After a while, he turned to me and met my eyes. “Portia and I used to—” He seemed to get stuck on how to describe what they were to each other and I swallowed a lump in my throat. It was unbelievably awkward, and I wasn’t sure how we’d resurrect the evening, let alone the rest of the trip.

“We were involved,” he said finally. Involved—a word loaded with complication and bad feelings and an unhappy ending. If he’d said “in love” or “in a relationship” that would have been completely different. But he hadn’t. He’d said, “involved”. It sounded like something out of a night-time soap opera.

We drank our cocktails in silence, and watched the sun descend below the rim of the mountain peaks. With the sun in hiding, the sky looked like someone had torn a jagged piece right off the bottom—a bit like my heart, really. It was beautiful, though—a distraction at least.

“I’m sorry about that,” James said, picking up my hand.

I wasn’t sure why he was sorry—it’s not like he’d planned it. Besides, it had only been mildly excruciating. “You loved her,” I said, surprising myself. It was a bold thing to say to your current lover.

“Yes, I did. But quite a while ago. It was just a surprise to see her here, in this context. I wasn’t expecting it.” And I was sure he hadn’t expected to meet her husband either.

“It’s fine,” I said, lying. It is so not fine. I told myself to breathe.

“Shall we order something to eat?” he asked.

“Sure.” Yes, let’s order food I’ll have to choke down. I hoped I sounded more enthused than I felt.

It was eventually okay between us—ish. We ordered food and some wine to go with dinner, then finished our drinks—well, I sipped about half of my Negroni before abandoning it for the wine. We also found something to talk about other than Portia, leaning on the one thing I knew we had in common: travel.

I knew we’d have to talk more about Portia at some point, but I was happy to put it off until I’d had time to sift through my feelings. I’d hated how I’d felt during the whole exchange, and I certainly didn’t like the look on James’s face when he saw the woman he used to love.

I had a lot of sifting to do.

Chapter 21

We didn’t have sex that night, which felt strange, but it would have felt stranger to have sex.

Our conversation over dinner had an unpleasant subtext of “let’s both agree to ignore the giant purple elephant in the room”. And that elephant looked like a forty-something supermodel.

After we got ready for bed and said our overly polite goodnights, including a kiss I can only describe as “chaste”, I lay awake fretting. James, of course, slept.

It will never cease to amaze me how a man can sleep so soundly when everything is utterly crap between you. I’d lost track of the number of times I’d woken from a broken sleep, exhausted and feeling wretched, to have the man next to me say, “I’m sorry about last night,” or, “Let me explain …” or “We should talk about …” while looking remarkably refreshed. It made me hate him—them—a little. And hate is not a good thing in a relationship, apparently.