“Thank you,” she said, daring a look at him, finding those eyes already on her.

“For what?”

“Telling me the truth.”

He gave a small nod in response, and for a moment she thought he was about to say something more, but then the song on the jukebox changed, the soft, full voice of Patsy Cline spilling into the bar, and Tyler stood, held out his hand in invitation.

There was an awakening in every part of her body as he moved closer and she felt the charge between them, tried to capture the moment in her mind, like a photograph she could look at in years to come. The rawness of her emotion was intense, yet invisible, but she knew he could see it, just as she could see his. Then a sudden change of his features, as if he remembered the way he should be behaving, and he pulled away.

The air vibrated with rejection even before he opened his mouth to speak.

“It’s late,” he said, glancing at his watch by way of explanation. “Do you want to go back to the hotel?”

“I’m not tired.” Emily shouldered her bag and walked out of the bar, leaving the echoes of “Crazy” and all that nearly was contained within its walls.

Everything was wrapped up in the night. Couples holding tight to each other as they weaved through the back streets and kissed in doorways. The constant clink of glasses, laughter and music that spilled from all the bars and restaurants she passed, not stopping to imagine how it could have been her. Nor to breathe in the happiness, the normality, enjoyed by so many. Something that seemed to elude her, to leave her be.

An elderly man was walking his dog, one hand around its leash, the other holding onto a twisted, wooden cane. He stopped at a low stone pillar around which a rope was tied, bent down to ruffle behind the dog’s ears, then nodded his head in greeting to her.

A pair of strangers, sharing the night air.

He was no doubt one of those people who always had to work for a living, really work, not just push numbers about on a screen or paint pretty pictures. People who had called this place home for generations, who were here long after the tourists went home, who filled in all the blanks and tidied up after those too entitled, too rich to notice, were gone.

Emily walked alongside the water, past all the boats with their ostentatious displays of wealth, to where a set of steps led down to the narrow beach, slowly being eaten away by the incoming tide.

Toes in the ocean, she stood, thinking of how her grandmother had spent every summer in various places along the coast of France. Four months from June through to the end of September, renting an apartment somewhere in the seaside towns. She claimed it was because the air was good for her disposition, but now Emily understood it was also because the sea made her happy, that it was a link back to that first summer, when she found what she needed to write.