‘I’d love to be a father.’ That’s what he’d said. Or something very like it.

But would he want to be one right now? The thought of telling him that she was pregnant made her stomach churn even more than it was already.

What a mess she kept making of her life. Would she never learn?

Chapter Fifteen

Ellis observed his mother’s face light up at the sight of the colourful anemones Naomi had picked from her garden first thing that morning.

‘They’re beautiful,’ Rose said, ‘how kind of you. Now shall we send Ellis off to find a vase while we get to know each other?’

‘No point in asking if I have any say in this, is there?’ he enquired.

Both Naomi and his mother said no.

With a smile on his face, Ellis left the room to go in search of somebody who could provide a vase. It was clear that Naomi meeting Rose was going to go a lot better than when he finally met her daughters.

Once Naomi had told Martha and Willow about him, Ellis had anticipated an immediate showdown, but it seemed they couldn’t organise themselves to be in the one place at the same time and so the date kept being shifted. He knew from the way his stepson behaved that this was common practice amongst the younger generations. Even with all the available technology they used, it seemed that the simple act of putting a date in a diary and sticking to it was fraught with difficulty.

Each time he tried to speak to Lucas in LA, it was never quite the right moment. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ he’d say, ‘gotta run, I have a meeting. I’ll call you later.’ Sometimes he did, several days later, but often he forgot. For a while now Ellis had been trying to nail Lucas down for a proper chat, to tell him about Naomi. He wanted, out of respect for Diana, Lucas’s mother, to do the thing correctly. A text or an email didn’t feel right. Perhaps that was just him being old-school. Him being an old duffer.

Which ironically was the last thing he felt. He felt vibrantly alive, as though life was now overflowing with wonderful opportunities. Opportunities that he wanted to grab hold of and enjoy to the full. With Naomi.

It still didn’t seem possible that their paths should have crossed the way they had. Thank God his mother had insisted she wanted to live out her last days here on the West Sussex coast. When he thought of the miraculous coincidence of choosing to rent a cottage that was slap-bang next door to where Naomi lived, he could almost believe that fate had intervened, that it was meant to be, how it had always meant to be.

He’d felt something similar at Geraldine and Brian’s wedding all those years ago when, after losing touch with her, he’d spotted Naomi amongst the guests. It had been a complete fluke him actually being there in the first place; a new girlfriend had invited him to accompany her and hadn’t even told him whose wedding it would be, other than to say the groom was a cousin of hers. As much as the wedding was a lasting memory for him, he couldn’t remember the girl’s name, but then it had been a short-lived relationship, if you could even call it that. He’d ended it the next day in fact.