‘And all the births and marriages of the Delancourt family are in the church records?’ Jon was examining the family tree that Hannah had drawn up.
‘Most of them. I’ll show you. And we can go to the churchyard as well. Our grandmother’s buried there. And guess what her name is.’
Chloe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember Dad ever mentioning it.’
‘Flora Delancourt.’
Jon looked questioningly at Chloe’s smile. ‘My middle name’s Flora.’ The more she thought about it the more she liked having her grandmother’s name. ‘That’s so nice, Hannah. That he called me after her.’
Hannah was grinning too. ‘Yeah. I think so too.’
Jon’s fingers touched Chloe’s arm. She followed his gaze across the road and nodded, turning to Hannah. ‘Can we take flowers? There’s a florist over there, we could get some.’
‘Yeah. I think that would be great.’
* * *
It had been a long day. They had gone to the church, and then Hannah had walked them around the village, more than once if the familiarity of some of the landmarks and houses wasn’t just déjà vu.
After dinner, Jon had gone back to their room, making an excuse to leave them alone to talk. As soon as he was out of earshot Hannah had turned to her.
‘Well?’
It was the question that Chloe had been dreading, because she’d been asking it of herself for the last few days and hadn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. What on earth was she doing?
‘Good question.’
Hannah leaned back in her seat in the deserted sitting room. ‘Which you’re not going to answer. Jon told me that you weren’t an item.’
‘Well, we weren’t at that point. It all just...happened. It’s not serious.’
Hannah pulled a face. ‘Of course it isn’t serious. It’s been...what, three days? Nothing’s serious after three days.’
It felt like a lot longer. It felt as if somehow she’d known Jon her whole life, without actually knowing him. ‘Yes, but this... Neither of us have any intention of making it serious in the future.’
A slow smile spread across Hannah’s face. ‘So...? Friends with benefits?’
‘No!’ Actually, Hannah had hit the nail pretty squarely on the head, even if there were some important differences. Surely friends with benefits didn’t spend most of the day thinking about each other.
‘What, then?’
‘Okay. It’s probably friends with benefits.’ That was the closest she could get to explaining it in a few words, even if it didn’t cover the feeling that Jon had broken her and then re-made her into someone who was slightly different.
‘Shame. He’s nice. He’d be good for you. Jake was a creep, leaving you like that.’
‘What?’ Chloe had never said anything about Jake to Hannah. She’d tried to protect her from the more awkward facts of life, and there had been a few things she hadn’t mentioned.
Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘I know what you were doing. I was only a kid and you kept all that to yourself. It was pretty obvious, though. You got ill and he walked out.’
This had to stop. And Chloe had to be the one to stop it because Hannah needed to release some of the secrets that seemed to be eating her up. She leaned forward, taking Hannah’s hand.
‘There’s a lot we haven’t said to each other, Hannah. But the trouble with secrets is that you hug them close and they come back and smack you in the face.’
Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘Jake smacked you in the face?’
‘Not literally.’ A few months—just a few weeks ago Chloe wouldn’t have been able to bring herself to talk about this. It was an uncomfortable reminder that Jon really had changed her.
‘Look, Hannah. I was very ill, and I still worry about ever being that way again, even if I do know that it’s not going to happen. And I felt so alone when Jake dumped me. I wanted to protect you from all of that but it was wrong of me not to say anything and I’m really sorry for that.’