“Happy birthday, Arthur,” she said into her microphone. “I love you.” She set the mike back in its stand, accepted the lead singer’s courtly hand down the stairs, and the entire crowd was standing, applauding her.

  She paid them no attention, just walked straight through the room, bent to put her arm around the old man’s neck, and kissed his cheek, which was wet with tears. Iain hadn’t seen him cry since his wife’s funeral, but he was crying now. He had his arm around Nina’s waist, and her eyes were shining as well.

  “Little witch,” Arthur said at last, trying to frown. “You’ve made me cry in front of my mates.”

  “Yep,” she said. “Once every eighty-five years, need it or not.” She kissed him once more, then stood, sighed, and said, “I’m going to fix my face. Be right back.”

  She walked off, and Iain sat there and tried to bring himself back under control, and failed entirely. And then she came out again, slid into her seat beside him, her arm brushing his, and he knew that nothing had changed, and everything had. She’d said no, it didn’t matter how much he would’ve given to turn that into “yes,” and it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  A week ago, he’d been sure he’d never love again. A day ago, he’d have said the situation was impossible. And tonight, he knew that it didn’t matter how impossible it was, or how hopeless, either. He’d already started. He was already gone.

  Our Life

  Graeme sat, silent as usual, and watched. He watched Nina with his father-in-law, watched Carmella, sitting kitty-corner to him instead of beside him the way she should have been, with a smile on her face that looked pained, like the way she’d smiled after their babies had been born. Like she was happy, but it hurt. He watched Iain, and thought about what his son had said earlier, in the kitchen of the cottage. About how Iain had been able to talk to a woman he’d met a week earlier, had been able to say the kind of thing to her in front of his parents and his granddad that Graeme himself had so much trouble saying, even to his wife, even when they were alone.

  What was he going to do? He didn’t know. But he knew he had to do something.

  It wasn’t long before the band was taking another break and Arthur was hauling himself to his feet, saying, “I don’t care if all of you stay, but I’m going home. Not a bad birthday,” he told the group. “Not bad at all.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Nina said, and Carmella stood, too.

  “You stay here,” Arthur told Nina. “Dance with Iain.” Indeed, an intrepid few couples had eventually stood and taken the floor. They’d be doing it again, too, now that the evening was well advanced and the alcohol was flowing.

  Nina laughed, her teasing gaze landing on Iain. “Somehow, I doubt he’s a big dancer.”

  “A big one,” he said, “but not a good one. But I reckon you could talk me into it.”

  “Nope,” she said lightly. “Not safe.” And left everybody there to wonder what that meant. She tucked her hand through Arthur’s arm, smiled around the assembled faces, and said, “Nice to meet you all.”

  Iain and Graeme went with them, of course. No point in staying. Iain was hanging back, walking with Nina and Arthur, to nobody’s surprise, and Graeme looked at his wife.

  If Nina was beautiful tonight, so was Carmella. Still slim, still strong, her eyes still as dark and full of life as they had been the evening he’d met her. Beautiful, and as remote as a star.

  “You doing all right?” he asked her.

  She looked at him, and the moon shed enough light for him to see how somber her expression was. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Oh.” He said it, then. “That fella. In Nelson. Is it something you do together, then? Would I ring up?”

  Her face was twisting. She was looking away, and he thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that she was going to say that it was over. That she’d decided, and that the answer was, “No.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “You do it together. If you do it.”

  “I’ll ring up, then.” He wanted to say more. He wanted to say how he’d felt when he’d seen Arthur tonight, had seen the tears on his cheeks. When Graeme had finally realized exactly what it would mean to lose the woman he loved, and how close he was to doing it. And that however hard it would be to do this, losing her would be worse, so he had no choice. But he didn’t say it, of course.

  “Yes,” she said. “You need to be the one to do it. I need to know you’ll make the effort. This can’t be something I do, and that you go along with. Not this time. I have to . . . I have to take a stand here. All you have to do is say one thing, to reach out, and you make me want to come back, to say it’s all right. But I can’t, not unless it’ll be better, not if I’m still going to wonder whether you really want me. I know you’ll think this is too much to say, but I . . . I was dying inside.”

  He was so uncomfortable, all he wanted was to turn away from her, to walk away. But if he pulled himself together, he might just pull himself apart from her for good, and he knew it. “If you can’t come back yet, you can’t,” he said instead. “I’ll ring up. First thing tomorrow.”

  She had a hand up to her cheek, was dashing the tears away, and he wanted to hold her, but he wasn’t sure what the rules were.

  The hell with the rules, something from outside him seemed to shout. They’re not working. So he put a hand on her shoulder, and when she turned to him, he pulled her into his arms.

  The shock of it. So familiar, and so lost to him. He hadn’t held her, really held her, for months.

  She never cried, but she was crying now. He could feel the tears, hot and wet, seeping through his shirt. Surely, that meant she still cared.

  She never cried, no, and he never talked, but he was talking anyway. “Don’t leave me.” His voice was rough, not the way it ought to be, the words ripped from some spot deep inside him. “Please. Give it a go first, at least. Let me try.”

  She was crying harder, and he rubbed his hand over her slender back, tightened his arms around her, and rocked from side to side with her until, at last, she was pulling back, brushing the tears away again, and saying, her voice choked, “Tell me, then. Tomorrow. When. And I’ll go with you.” Her eyes were searching his face now. “You’ll try? You really will?”

  “Don’t you know,” he found himself saying, “that I’d do anything for you? Don’t you know that?”

  “No,” she whispered. “No. I don’t.”

  “Reckon I’d better tell you, then. Come home with me. Please. Let me . . . let’s start again.”

  She shook her head, her lips trembling. “No. I’m sorry, Graeme. But no. I need us to have some new . . . rules. Some tools. I need to know they’re there to help. I feel . . . so battered. If we slip back, I don’t think I can take it.”

  “You want me to win you again,” he said slowly.

  “That sounds like a game. It’s not a game. It’s our life.”

  “Yeh,” he said. “I know it is. Just trying to understand the rules, is all. I’ll ring up, then. Eight o’clock, I’ll ring up, and if he doesn’t answer, I’ll keep on doing it until he does.”

  “All right,” she said. They were at the track leading down to the house, and she headed down it ahead of him and, before he could say more, she was saying, “Good night,” and ducking into the cottage.

  He walked to the house, and he was still alone. But he wasn’t hopeless. Not anymore.

  Eight o’clock. He’d do it if it killed him. Because if he didn’t do it . . . it would kill him.

  Closing the Chapter

  Matthias’s head shot up at the knock on his study door. “Enter.”

  Raoul came in silently, as always, and stood looking down at him. Something about his gaze was unsettling. Really, the man was almost creepy. Matthias frowned. “What?”

  “I assume you still want to know,” Raoul said. “We’ve found her.”

  “A bit late, aren’t you? Four days ago would have been better. Not two days after my wedding day.”

  Raoul didn’t answer, just stared at him. Did he never blink? “Do you want to know?”

  “Of course I want to know. Where is she?”

  “New Zealand. The South Island.”

  Matthias shook his head as if to clear it. He hadn’t been drinking; that wasn’t the reason. It simply made no sense. “Why?”

  “She was hiding, she said.”

  “From what? From me?”

  Raoul shrugged, the tiniest movement of his shoulders in the dark suit he seemed to sleep in, and Matthias felt another flash of irritation. “You wanted to know,” his chief of staff said. “Now you know. I assume that closes the chapter.”

  “You assume wrong.” Matthias had swung out of his chair. Now, he began to pace. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Try Me

  Carmella had been afraid to believe that Graeme would actually do it. But at ten o’clock the next morning, he walked up to the bookings desk during a brief break in the action and said, “Today at five.”

  “Today?”

  “Yeh. I said it was an emergency. Had a cancellation, he said.”

  “Oh.” Now that it was here, she was terrified. “Uh . . . I wasn’t expecting that.”

  Graeme looked a little sheepish. “I may also have said I’d pay double.”

  Now, she wasn’t just surprised. She was gobsmacked. “Scotland’s going to disown you,” she managed to say.

  She got a gruff bark of laughter for that. “No worries. He said it didn’t work that way, so I wasn’t put to the test. But I would’ve done it.”

  “We’ll have to get somebody to cover.” She was already planning. “Have to leave at four-thirty.”

  “Already done. You told me it was down to me,” he said when she looked shocked again. “I assumed you meant it.”

  A young couple walked through the door then, and Graeme nodded at her, headed to the back, and Carmella pasted a smile onto her face and asked, “Can I help you?” even as she tried to calm her heart. And her hopes.

  When they were in the car, though, she couldn’t think of what to say. Graeme was her husband, but she felt as awkward as if it were their first date. She started with some chat about the business, and Graeme glanced across at her and said, “D’you really want to talk about that?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I’m nervous.”

  He put out a hand and gripped hers briefly before placing it back on the steering wheel. After a moment, he asked, “D’you remember when I drove you to the hospital to have Vanessa?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Never been more scared,” he said.

  “I didn’t know that.” She couldn’t think what else to say.

  “I put your seat back, I remember that. Trying to get you comfortable. Got you a pillow. And then I drove, and I thought—I was so afraid something would go wrong. That I’d lose you, somehow. Or that everything would change, that something would . . . happen.” He shook his dark head, his faintly lined face still so tough and strong. “Can’t even tell you what I thought.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “And today feels exactly the same.”

  “It . . . does?”

  He glanced across at her before taking a curve in the road. “You said I should talk. So I thought I’d tell you.”

  “Guess you’d better not have a smash on the way, then,” she said, her heart beating now with something new. With hope.

  “Reckon you’re right.”

  When they were in the waiting room in a nondescript building on a quiet Nelson street, though, she could nearly feel Graeme stiffening again. Walking into the suite had felt momentous, even though, to her relief, the sign by the door didn’t proclaim the word “Therapy.” If it had, she suspected Graeme might have bolted. She wasn’t too far off it herself.

  When the door to the inner office opened, the man on the other side didn’t look anything like she’d expected. She’d been thinking he’d be young, in a suit, maybe. Instead, he was their age, tall, with a bit of a belly, in khaki pants and a knit shirt, his hands as broad as his smile wasn’t. He looked, in fact, like a Kiwi bloke, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good thing from Graeme’s point of view or not.

  “Come in,” he said. “And don’t worry. I don’t bite much.”

  She laughed nervously, and Graeme, to her shock, took her hand and squeezed it again.

  Inside the simple office, though, set up with two comfortable chairs and a couch, Graeme looked dubious again. “Tell me I’m not lying on that,” he said.

  “Generally, people sit on it,” Melvin said. “But do whatever you like.”

  They sat, and Melvin said, “You’re both here. Congratulations. That’s the hardest part out of the way. Whose idea to come?”

  “Mine,” Carmella said.

  “And what did you say?” Melvin asked Graeme.

  “Said no,” he answered.

  “Uh-huh,” Melvin said. “Why?”

  And it went on from there. Getting there might have been the hardest part, but the rest of it wasn’t easy, either. The background information wasn’t so bad, but then it got tougher. When Melvin asked Graeme, “So you met when you were twenty-four and Carmella was twenty-one, at a dance. That’s a long time ago.”

  “Yeh,” Graeme said.

  “What did you think, that first night?” Melvin asked. “That first time? About her?”

  Graeme looked down at his hands so long, Carmella didn’t think he was going to answer.

  “Thought she was beautiful,” he finally said.

  “Why don’t you tell her?” Melvin asked.

  “Uh . . .” Graeme looked pained. “Now?”

  “Now,” Melvin said. “How are you going to tell her how you feel now if you can’t tell her what you felt then? We could call it easing up to it, maybe. Or you could ask yourself if you want her back in your house.”

  “Yes,” Graeme said instantly.

  Melvin didn’t answer, just looked at him, and Graeme sighed, scratched the back at his head, and glanced at Carmella. He was sitting a foot away from her. She’d sat in the middle, and he’d sat at the edge, and maybe that said too much.

  “I thought you . . .” His mouth twisted a bit, and he was looking down at his hands, studying his nails. “That you were beautiful. Your eyes, and your smile. So . . . alive, somehow. More than other girls. Couldn’t believe you were smiling at me. I actually checked behind me to make sure it wasn’t some other bloke. I was rough as guts. Tradie,” he told Melvin.

  “Tell her,” Melvin said quietly.

  “Yeh,” Graeme said, glancing at her again, while she sat and tried not to hold her breath. “I was a tradie, but you know that. Barely had my electrician’s license, and you were finishing Uni and all. And then I got up my courage, asked you to dinner, and you said yes.”

  “Want to know why I did?” she asked him.

  He nodded once, and she told him. “Because you were big and strong. And because you were gentle. Because you danced with me and didn’t try to grab me. Because you looked rough, maybe, but you weren’t rough. You want to know a secret?”

  “Uh . . .” Graeme was glancing at Melvin again, and the other man raised both hands and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Remember how we went on those three dinners, and then I asked you to come for a picnic on the beach?” she asked. “Did you ever wonder why I did that?”

  “Because you wanted to say thanks for the dinners,” he said. “I remember.”

  “No,” she said. “Because I wanted to wear my togs, and to see you in yours. I thought if I did that, you’d finally do more than kiss me goodnight. And you did.”

  Graeme was lost for words. Melvin said, “Why don’t you tell Graeme why you’re here today, Carmella?”

  She looked at her husband sitting there, so big and so lost, and her heart ached for him. She forgot the silences and the little comments, just for a moment, and remembered the man who’d put the pillow behind her when he’d driven her to the hospital to have Vanessa, who’d held her hand through it all. And who’d cried when he’d seen his daughter born. The way he’d cradled their little girl in those big hands. The ones that could fix anything, no matter how impossibly delicate it was. Maybe even this.

  If she wasn’t willing to take a risk, what was the point? “I’m here,” she told him, “because nothing matters more to me than you. And I don’t mean, ‘Nothing matters more than my marriage.’ I mean, ‘than you.’ I fell in love with you for good that night, after the beach. With how strong and fierce you were with me, and how careful and tender, too. I know that man’s still in there, and I want him back.”

  He wasn’t answering at all now, and the seconds ticked by until Melvin finally said, “Graeme? Want to answer Carmella?”

  “Uh . . .” he said. “I want her back as well.”

  “Tell her,” Melvin reminded him.

  Graeme turned, looked at her, and said, “I want you back as well.”

  “That’s a good start,” Melvin said. “And it’s our time about up. But you’re not in a bad spot at all, are you?”

  “Not the worst you’ve seen, then,” Graeme said, back to gruff again.

  “Oh, no,” Melvin said. “Not by a long chalk. Looks to me like you remember what you felt for each other at the start, and if you’re here at all? You’ve got the desire to get it back. I know that, because this wasn’t easy for you. But I’d like to see you twice a week. Knock this thing out, get you back on track, that would be the idea. If you need more after that, you can come back for a tune-up now and then.”

  “The business—” Graeme said.

  “Ah, yes. The business.” Melvin sat back and looked at him. “More important than this, or less?”

  “Less.”

  “Well, then,” Melvin said, cheerful once more, “shall we say Thursday, same time? And then next Tuesday and Thursday as well?”

  “So does this mean she comes home?” Graeme demanded.

  “Asking the wrong person, aren’t you,” Melvin said.

  Graeme looked at Carmella, and she said, “No. Not yet.” She saw him stiffen and said, “I don’t feel ready.”