She expected him to be waiting in the front garden for her when she left an hour later and had nerved herself for the inevitable confrontation, but as she stepped out of the small front door only green vegetation and gently waving trees greeted her troubled eyes. It was a beautiful day. She glanced up into the pure blue sky, washed clean of even the faintest trace of a cloud, as the breeze lifted her hair into a silky cloud round her cheeks, feeling the sun warm on her upturned face. Some wallflowers, their velvet petals bright and glowing, wafted their heady perfume into the thick warm air and a group of tiny sparrows flew by in a noisy game of tag. She was alive. She shut her eyes with the intensity of the thought. And for years yet she would be able to walk and talk and see normally, travel, explore the far corners of the world before it was too late.
But she couldn’t have Blade. Suddenly all the rest seemed infinitely pointless, a dark grey cloud descending with abrupt coldness over the colour and warmth of the day before she forced the depression away with rock-like determination. After the first week, when she had wallowed in stunned shock and morbid self-pity, she had made a vow to herself as she clawed up through the blackness that had enveloped her since Sandra’s venom had poisoned the very air she breathed. No more indulgent self-pity, no more crying for the moon and no more tears. Well, the last part had been impossible to keep but the rest was up to her.
‘You’re no wimp,’ she told herself out loud as she walked quickly down the lane, the gently rustling branches overhead an arched canopy of green, ‘and you’re not going to waste an hour, a minute of precious time with pathetic whinging. OK?’ She continued, in fits and starts, to lecture herself all the way to the small restaurant and amazingly, by the time she served her first customer, the world was in place once more. And Blade was still around for the moment. She nodded to herself slowly. How she would cope once he left, really left, she didn’t know, but for the present he was here. She could hear his voice, catch a glimpse of him now and again and that had to be enough.
The unusually warm weather for late May brought a host of tourists into the restaurant and the small dining-room was still packed at closing time. It was well after twelve before the last customer left and Amy was free to leave, and the effort to put one foot in front of the other was fast becoming impossible. The emotion of the morning coupled with sheer hard work had drained all her natural resources and she found herself dreading the short walk home. It was with a mixture of emotions then that she saw Blade’s car parked directly outside as she stepped out into the dark sleepy street.
‘Amy?’ His voice was soft and deep as he called through the open window before sliding out and coming to meet her. ‘You look all-in.’ As she looked at him it came to her, in a flood of self-awareness, that she had been desperately hoping he might meet her and the knowledge made her voice unnecessarily sharp as she stared up into his waiting face, his solid strength and male bulk poignantly attractive.
‘I thought we’d agreed you would leave me alone,’ she said tightly, dropping her eyes from his as she moved to turn away. ‘I don’t want you to meet me, Blade, you—’
‘Just a minute.’ All the tenderness had vanished and his voice was now as cold as ice. ‘I have something to tell you—’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’ She didn’t know why she was behaving so badly, but found it impossible to stop. ‘How many times—’
‘Will you shut up, woman!’ He was shouting and he never shouted, she thought with a small detached part of her brain that seemed to be looking on as an interested spectator. ‘Give me strength …’ He raked back his shock of hair angrily and took a deep breath before he spoke again. ‘It’s Mrs Cox.’
‘Mrs Cox?’ she repeated vacantly. ‘I don’t understand?’
‘Apparently her sister has been taken ill; a neighbour phoned this afternoon. Bronchitis that turned into pneumonia and now there are further complications. She’s in a bad way, I understand.’
‘Oh, no.’ She stared at him helplessly. ‘But her sister’s all the family she’s got.’ Mrs Cox’s husband had died in the war before they had had any children, and she had preferred to live as a widow in the tiny village in which she had been born rather than join her sister and her elderly husband in Scotland. Since the death of her sister’s husband a few months before the two had become even closer, exchanging letters and phone calls nearly every day.
‘She left on the afternoon train,’ Blade continued more quietly, ‘and I promised her I’d keep an eye on the house—and you,’ he finished grimly. ‘Now get in the car and stop behaving like a bad actress in a third-rate movie.’