But he hadn’t. His mother had gotten sick and he’d had to look after her, and then the farm had really needed all hands on deck, and that dream had gotten away from him. Of course, he had discovered a new love of food and cooking when Flora came back from London. And then he’d met Colton and fallen in love, and everything had changed in the very best way, and for a short time he’d been the happiest man in the universe and firmly believed that everything had turned out for the best.

That had not lasted long.

And now here he was, trudging the damp shiny pavement of the old place again, the leaves wilting beneath his feet, umbrellas overhead, pipers trying to make money on the corners of the huge stone buildings. He didn’t raise his eyes to look in the extravagant shop windows; he didn’t glance at men walking into coffee shops who might glance back at him. He just thought over his life, of the ways he had and hadn’t taken, the other roads and other doors.

HE ARRIVED AT the employment agency in a very low mood indeed. Flora had suggested, at the beginning of the year when things were very bleak, that he take a little of Colton’s money and go lie on a beach somewhere, and he’d gone to Cancún by himself and drunk cocktails under a palm tree and cried himself sick. It had not been entirely successful.

People did keep telling him not to worry, that it took a long time. The problem was they’d say that with their heads tilted and a sad face on, and he knew they meant it and he knew they were concerned. But then they went on and bought one of Flora’s sausage rolls, or patted the next dog they saw, or went to the library and exchanged the latest novels. But he was still here, stuck in his misery. They did two minutes a day and thought they were being helpful, when it was all he could do to not snarl at them, to not feel enraged at the way they carried on with their totally normal lives, now made even more perfect by being able to mentally pat themselves on the back for doing a good deed to poor wee Fintan.

Grieving set his teeth on edge. And more than this, it was dull. So dull. To be missing Colton every second of every day, to wake up every morning and remember the whole sodding thing again, to know, because he’d been told, that it would never go away, not entirely, and that this was just how it was now, and oh, by the way, loads of people lived like this so he might as well get used to it.

He didn’t want to get used to it, he thought, kicking a pile of leaves with unusual savagery, so that a passing taxi driver eyed him warily. He didn’t want any of this. He didn’t want to be going to some lousy chef agency. He wanted to be lying in his and Colton’s vast bed in the mansion—before it turned into a hospital bed, before that bed was donated to a hospice on the mainland. Way, way back, even though it was only a year or so. He wanted them to be lying there, going through CVs, laughing at things together, then going to the kitchen to make French toast and those hideous vitamin things that Colton would gulp down with a wince and a shudder. Fintan had assumed it was because he was being Californian about things.