Page 34 of The First Time I Saw You
‘I’ve got nothing on my plate. My plate is empty.’
‘But if she left and she hasn’t been in touch, Samuel . . .’ She puts the straw in my mouth. ‘It’s, well, it’s a pretty strong message that she’s, well—’
‘Well what?’ I ask out of the corner of my mouth.
‘Not interested.’
‘Of course she’s interested,’ I say automatically, although the way that Sophie has managed to completely disappear makes me wonder how she’ll react when I find her. ‘Just look at me! What woman wouldn’t be interested?’ Sarah laughs at this and slides into the tunnel walls – segments of her red hair lick out of the tunnel like fire before she reappears holding her phone.
‘Oh, hold on, don’t forget your glasses now. Geek chic, I think it’s called.’ She slides the frame on to the bridge of my nose and steps back, taking a few shots, laughing at my expense as she does. Crouching in front of me, Sarah shows me the photo. The gauze from my burns has now been removed and what remains is a purplish red mark which looks like a giant penis-shaped birthmark across the right side of my face. My leg is still in plaster, and to top this look off, I’m sporting a pair of thick glasses that would best be suited to my Uncle Pete – and let me tell you, Uncle Pete is not an attractive man.
‘I take your point. Perhaps it would be wise to wait a bit until I declare my undying love?’
‘Undying love?’ Sarah’s amusement fades and she raises an eyebrow at me. ‘You’re not even joking, are you?’
‘No. I love her, Sarah, I need to find her.’
‘But if she’s left you twice . . .’
‘For the love of God, can you not just do as I ask?’
‘OK, calm down. So, tell me . . . why do you love her?’
So I do. I tell her about our week together, about the week she came back to DC . . . about the colour of her eyes and the way she hiccups when she laughs.
Sarah is quiet for a moment.
‘There is something that might help,’ she says eventually, and I know that she is keeping something from me.
‘What?’
‘I checked your emails . . . You know, you really should come up with a better password than “mule-means-cool”. You were using that when you were eight years old.’
‘Just get to the point.’
‘There’s one from someone called Gemma. It says that she received an invoice from a car repair firm that Sandwell uses, billing Sophie for damage done to her company car. The repairs were done in Shropshire . . . is that any help?’
‘Why are you only telling me this now?’
‘Well, we’ve had quite a lot going on, Mule, and I don’t know if chasing after some woman who has dumped you is what you need right now.’
I ignore her.
‘Shropshire, where the hell is that?’ I say. ‘It sounds familiar.’ A quick search on Google shows it is in the West Midlands . . . and then I remember.
‘I don’t see her very often . . . she lives in Shropshire.’
A slow smile creeps across my face.
Week Thirteen
Sophie
I’m startled as the knocker on the door interrupts me. I’ve been sitting at my laptop for the past hour and have begun to set up a web page for my accounting business. I haven’t googled Samuel once.
The knocker raps again, insistently, the kind of knock that means this is not an emergency and yet one shouldn’t ignore its importance. I peek through the spyhole and Charlie’s face appears at the end of the tube. The sun is fractured into thousands of beams, just the way that I used to draw a sun when I was a child: yellow rays shooting outwards in every direction. It hovers over his shoulder, stinging my eyes. I pull away from the door and try to shake the image of the last time I saw him as I open it.
‘Hello,’ I smile brightly.
