The Last Letter from Your Lover(75)
Author: Jojo Moyes

“I thought ice-skating was for children. Teenagers.”

“Then you’re a very unimaginative person, Miss Haworth. Finish your drink and come with us. Have a bit of fun. Unless you really can’t get out of what you’d planned.”

She feels for her phone, tucked into her bag, tempted to turn it on again. But she doesn’t want to read John’s inevitable apology. Doesn’t want the rest of this evening colored by his absence, his words, the ache for him.

“If I break my leg,” she says, “you’re contractually obliged to drive me in and out of work for six weeks.”

“Might be interesting, as I don’t own a car. Will you settle for a piggyback?”

He’s not her type. He’s sarcastic, a bit chippy, probably several years younger than she is. She suspects he earns significantly less than she does, and probably still shares a flat. It’s possible he doesn’t even drive. But he’s the best offer she’s likely to get at a quarter to seven on her thirty-second birthday, and Ellie has decided that pragmatism is an underrated virtue. “And if my fingers get sliced off by someone’s random skate, you have to sit at my desk and type for me.”

“You only need one finger for that. Or a nose. God, you hacks are a bunch of prima donnas,” he says. “Right, everyone. Drink up. The tickets say we’ve got to be there for half past.”

As Ellie walks back from the Tube some time later, she realizes the pain in her sides is not from the skating—although she hasn’t fallen over so often since she was learning to walk—but because she has laughed pretty solidly for almost two hours. Skating was comic, and exhilarating, and she realized as she took her first successful baby steps onto the ice that she rarely experienced the pleasure of losing herself in simple physical activity.

Rory had been good at it; most of his friends were. “We come here every winter,” he said, gesturing at the temporary rink, floodlit and surrounded by office buildings. “They put it up in November, and we probably come every fortnight. It’s easier if you’ve had a few drinks first. You relax more. C’mon . . . let your limbs go. Just lean forward a bit.” He had skated backward in front of her, his arms outstretched so that she clutched them. When she fell over, he laughed mercilessly. It was liberating to do this with someone whose opinion she cared so little for: if it had been John, she would have fretted that the chill of the ice was making her nose redden.

She would have been thinking the whole time about when he would have to leave.

They have arrived at her door. “Thanks,” she says to Rory. “Tonight was going pretty badly, and I ended up having a great time.”

“Least I could do, after raining all over your birthday with that letter.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“Who’d have thought? Ellie Haworth has a heart.”

“It’s just an ugly rumor.”

“You’re not bad, you know,” he says, a smile playing around his eyes. “For an old bird.”

She wants to ask him if he’s talking about the skating, but she’s suddenly unnerved by what he might say. “And you’re all charm.”

“You’re . . .” He blinks, glances back down the road toward the Tube station.

She wonders, briefly, if she should invite him in. But even as she considers it, she knows it won’t work. Her head, her flat, her life, are full of John. There’s no room for this man. Perhaps what she actually feels for him is sisterly, and only mildly confused by the fact that he is not exactly ugly.

He’s studying her face again, and she has the unnerving suspicion that her deliberation was written on her face.

“I’d better go,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “Thanks again, though.”

“No problem. I’ll see you at work.” He kisses her cheek, then turns and half jogs toward the station. She watches him go, feeling oddly bereft.

Ellie makes her way up the stone steps and reaches for her key. She will reread the new letter and go through the papers, checking for clues. She’ll be productive. She’ll channel her energies. She feels a hand on her shoulder and jumps, stifling a scream.

John is on the step behind her, a bottle of champagne and a ridiculously large bunch of flowers under one arm. “I’m not here,” he says. “I’m in Somerset, giving a lecture to a writers’ group, who are talentless and include at least one interminable bore.” He stands there as she catches her breath. “You can say something—as long as it’s not ‘Go away.’ ”

She’s mute.

He puts the flowers and champagne on the step and pulls her into his arms. His kiss has the warmth of his car. “I’ve been sitting over there for almost half an hour. I started to panic that you weren’t coming home at all.”

Everything inside her melts. She drops her bag, feels his skin, his weight, his size, and allows herself to fall against him. He takes her cold face in his warm hands. “Happy birthday,” he says, when they finally pull apart.

“Somerset?” she says, a little giddy. “Does that mean . . . ?”

“All night.”

It’s her thirty-second birthday, and the man she loves is there with champagne and flowers and is going to spend all night in her bed.

“So, can I come in?” he says.

She frowns at him in a way that says, Do you really need to ask? Then she picks up the flowers, the champagne, and heads upstairs.

Chapter 19

“Ellie? May I have a word?”

She’s sliding her bag under her desk, her skin still moist from the shower she had not half an hour previously, her thoughts still elsewhere. Melissa’s voice, from the glass office, is hard, a brutal reentry into real life.

“Of course.” She nods and smiles obligingly. Someone has left a coffee for her; it’s lukewarm, has obviously been there some time. There is a note underneath it, addressed to “Jayne Torvill,” that reads: “Lunch?”

She has no time to digest this. She has whipped off her coat, is walking into Melissa’s office, noting with dismay that the features editor is still standing. She perches on a chair and waits as Melissa walks slowly round her desk and sits down. She’s wearing a pair of velvety black jeans and a black polo-neck, and has the toned arms and stomach of someone who does several hours of Pilates every day. She sports what the fashion pages would call “statement jewelry,” which Ellie assumes is just a trendy way of saying “big.”