‘Are you so sure she’s wrong?’ Rachel asked.

‘No,’ Toby admitted. ‘She knows her stuff. That’s part of what makes my ex-wife so very annoying.’

‘How long were you married?’

‘Seven years. Although for most of them I was on assignment. If I’d been based closer to home we’d probably have lasted two.’

Rachel smiled slightly. ‘You’ve stayed friends, though?’

‘I think we’ll always be that. How about you?’ he asked, wondering what her past relationships had been like, given what Rachel had said about living in a van. ‘No one ever managed to tie you down?’

Her gaze dropped to her glass and his journalist’s senses expected her to say something about an equally failed marriage. There was a brief silence, as if the conversation had hit a STOP sign held up by Rachel herself, and then she swallowed the last of her pint and stood up.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I am notoriously flighty. Hence the van.’ She reached for his empty glass. ‘Another?’

Later, Toby walked her back up the hill to the lighthouse beneath a full moon. They were quiet as they climbed the path past the row of cottages, Rachel pointing out which of his new friends lived in which house.

‘Are you annoyed with Cullen and Ron?’ he asked, as Rachel searched her bag for her key. ‘For setting us up, I mean?’

She looked up at him, key in hand, and then away. The moonlight glanced off her nose and cheekbones, and suddenly he was a browser at a flea market, struck dumb to find an Old Master concealed amid the Banksy rip-offs.

‘No,’ she said, eventually. ‘But look, Toby… I don’t want to date you.’

‘Oh,’ he said, taken aback by her blunt statement. ‘Right. Okay.’

‘Not just you,’ she added quickly. ‘I mean anyone. I don’t want to date anyone. Sorry,’ she said. ‘But it’s best to be upfront, isn’t it? And it’s—’

He smiled. ‘Rachel. You don’t have to explain,’ he said, despite having a million questions. The van, her past, this sudden, blanket statement. I don’t date.

‘I do like you,’ she told him. ‘But I’m not looking for anything more than a friend. That’s all. I can always do with more of those. Anything else…’

Toby smiled. ‘Friends is good,’ he said.

She looked relieved. Had she expected him to be difficult about it?

‘Okay. Great. Thank you for the drink.’

‘And you,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’

It was just as well, he reflected, as he walked back down the hill, his leg protesting as it always did at the end of the day. You won’t be here for ever and, besides, you’re dragging around enough baggage of your own already. No need to add someone else’s. However intriguing it might be.

Six

It was a few days later and Toby hadn’t realized how long he’d been sitting in the bookshop until he was jolted back into the present by the clang of footsteps on the iron staircase from the ground floor. He looked up to see Rachel appear and saw through the narrow window on the other side of the tower behind her that the light had begun to dip in the sky.