The Light Over London(17)

She tugged her hand away, breaking the connection. She’d just untangled her life from Simon’s. There was no room in her life for another man. Not yet.

Liam nodded to her cottage. “Isn’t number thirty-three just next door?” His eyes widened. “The van. It must be blocking your drive.”

“It is a little, yes,” she said.

“I’m so sorry.” He starting patting his jeans pockets, a lock of his hair falling over his forehead as he looked down. “I have the keys around somewhere.”

With a sigh, Leah pulled a set of keys from the pocket of her zip-up jacket. “These?”

He grinned and snatched them out of her hand. “I’d be lost without you.”

“You usually are!” Leah shouted, as he ran down the path and through the garden gate. She smiled at Cara as Rufus settled at her feet with a huff. “The stereotype about absentminded professors is sometimes so true it’s comical.”

They watched with Rufus as Liam started up the van and backed it into the street before pulling into the slope of his drive behind a little blue Ford that was already parked there.

“There you are,” he called as he climbed out and strode up the path to join them again.

“How long have you lived in Barlow?” Leah asked Cara.

“I went to university here, but I was in London for years. I just moved back over the summer,” she said.

“So I’m not the only one new to the neighborhood,” said Liam.

“Maybe you two should have dinner. To celebrate your moves,” said Leah, glancing between them.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.” The words rushed out of Cara’s mouth before she could think of how rude they made her sound. Quickly she said, “It’s just that I’m still settling into my new job and we already have a project that’s going to be keeping me at work late. I don’t know when I’ll be free.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” said Leah with a sigh, and Cara couldn’t help but feel that she’d somehow disappointed the woman.

Liam just shrugged. “I can understand. Lectures start in two weeks, but I’m sure we’ll see each other around. We are neighbors, after all.”

They said a quick goodbye and then Leah gave Rufus’s leash a tug. “Come back inside, you wonderful pain of a dog.”

Cara watched as Liam laughed and brother, sister, and dog disappeared into the house.

She returned to her car and pulled the wheel hard to the left, swinging into her drive and parking. Reaching into the back seat, she grabbed the biscuit tin from the old Barlow University sweatshirt she’d wrapped it in. When she looked up, she saw Liam and Rufus standing at the bay window. He raised a hand in a little wave. She smiled tightly, ducked her head, and hurried into her house.



The tart she’d baked for her dinner had turned out beautifully: it was golden brown, flaky perfection. Soft goat cheese melted around thick lardons of bacon nestled in a bed of sweet leeks. This was the sort of self-care she liked. Taking the time to cook for herself properly felt like the ultimate indulgence, a declaration that it didn’t matter whether Cara ate alone or not. She was worth the effort.

She picked up her half-empty glass of minerally Spanish wine and pushed back from her kitchen table to wrap up the rest of the tart for the next day. The Old Vicarage was just down the road from a park, and she planned to bring her lunch and eat it on one of the benches she’d spotted.

With the leftovers in the fridge, she set about washing the dishes and lining them up neatly in the bamboo rack by the sink. There wasn’t a dishwasher in the cottage’s tiny kitchen—one of the landlord’s eccentricities, the leasing agent had told her—but she liked the meditative practice of dipping, scrubbing, and rinsing.

Simon hadn’t understood that.

“Why don’t you use the dishwasher?” he would ask on the rare weekday evenings their jobs allowed them to be together.

“I like cleaning up,” she’d say. “I started the meal and now I’m clearing it away. It brings everything full circle.”

He would grunt at that and go back to sipping his port. She would smile at how much her refusal unsettled him; they could afford a Miele dishwasher, so she should use it. But she wasn’t Simon. She couldn’t make herself care about that sort of thing.

From the day they’d left uni, Simon had been obsessed with keeping up with his friends. While Cara had grown up comfortably affluent in a big, five-bedroom brick house in Hans Place, he’d come from a modest suburb of Manchester and was eager to shake off all the middle-class markers of his childhood. He’d worked hard to reinvent himself, making the right friends at uni and taking the right job in the right industry. He’d wanted the big house in Chiswick, an expensive neighborhood of West London, because it was where his friend Sam lived. He’d become a member of the same club as Theo and Jasper, paying the exorbitant fees to join. He’d bought a Porsche 911 for himself and a Lexus SUV for Cara—even though she hated London traffic and rarely drove—because Edward had mentioned he was buying one for his wife. One summer, Simon had even tried to take up polo after Claude had invited him to play, but he was nothing more than an average rider and resigned himself to drinking champagne on the sidelines instead.

Now Cara suspected she’d just been another marker of status—the right kind of girl with the right kind of background—but she couldn’t deny having been a bit dazzled by Simon from the moment they’d met in a Barlow pub as students. Smart and charming, he’d painted a picture of his own brilliance so seductive she’d believed it for years. When his redundancy came, seemingly out of nowhere, she’d assured herself he would find another job at another hedge fund quickly. But weeks had stretched into months and he’d stopped boasting of the interviews he was setting up. The headhunters he was certain would call had never materialized. He’d spend nights out, telling her that he was networking, but networking shouldn’t have ended so often with him snoring through his drunkenness on the sofa.