Impossible to Forget(107)

‘And did you know about Hope and me?’

He nodded. ‘That wasn’t hard to work out. Angie and Romany is hardly a common combination of names. When Hope told me what Angie had asked her to do it was fairly obvious why.’

‘And Hope?’

‘She knows too. I told her. How could I not? We’ve just been waiting for the right moment to tell you.’

‘But how did Mum know that you were in York?’ Romany asked. She was trying to link all the pieces together, but this bit was missing.

‘We think she saw me at Hope’s thirtieth party, but we don’t know for sure. That was the only thing we could think of that would connect all the dots.’

Romany sat and thought for a while as the café hummed around her. Her head was spinning with it all, but she could see that it did fit together.

‘Tiger recognised you, at Christmas,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I thought he might have done. I’ve been waiting for it to come to a head since then. But I wanted you to be in charge, Romany. It had to come from you. It was only when it looked like Tiger wasn’t going to say anything that I gave you a little nudge.’

Romany thought back to the journey home from the fashion shoot. It had been so subtle, his hint. She might easily have missed it.

‘And there you have it,’ he said. ‘The whole sorry tale. I imagine you’ll need some time now, to think it through, decide what you want to do. There’s no pressure from me, Romany. I can be as involved in your life as you like. Or not at all, if that’s what you choose.’

Romany scraped at the remains of the froth in the bottom of her glass with her spoon. She had no idea what she wanted to do, what her future might look like, whether he would be a part of it or not. But she liked him. He had been straight with her, she thought. Told her the truth. And that must count for something.

‘Okay,’ she said.





56


Romany hadn’t told Tiger that she was going to meet Daniel. She hadn’t wanted him to worry and she wasn’t sure she needed the inevitable questioning that would follow. But as she let herself back into the flat, she wished that she had done. She needed someone to talk it all through with, but she couldn’t be bothered with going back to the start, with what she had thought up until today. She just wanted to dive straight in with what had just happened without any preamble or explanation. But Tiger wasn’t great with anything emotional. He would just crack some corny joke or other.

Maybe Maggie would be a better choice of listener. Romany had always found her easy to talk to in the past and she generally said something sensible, even if it wasn’t what Romany wanted to hear. But Maggie was too close to her mum. She would judge Daniel for leaving them at the start and then staying away for all that time. And her anger at him for that action would skew her view. No, Maggie wasn’t the right person. And anyway, she thought, her mum had left Maggie in charge of all things legal. This wasn’t in her brief.

No, her mum had given Hope responsibility for relationships, a decision that had made no sense at the time but now seemed obvious. This was Hope’s moment. But could she talk to Hope about Daniel? She didn’t want to cause any problems between them. It wouldn’t be fair. Then again, Daniel had said that Hope knew the whole story, and it wasn’t as if he had ever been going out with Hope and her mum at the same time.

Romany picked up her phone and messaged her. The reply came almost instantly.

Yes. Meet for a walk on the walls? 6.30 Monk Bar?

Romany texted straight back agreeing to the arrangement.

It was lunchtime, so she had hours to kill until then. Tiger was in the bathroom repotting bedding plants for a window box. The flat had no outside space but he had fashioned a way of securing the boxes to the windowsills and was now using the bath to keep the compost under control whilst he planted red geraniums between some tiny blue flowers that Romany didn’t know the name of. He knelt on the floor, bent over the bath as he worked.

‘They look pretty,’ she said as she stood in the doorway and watched him.

‘Thanks,’ he said without turning round. ‘When I was in Aix-en-Provence picking lavender one year, I loved how all the houses had window boxes with geraniums in them. I know it’s not quite the same here, but I thought they might look nice.’

‘They’re lovely,’ she said. ‘A treat for the neighbours though. We won’t see much of them from in here.’

‘No,’ Tiger agreed. ‘Maybe one day we could think about moving to somewhere with a little garden. I could grow some herbs, maybe a bit of salad.’

He didn’t look at her as he spoke. This was the first time either of them had mentioned what might happen after she finished school. The whole focus of her mum’s letter had been to keep her safe whilst she completed her A levels. She had done that now, and before too long she would be nineteen and hopefully going to Durham to study. What might happen after that hadn’t been on her radar, but she had always known that Tiger would leave. It never occurred to her that he might be thinking about new places for them to live in together.

‘Won’t you want to get back on with your travelling?’ she asked. ‘I thought you had a plan. Guatemala, wasn’t it?’

‘I missed that one,’ he said.

‘But there’ll be others, though. Surely,’ Romany said.