Reunited with His Long-Lost Nurse

‘Didn’t you say that your grandmother used to get you to read to her? And that she taught you to cook?’

He didn’t even know where the question had come from—possibly from talk of her family—and by the look on Talia’s face, she hadn’t expected him to remember either.

Even so, her expression of surprise quickly gave way to fondness.

‘She still teaches me to cook.’ Talia smiled. ‘She says that no one can make that kitchen sing the way that she can. And she’s right.’

‘I seem to recall you cooked some incredible food when we were together,’ he couldn’t help himself saying.

‘Well, if you meet Gramma, don’t tell her that.’ Talia chuckled. ‘She’ll probably try to beat you with the soft end of a sweeping brush. Actually, one look at you and she probably wouldn’t. Anyway, she used to let me sit on a stool and try the batter. Though she always said that a good gramma lets her grandchild lick the beaters, but a great gramma turns them off first.’

‘My grandmother taught me how to bake too.’ The detail slipped out without warning, and Talia almost tripped over the cobbles in her shock.

He caught her, wondering what the hell he was doing.

‘Did she?’ Talia asked, and he knew she was trying to sound casual.

Another time it might have made him smile but he was too busy trying to silence his uncharacteristic thoughts. They were still moving along the narrow streets but their pace had slowed considerably.

‘Her favourite was walnut cake.’

‘You made me that once,’ Talia gasped.

‘Did I?’ He shrugged as though he didn’t recall it but the memory was shamefully clear.

It had been near the end of their relationship, about a week before she’d walked out without a word.

‘You just never mentioned who taught you how to bake it.’

He could see that she didn’t mean to push him. She looked almost thrilled and terrified all at once and he could understand why.

Three years ago there was no way he would have ever confided anything so personal to her. To anyone. He’d barely been able to show her the box that contained painful photos of his mother. Certainly nothing else it kept so secure inside it.

He didn’t know why he was opening up now. It was as though he couldn’t shut himself up.

He could only put it down to the odd spell this enchanting island had been weaving around him ever since that first, stunning view from his plane.

They popped out of the warren of streets just by a taxi office, the taxi itself fortuitously parked outside.

‘What else do you remember about her?’ Talia pressed gently as they slid into the battered back seat.

‘I don’t remember her that well,’ Liam heard himself say, though he couldn’t have identified where the memories ever came from.

They were always little more than fuzzy images swimming in the recesses of his brain. Or a sparse jigsaw box of partial pictures. Snippets of conversation.

‘Her name was Gloria, but people called her Glory.’ Something new swam past his consciousness and he grasped at it. ‘I think I called her... Glammy?’

He fought to focus but it was like dredging a memory up from a muddy, silty riverbed. It might have had form, but he couldn’t quite be sure. He thought back to Talia and her grandmother, and something else clicked awkwardly into place.

‘I think... I think I remember her giving me the beaters when she’d mixed something.’

‘So she was kind?’ Talia asked cautiously.

A flash of a silver-grey bob laughing over him, perhaps? Gnarled hands smoothing hair from his forehead? Fleeting, and hazy. Maybe not even real at all.

And yet...he’d always felt as though they were. And now he found that he wanted to say that he thought she had loved him. But how could he know that?

‘I think so. I used to think she loved me. But then...she went away.’