two people who are not going to touch each other. He did it in about four seconds and then stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at his work.

"Better," he said.

"Better."

"I'll take this one, if that's all right. Nearer the window."

"That's fine."

"You can have the one near the bathroom. Easier in the night."

"I don't get up in the night."

"You will. It's the heat."

I didn't argue. I put my suitcase on the bed and opened it and started to unpack, and he did the same on his side, and we moved around each other in that small room with the careful choreography of people who are trying very hard not to be in each other's way. The wardrobe was small. We hung our things on separate ends of the rail. The bathroom was small. We agreed on a schedule without actually agreeing on one, the way you do when you're sharing with someone and you don't want to say it out loud.

And then there was nothing left to do but go down to dinner.

---

The restaurant was on the terrace, under a vine, with candles on the tables and the sea somewhere below in the dark, making a sound I couldn't quite hear but could feel. We were the only guests. It was late in the season. The waiter brought us a bottle of the local wine without being asked and Jon let him pour it, and we sat across from each other and looked at the menus and didn't say anything for a while.

"I don't know what any of this is," I said.

"I do. I've been reading up."

"Of course you have."

"I'm a planner. You know that."

"I know that."

He ordered for both of us. Seafood, mostly. A plate of cured meats to start, and then pasta with clams, and then a whole fish that came to the table on a trolley and was filleted in front of us by a man who took his job very seriously. And through all of it we talked, properly talked, in a way I hadn't talked to anyone in years.

We talked about Charlene. About the good days and the bad days and the way she'd been lately, which was better, actually, better than last year, better than the year before. We talked about Graham and his knee and his kidney and his skin, and I told Jon things I hadn't told anyone, about the nights I lay awake listening to him breathe and wondering how much longer we had, and Jon listened and didn't try to fix it, which was the thing I liked most about him. He didn't try to fix things. He just sat there and let them be true.

We talked about his work. About the security estimating, which sounded boring and wasn't, the way he described it, all these little puzzles about risk and cost and what people were willing to pay to feel safe. We talked about the house they'd bought and the extension they'd never finished and the garden Charlene had wanted and couldn't manage. We talked about the wedding, twenty-two years ago, and how young everyone had been, and how Jon had been so nervous he'd dropped the ring, and how Charlene had laughed and said it was a sign and her mother had nearly had a fit.

"You were beautiful that day," Jon said. "I remember thinking that."

I looked at him. "I was thirty-eight."

"You were beautiful. You had that blue dress on."

"You remember my dress?"

"I remember everything about that day. It was the day I got a family."

The wine was doing something to me. Not making me drunk, exactly, just softening the edges of things. I looked at him across the table, at the candlelight on his face, at the way he was looking at me, and I felt something move in my chest that I hadn't felt in a very long time.

"We should go up," I said.

"Yes."

We walked back through the little town, because the hotel was only ten minutes away and the night was warm and neither of us wanted to be in that room yet. The streets were narrow and white and quiet. A cat watched us from a wall. Somewhere a television was on, and somewhere else someone was laughing, and the sea kept making its sound down below, and Jon walked beside me with his hands in his pockets and his shoulder very close to mine.

"You know what everyone's going to think," he said.

"About what?"

"About this. Us. Being here."

"They're going to think we're having an affair."

"They are."

"Graham will think it. He'll never say it, but he'll think it. And Charlene will think it, and she'll say it, because she says everything."

"She will."

"And the girls at work, when I tell them I went to Sardinia with my son-in-law, they'll look at me like..."

"Like you're having an affair."

"Exactly."

We walked a bit further. The hotel was in sight now, up the hill, its windows glowing.

"So," Jon said, and stopped. He turned to face me. The street was empty. There was nobody in the world but the two of us and the cat and the sea.

"So," I said.

"We could just... have one."

I didn't say anything. I looked at him, at his face in the dark, at the grey at his temples and the lines around his eyes and the mouth I'd been looking at for twenty-two years without ever once letting myself think about it.

"You've thought about it," he said. "I know you have. I've seen it. At Christmas, in the kitchen. At the hospital that time, when we were waiting for her scan. You looked at me and I looked at you and we both knew."

"Jon."

"I've thought about it since I was twenty-one years old. Since the first time I walked into your house. I stood in your kitchen and you handed me a glass of wine and I thought, I'm going to marry her and I'm going to spend the rest of my life wanting her mother. And I did. Both of those things. I did both of those things."

"Jon."

"I'm not saying we should. I'm saying everyone's going to think it anyway. And I've wanted you for twenty-two years, Ness. I've wanted you in a way I've never wanted anything. And I know you've wanted me. I've seen it. I've felt it. So tell me I'm wrong."

He was standing very close to me now. Close enough that I could smell the wine on his breath and the salt on his skin. Close enough that if I moved my hand even a little it would touch his.

"You're not wrong," I said.

And that was it. That was the whole thing. Twenty-two years of not saying it, and then saying it, and the world not ending. The cat watched us from the wall. The sea kept making its sound. And Jon Wallace, my son-in-law, the husband of my daughter, reached out and took my hand, and his hand was warm and dry and bigger than I'd imagined, and he held it for a long moment and then let it go.

"Not here," he said. "Not in the street."

"No."

"Come on. Let's go up."

We walked the rest of the way in silence, up the hill, through the gate, past the bougainvillea, into the lobby where the girl from reception was now reading a magazine and didn't look up. Into the lift. Up to the fourth floor. Down the corridor. Into the room.

The beds were still three feet apart. He'd done that. I'd watched him do that. And now he walked over to the left-hand bed and took hold of the frame and pulled it back, slowly, until it touched the right-hand bed, until there was no gap at all, until they were one bed again, the way they'd been when we arrived.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

And then I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed and he sat down next to me and neither of us said anything for a while.

"I'm sixty," I said.

"I know how old you are."

"I'm married."

"So am I."

"This is..."

"I know what this is."

"Do you?"

He turned to face me. His knee touched mine. "It's what we both want. It's what we've both wanted for twenty-two years. It's the only thing either of us has ever wanted that we've never let ourselves have. And we're here, and nobody knows us, and nobody's ever going to find out, and in a week we'll go home and nothing will have changed except that we'll know. We'll know what it was. And we'll have that. We'll have that for the rest of our lives."

I thought about Graham, at home in his chair with the ice pack on his knee. I thought about Charlene, in bed, too tired to lift her head. I thought about the life I'd built, the life I'd been building since I was nineteen years old, the whole careful architecture of it, and I thought about how easy it would be to knock it all down and how nobody would ever know.

"Kiss me," I said.

And he did.

---

His mouth was softer than I expected. That was the first thing. Soft, and careful, and unhurried, like a man who'd been thinking about a thing for twenty-two years and wasn't about to rush it now that he had it. He kissed me the way you'd kiss someone you loved, not the way you'd kiss someone you were about to have an affair with, and that undid me more than anything else could have. I put my hand on his face, on the stubble he'd shaved that morning, and he made a sound low in his throat and pulled me closer, and we stayed like that for a long time, just kissing, just learning each other's mouths, while the sea made its sound below and the candles burned down in the restaurant and the girl at reception turned the page of her magazine.

When we finally lay back on the bed, the two beds pushed together, the whole room seemed to tilt. He unbuttoned my blouse slowly, one button at a time, and I watched his hands do it, watched his fingers, watched the way he looked at each new inch of skin like it was something he'd been waiting his whole life to see. And when my blouse was open he stopped and looked at me, really looked, and I felt myself go red in a way I hadn't since I was a girl.

"You're beautiful," he said.

"I'm old."

"You're beautiful."

He kissed my neck. He kissed my collarbone. He kissed the top of my breast, above the lace of my bra, and I arched up into him without meaning to, and he smiled against my skin.

"I've thought about this," he said. "For years. In the car, driving home from your house. In bed, next to Charlene, when she was asleep. I've thought about what you'd look like, what you'd sound like, what you'd taste like."

"And?"

"And I was right."

He unhooked my bra with one hand, which surprised me, and then I stopped being surprised because his mouth was on my breast and his tongue was on my nipple and I couldn't think about anything at all. I held his head, his hair, which was thick and warm, and I pulled him against me and he came, and we kissed again, harder now, and I felt his weight on me and his hand on my hip and his leg between my legs, and I wanted him so badly it was like a hunger, like something I'd been starving for without knowing it.

"Wait," I said.

He stopped. "What?"

"Nothing. Just. Wait."

He lifted himself up on his elbows and looked down at me. His face was flushed. His shirt was open. I could see his chest, the hair on it, the way he was breathing.

"I don't want to rush this," I said.

"We've got a week."

"I know. That's not what I mean. I mean I don't want to rush this. This. Right now. I want to remember it."

He nodded. He lay down beside me and pulled me against him and we lay there for a while, half-undressed, on the two beds pushed together, with the window open and the sea sound coming in, and I felt his heart beating against my back and I thought, this is happening. This is actually happening. I'm sixty years old and I'm lying in a hotel bed in Sardinia with my son-in-law's hand on my stomach and I've never been happier in my life.

"Tell me," he said. "When did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That you wanted me."

I thought about it. I'd thought about it before, many times, in the small hours of the night shift, when there was nothing to do but sit and watch the monitors and think. "The Christmas after the wedding," I said. "You were in the kitchen doing the washing up. Charlene was asleep on the sofa. Graham was asleep in the chair. And you were standing at the sink with your sleeves rolled up and I came in with a stack of plates and you took them from me and your hand touched mine and I felt it. Here." I put my hand on my chest. "Like a shock. And I went upstairs and I sat on the edge of the bed and I thought, no. No, no, no. And then I came back down and we had pudding and nobody knew."

"I knew."

"You didn't."

"I did. You went red. You never go red. And you didn't look at me for the rest of the evening. You looked at everyone except me."

"I did not."

"You did. And I thought, she feels it too. And then I thought, I'm never going to do anything about this. And I never did. For twenty-two years I never did."

"Until now."

"Until now."

He kissed my shoulder. "What about you?" he said. "When did you know about me?"

"The first time. In the kitchen. With the wine. You looked at me and I looked at you and I thought, oh no."

"Oh no?"

"You were twenty-one. You were a child."

"I was a man."

"You were a child. And you were with my daughter. And I thought, this is going to be a problem, and I pushed it down, and I pushed it down for twenty-two years, and now here we are."

"Here we are."

He turned me over to face him. He kissed me slowly, deeply, and I felt his hand move down my stomach to the waistband of my trousers, and he stopped there, waiting, and I nodded, and he undid the button and the zip and slid his hand inside.

I gasped. I couldn't help it. His fingers were warm and sure and they found me already wet, already ready, and he made a sound like a man who'd found something he'd lost.

"God," he said. "You're so..."

"Don't say it."

"I was going to say wet."

"That's worse."

He laughed, quietly, against my mouth. "I was going to say beautiful. You're so beautiful."

"You're a liar."

"I'm not. I've never lied to you. Not once, in twenty-two years."

And it was true. He hadn't. He'd lied to Charlene, probably, about little things, about whether he'd remembered to put the bins out, about whether he'd eaten lunch. But he'd never lied to me. He'd always looked at me with that steady, honest face and told me the truth, even when the truth was hard, even when the truth was that Charlene was worse than we'd thought, or that the treatment wasn't working, or that there was nothing more they could do.

His fingers moved inside me, slow and careful, and I closed my eyes and let myself feel it. It had been so long. So long since anyone had touched me like this, with this kind of attention, this kind of care. Graham and I hadn't made love in three years. It wasn't anyone's fault. His knee, his kidney, his exhaustion, my shifts, the whole grinding machinery of getting old together. We'd stopped, and we hadn't talked about it, and I'd told myself I didn't miss it.

I'd been lying.

"Jon," I said.

"Yes."

"Take your clothes off."

He did. He stood up beside the bed and undressed, and I watched him, and he watched me watching him, and when he was naked he stood there and let me look. He was forty-three. He had a belly, a small one, the kind men get in their forties, and hair on his chest that was going grey, and a scar on his shoulder I'd never seen, and his cock was hard and standing up against his stomach and I looked at it and felt something in my stomach clench.

"You're staring," he said.

"You're worth staring at."

He got back on the bed and lay over me and kissed me, and I felt his whole body against mine, skin to skin, and it was like being wrapped in something warm and alive and entirely new. He was heavier than Graham. He was taller. He smelled different. He kissed different. Everything about him was different, and everything about him was what I wanted.

"I want to be inside you," he said.

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

He reached for his trousers, for his wallet, for a condom, and I watched him roll it on and I thought about how long it had been since I'd seen a man do that, and how strange it was, and how right. And then he was over me again, and his hand was between my legs, and he was pushing into me, slowly, carefully, watching my face the whole time.

I closed my eyes.

"Look at me," he said. "Please. Look at me."

I opened my eyes and looked at him, and he was inside me, all the way inside me, and we were joined in a way I hadn't been joined with anyone in years, and he was looking at me like I was the most important thing in the world, and I started to cry.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Nothing's wrong. I'm just..."

"I know."

He kissed the tears off my face, one by one, and then he started to move, and I wrapped my legs around him and my arms around his neck and held on, and we made love on the two beds pushed together in a hotel room in Sardinia while the sea made its sound below and the moon came up over the water and somewhere in England my husband was asleep in his chair with an ice pack on his knee and my daughter was asleep in her bed and neither of them knew anything at all.

---

Afterwards we lay tangled together, sweating, breathing hard, and he laughed.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing. I just. I can't believe it."

"Neither can I."

"I've wanted that for twenty-two years and it was better than I imagined. It was so much better than I imagined."

I turned my head to look at him. His hair was wet at the temples. His face was flushed. He looked about twenty years younger than he had that morning at the airport.

"We've got six more nights," I said.

"I know."

"What are we going to do?"

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. "We're going to have a holiday," he said. "We're going to swim and eat and drink and lie in the sun. And we're going to do this. Again and again. Every night. Every morning. Whenever we want. And then we're going to go home and we're never going to tell anyone, and we're going to have this for the rest of our lives."

"That's a lot to promise."

"It's not a promise. It's a plan."

I laughed. "You and your plans."

"You love my plans."

"I do."

He kissed me. "Go to sleep," he said. "We've got a long week."

I didn't sleep, not for a while. I lay there with his arm around me and his breath on my neck and I listened to the sea and I thought about what I'd done. I thought about Graham, and Charlene, and the whole careful life I'd built, and I waited for the guilt to come.

It didn't come.

What came instead was a kind of peace, a kind of settling, like something that had been out of joint for twenty-two years had finally clicked back into place. I'd spent my whole life doing the right thing. I'd married young, I'd raised a daughter, I'd nursed my husband through illness after illness, I'd worked nights for thirty years to keep the money coming in. I'd been good. I'd been so good, for so long, and nobody had ever asked me what I wanted.

And now here I was, in a hotel room in Sardinia, with a man who'd wanted me for twenty-two years, and for the first time in my life I was doing something just for me.

I turned over and looked at him. He was asleep. His mouth was open. He looked like a boy.

"Jon," I said, quietly.

He didn't stir.

"I've wanted you too," I said. "For twenty-two years. I just never let myself say it."

He slept on. The sea went on making its sound. And somewhere in England, in a little terraced house in Sussex, my husband turned over in his chair and reached for the ice pack and found it warm, and put it aside, and went back to sleep, and dreamed, perhaps, of the holiday he'd given away.