‘Jesse’s here?’ Winnie snapped to attention. It seemed bizarre that he’d been here digging her garden while she’d been in town at the opening of his exhibition.
‘He left a little while ago,’ Angelo said, leading them across the grass to take a closer look at their handiwork. ‘Pretty special, eh?’
Stella looked him right in the eye. ‘I bloody love you, Angelo Vitalis.’
For a moment, he looked as if he might cry, then he pushed his hands through his dark hair and threw Stella over his shoulder instead.
‘You’re going to have to stop doing this,’ Stella laughed, but from the way she gaily lifted her hands to wave goodbye as Angelo strode inside the villa, it probably wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
‘There’s one more thing,’ Seth said, looking unusually uncertain of himself. ‘We’ve invited a few people over tonight, if that’s OK?’
Winnie looked at Frankie, and then shrugged. ‘Fine with me.’ She couldn’t really care less what happened for the rest of the night. She was going upstairs for a soak in the bath, and then she was going to go to sleep and try to forget that today had ever happened.
A few friends turned out to be more than a hundred locals, probably somewhere nearer to two hundred. They came as families and laid their blankets on the beach, and they came as couples with romantic picnics for two. They came as groups of teenagers, and they came as elderly friends who set up sturdy deckchairs in the sand and drank gin from silver hip flasks. Panos had managed to rustle up amplifiers and basic equipment from the high school’s music department, and as dusk settled, Seth tapped the microphone to get everyone’s attention.
Up in her room at that same moment, Winnie regretted saying she didn’t mind Seth’s plan to have a few people over, and rolled off her bed to shuffle to the balcony and have a look at what all the noise was about.
‘What the …’ she muttered, trying to take in the scale of what was happening down there. The beach was alive with flickering candle lanterns and crowds of people picnicking, and Seth, a guitar slung over his shoulder, tapped the microphone and greeted everyone loudly in really quite terrible Greek.
Then he handed over the microphone to Angelo, along with a letter of apology to translate on behalf of Mikey and the rest of the band. It explained that the three Englishwomen had done nothing wrong but had accepted the blame anyway, and it asked them to find it in their hearts to forgive them because the women loved the island and wanted to stay for as long as they were welcome.
The crowd applauded and wolf-whistled, and then broke into loud cheers when Seth gave Jamie Harte the nod to strike up the opening notes to one of the band’s biggest worldwide hits.
Winnie didn’t realise that Frankie and Stella had come to find her until they stood either side of her on the balcony, and for a long, wonderful minute they stood hand in hand and gazed out over the impromptu starlit concert happening right there on their beach.
‘Come down?’ Frankie asked.
Winnie nodded, squeezing Stella’s hand. She’d realised lying in the bath that her time on the island had finally come to its natural end today. She couldn’t stay here and be Jesse’s neighbour without wishing she was his girl, and she could never be his girl because it was never her that he truly wanted. She understood now why he’d pushed her away and then pulled her close again, why he was sometimes so agonised by their relationship; because it was never really about her at all. Winnie thought she’d glimpsed the future in Jesse, but in her he saw only echoes of the past.
It was time to go home, and she could think of no more fitting way to draw the curtain on her brilliant Greek adventure than to head downstairs and join the party.
Frankie flicked the switches beneath the beach bar and the fairy lights wound around its roof struts flickered into life, ramshackle and charming, perfectly in keeping with the villa. They’d taken it in turns manning the bar to look after the locals who hadn’t come prepared with their own gin, and to hand out ice lollies to the kids, and finally there was enough of a lull for Frankie to slide onto one of the tall bar stools and watch the show as Seth and Jamie slowed things down.
‘Something new now, if you’ll indulge us. This one’s called “Bloody Love”.’ Seth turned to catch Frankie’s eye momentarily before he started to sing the song he’d written for her, a song about a pixie girl with tiger-striped eyes.
‘They’re not that bad after all.’ Gav came to stand beside her stool, and Frankie found herself winding her arm around his waist and leaning her head on his shoulder. He felt achingly familiar and yet alien, solid, dependable and yet newly sexy too, especially since their unexpected afternoon liaison. Her body reacted to his nearness, and when she looked up at him she found him gazing down at her in a way that made her heartbeat quicken.
‘Thank you for coming here,’ she said. ‘It was brave.’
‘Thank you for making me welcome,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’ He stopped to look over at the band. ‘I’m no rock star, Frank. I’m a normal bloke who’s good at DIY and gardening, and I like a beer and the crossword. But I’m not the same man I used to be, either.’
‘No, I think you’ve more than shown me that much,’ she said, unaccountably nervous of the man she’d lived more than half her life with. ‘I’m not that woman, either. We both made a lot of mistakes over the years, Gav.’ She was distracted by the feel of his fingers wrapping around her upper arm, and by the delicious shiver of anticipation that shimmered down her spine when he skimmed the back of his fingers down to her elbow.
‘I’m out of practice,’ he said, looking for all the world like the nervous boy she remembered from their teens.
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But that’s easily remedied, isn’t it?’
He cupped her cheek and lowered his face to hers, kissing her in the intense, territorial way she’d needed him to kiss her for years.
‘I love you very much, Frankie,’ he said, holding her close. ‘I always have and I always will.’
Frankie ran her hand down his back as his familiar aftershave wafted around her. She was deeply affected by his words. Sleeping with Gav had been tender and emotional, but wondrous and incredibly sexy too. They’d talked some more afterwards, quiet, hushed pillow talk; shared memories and soothed hearts. She understood now that their relationship had been lying dormant rather than disappeared, and that although they’d neglected each other, it wasn’t beyond repair. Theirs was a love story without end, and right now she felt like her sixteen-year-old self again, dizzy and breathless for the handsome man who’d just handed her his heart, if she wanted it.
Looking up into his beautiful eyes, she curled her fingers around the back of his neck.
‘I love you too, Gav. I really, really do.’
A little before midnight, Winnie sat alone, tucked into the bench alcove on the edge of the terrace with her knees pulled into her chest. She smiled at the sight of Angelo and Stella necking over by the bushes, and her heart turned over when she spotted Frankie and Gav close together at the beach bar. As it should be, she realised, watching them. Some people were just meant to be together, even if they needed the extreme push of divorce and foreign adventures to make them see that they’d had what they needed under their noses all along.