Page 88 of The Cornish Cream Tea Holiday
‘You did – you do. Everything that’s happened between us, everything I said, was real.’ But in that moment, she didn’t know how to prove it to him. She thought she was getting some of the anger he wanted to aim at Damien, too. It wasn’t lost on her that part of the reason he was questioning her was because she’d been lying to Esme, deceiving her best friend, and that was exactly what Damien had done to him. It was a mess that she had created, and right now she didn’t know how to fix it. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I can see how wrong I’ve got this. But I like you a lot, Ben. I want to be with you.’
‘For four more days?’ He sounded weary, now, his shoulders slumped as he leaned against the cupboard opposite her.
‘You know I want it to be a lot longer than that. Would you just—’
‘Can you go now, please?’ He’d been looking at the floor, but with his plea he raised his head. She saw so many things in his expression: hurt and anger, sadness, but not indifference. For a man who often came across as impassive,his emotions tucked firmly away, she didn’t think he could quite manage it when it came to her.
‘OK,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m going to leave, but you know where I am. I don’t want things to end like this. I care about you, Ben.’ She walked slowly out of the room, feeling his eyes on her. It was an effort not to turn around, but she managed it. She stroked Scooter, then opened the front door, stepped outside, and closed it gently behind her.
She stood on Ben’s doorstep and stared at the sky, the blue starting to deepen as the sun slunk through it, heading for the flat line of the horizon. The view here, regardless of the weather, was always breathtaking, somehow timeless and short-lived all at once. She didn’t want to go back to her cottage, where Esme and Alex would be waiting to hear how it had gone. She wanted to hold onto the image of Ben in his unfinished kitchen, to work out how she could fix things between them.
She understood why he was upset, but she wasn’t going to give up. All their conversation had done was confirm that she didn’t want to lose him, that she cared about him even more than she had realised. She would give him space, then try again.
Eventually, she turned away from the mesmerising seascape. The one good thing that had come out of this disastrous day, was that it had forced her hand with Esme; there were no secrets left between them, now. What she had to do next was get Anisha’s number from Meredith, so she could ask about the possibility of renting the Old Post House. Her stomach churned with a mixture of discomfort and anticipation.
It felt like all the threads of her life were tied up in knots at her core, and she was going to have to work slowly andmethodically to undo them. She hoped her thread with Ben wasn’t tangled to the point where she would have to admit defeat and snip it, rather than untie it and pull him close to her again.
