A future. He stared at the ceiling, breathing into the feeling in his chest as he might do the pain in overworked legs. It hurt, but stretching always did.

He could say thanks but no thanks. He could say that this thing between them was all very well for now, but he was planning to find a nice girl and settle down. That way, Kim might abandon this damn fool plan which was inevitably going to blow up in his face.

It would be the sort of stupid self-sacrificing lie the heroes and heroines told each other in Victorian novels to string things out for another volume, and Will was fairly sure it wouldn’t work. Anyway the nicest girls of his acquaintance seemed pretty wrapped up in each other. He contemplated offering Maisie babies in a cottage as an alternative to Phoebe in Paris, and grinned to himself at her imagined response.

Would it have been easier for him to plump for a future like that? Probably. It was always easier to do the things you were meant to do. He’d doubtless have taken marriage and children as they came up if he’d been with a girl, just as he’d taken the bookshop: the next step along a path he was already on, so he might as well keep going. Much as he’d been doing with Kim. Carry on, let things happen, don’t sit down to think about what you truly want or what other people might need from you.

It was probably a good thing Kim had such a low opinion of himself, otherwise he might have whacked Will round the head by now for being such an arsehole.

Suppose he went for it. Suppose he told Kim not to do this damn fool thing on the promise that he’d stick around through the insults and the annoyances, the invasions of privacy, Kim’s father, and all the rest of the shit that would be slung at him. Suppose they made a pact to slog through the mire together, taking whatever misery came their way, in order to do the right thing.

That was probably what he ought to say, but the thought was a leaden weight. Endurance was easier to promise than to maintain and he’d seen it grind men into shadows too often. People bent, snapped, wore out. And Will had done a lot of enduring in his time, what with the years in Flanders mud, and so had Kim in his own way, and he found himself disinclined to sign either of them up for more.