The Dress Shop of Dreams (31 page)

Etta frowns. “Cora, you can’t ask that sort of thing.”

“I know, I know, but I’m not asking what he said, I’m just wondering if he’s one of your regulars,” Cora says, “that’s all.”

Sebastian looks at his new granddaughter, then at his old lover. When he opens his mouth he means to explain that he can’t say anything, given the confidentialities of the confessional. He wishes, more fervently than he’s ever wished before, that he wasn’t a priest anymore.

“He’s been coming to see me every week for nearly twenty years,” Sebastian says. “But, strangely enough, until today he never spoke. And he confirmed …” All of a sudden Sebastian seems to realize he’s not saying what he’d meant to say. He frowns, not entirely sure what’s going on. Secrets just seem to slip out when he’s around Etta. “I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“It’s okay, I don’t need …” Cora says. “I just want to know—was he sorry?”

Almost against his will, Sebastian finds himself nodding. “Yes, yes, he was.”

Cora smiles, feeling her heart lift. “Good,” she says. “That’s good.”

Henry sits on a park bench with Francesca next to him and Mateo playing with a stick in the grass a few feet away.

“You didn’t have to come with us,” he says. “You could have taken some time for yourself. Read a book, gone to the cinema, had your nails done.”

Francesca laughs, a hearty, dirty laugh that sends shivers of pleasure through Henry. It’s been a long, long time since he’s heard that laugh.

“I’d rather be here.”

“I’m glad.” Henry gives her a sideways glance. “Does it get easier?”

Francesca gives a little smile. “It’s hell. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s okay.” She reaches for his hand. “Because I’m not … I’m not doing it alone anymore.”

Henry takes her hand and holds it in his.

“Daddy! Daddy! Look at me!”

Henry looks up at his son, who’s holding an enormous stick above his head.

“You’re so strong, Mattie,” Henry calls out. “You’re even stronger than me.”

Mateo giggles and starts running in circles, the stick aloft, a thick black line against the light blue sky. Henry and Francesca clap and cheer. A gust of wind blows through them and Francesca
pulls her coat tighter. She holds her son’s woolen scarf up and calls to him.

“It’s getting cold, Mattie. Come and put your scarf on.”

Mateo gallops over to his parents, snatches the scarf up and dashes off again.

“He’d freeze to death if we let him,” Henry says.

Francesca nods, then mumbles something he can’t hear.

“Sorry?”

Francesca looks down at her gloved hands and presses her fingers together. “I said …” She takes a deep breath. “I said that I never stopped loving you.”

Her words are dripping with honey and sugar again and, as he swallows them, the sweetness rushes through his blood. He feels light-headed and wonders if he might faint. He grips the bench and opens his mouth to breathe. Then he nods. “I know,” Henry says, “I knew you didn’t.”

Francesca turns to him. “What do you mean, you knew?”

Henry gives a shrug and tries to sound nonchalant. “It’s part of being a policeman, I suppose. I just know when people are telling the truth or not.”

“So when I told you I didn’t love you anymore, you knew I was lying?”

Henry nods.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because what difference did it make? You wanted to leave me. And you wouldn’t tell me why. So what could I do?”

“Why didn’t you fight for me?”

“I asked you,” Henry says. “I asked you again and again. What more could I do?”

“In Italy we fight for love,” Francesca says. “An Italian man
would have knocked my door down until I took him back, if he knew I still loved him.”

“So you left me because I didn’t fight hard enough for you when you left me?” Henry frowns. “That makes no sense.”

“No. Sorry. I’m being silly, of course that’s not what I mean.”

“Well, what do you mean?”

Francesca shrugs.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t you let me help you then? Why did you hide yourself from me?”

Francesca is silent. “I was scared of you.”

“Scared?” Henry is incredulous. He’s one of the gentlest men he knows, he’s never once lost his temper with his wife or his son. “Why?”

“You didn’t
do
anything,” she says. “But you can see everything, you just proved it. I always felt like you can see inside my soul with a single glance.”

Henry frowns again. He glances back at the grass to check his son is okay, then turns back to his ex-wife. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Not all of us have souls as clean as yours,” Francesca says quietly. “I had so much I was ashamed for you to see.”

Henry lifts his hand to her cheek and gently brings her face toward him until she meets his gaze. “You thought there was anything you could tell me that would stop me loving you?”

Tears fill Francesca’s eyes.

“There is nothing,” Henry says, “absolutely nothing. You could have told me Mattie wasn’t mine, I’d still love you. You could have told me you’d killed a man. I wouldn’t have cared. Alcoholism is nothing.”

A tiny smile slips onto Francesca’s lips.

“Hell, you could tell me you
are
a man,” Henry continues. “Say whatever you want, it won’t matter to me.”

Francesca giggles. “Now you’re being silly.”

Henry shrugs. “I’m a man in love, that’s all.”

“Then not many men love like you do.” Francesca leans toward Henry, rests her head on his shoulder and looks up at him. From his spot on the grass Mateo stops playing and watches them as they move closer together.

“Mama and Papa in a tree,” Mateo sings, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

Then he claps and cheers, throwing his stick high into the air.

Walt’s mind races and finally slows as he alights on the answer. Of all the people who might possibly have impersonated him in a letter there is really only one. Though he still has absolutely no idea why on earth he would do it.

“Dylan.”

Milly frowns. “Who’s Dylan?”

“My boss.”

“Your boss?” Milly’s frown deepens. “But why would he?”

Walt shrugs. “I have no idea.”

Then Milly remembers. “I started it,” she says.

“What?”

“I wrote to you, when we were first together. I sent it to you at the radio station. I thought it would be romantic and I wrote things I was too shy to say to your face. You wrote back to me the next day.” Milly swallows. “At least, I thought you did.”

“But it was Dylan.”

Milly shrugs and nods all at once. With every second that passes she is being slowly torn in half, ripped down the middle
by feelings that fight inside her: sorrow that Walt isn’t who she thought he was, regret at being fooled, confusion about whom she really loves, hope that perhaps Dylan …

Walt watches Milly’s face changing and suddenly, with a great flood of relief, realizes what she’s feeling.

“It was the letters you loved, that was the man you fell in love with.”

Milly nods. “I’m sorry—”

Walt smiles. “Don’t be.”

Milly reaches for his hand. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Walt kisses her fingers. “You didn’t. It’s fine. It’s perfect. You’re in love with someone else and so am I.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

H
enry stands in his kitchen in his pajamas, pouring Francesca’s coffee with one hand and stirring Mateo’s porridge with the other. His son plays on the stone floor with his Legos, building an enormous and elaborate kingdom. BBC Radio Four plays in the background, the comforting hum of eloquent voices drifting through the air, bringing Henry home again. He’d only ever listened to the radio for music—local rock stations while driving around in the patrol car—before meeting Francesca. She introduced him to the joys of
The Archers
at seven o’clock every evening and
Woman’s Hour
at ten o’clock every morning.

“Daddy, look, I’ve added a castle,” Mateo says. “What do you think?”

Henry lifts the pot of porridge off the stove, sets the French
press on the counter and crouches down on the floor to inspect the newest development in Legos.

“Here it is,” Mateo says, pointing to a tower of red and green bricks.

“It’s very cool,” Henry says and, when his son frowns, adds, “really quite magnificent.”

Mateo grins. “Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Now that you are back home again, can I have a baby brother?”

Henry regards his son with a smile. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

Mateo shrugs. “Tommy has one, he’s okay. I thought I might get one, too.”

Henry smiles and tousles his son’s hair. “I don’t know, Mattie, we’ll have to see. But don’t ask your mama about it, okay?”

“Why not?”

Henry considers, wondering how best to explain. “She’s just feeling a bit—” He glances up, hearing the radio presenter say a name he recognizes.

“… has, in an unprecedented move, relinquished his Nobel Prize and named two deceased scientists, Drs. Robert and Margaret Carraway, as the original authors of …”

“Papa?”

“Just a second, Matt-Matt.” Henry stands, reaches for the radio and turns the volume up.

“… Dr. Colin Baxter said in a statement that he deeply regretted his actions in taking credit for their research and would be setting up the Carraway Foundation to fund aid work, specifically the planting and distribution of sustainable foods in third world countries. In other news …”

Henry leans against the counter, thinking of Cora and smiling.

“Papa, can I have my breakfast now?”

Henry turns back to his son. “Of course, Matt-Matt, of course you can.”

Milly knocks on the office door, thinking again what a strange situation she has got herself into: thinking she was in love with a man with an enchanting voice and then discovering she was actually in love with a man she’d never met. Now that she’s about to meet him Milly is oddly calm. Even though she’s never seen his face, and has no idea of the color of his hair, if indeed he has any hair, or the color of his eyes or how tall he is. Not that she cares, not at all. She only hopes that he’s as uninterested in physical beauty and not too young or too handsome to be interested in her.

Fifteen seconds later, when Dylan opens the door, she can only gawp at him. He is, without a doubt, one of the handsomest men she’s ever seen. Suddenly Milly feels shorter, fatter, uglier and older than she’s ever felt in her life. But, when his face lights up with delight at the sight of her, all of a sudden Milly doesn’t feel so frumpy anymore.

They stand in the doorway and stare at each other for what feels like both a single second and an eternity. Then Dylan steps back.

“Come in.”

Milly steps inside and stands in the middle of the room, before Dylan nods at the small sofa in the corner.

“Please, sit down. Would you like tea? Coffee? Anything?”

“No thanks.” Milly shakes her head and perches on the edge of the sofa. Smoothing her skirt over her knees, she glances
around the room: books on the shelves, open boxes overflowing with letters scattered across the floor, pictures of exotic places on the walls, then back at Dylan.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I know.” He grins. “Me neither.”

As the shock of it all slowly begins to subside, Milly thinks of something, the thought she has been thinking, mulling over in her mind for nearly every minute of the last forty-eight hours.

“Why did you do it?” she asks.

“I’ve been trying to think of an answer to that, a good, sane answer that doesn’t make me sound like a crazy person, ever since Walt called.” Dylan starts pacing up and down the room. He gestures at the boxes around him. “I started answering his fan mail. All these women were writing to Walt with their problems and broken hearts and it seemed so sad just to leave their letters flapping in the wind … Not that I’m the sort of man who’d usually do that sort of thing, not before I started listening to him read. It changed me, I don’t know how but—”

Milly nods. “I know what you mean.”

“Exactly, right? He’s so strangely … enchanting. When he started reading
Sense and Sensibility
I turned from the tough, rugged specimen of a man I’ve always been”—Dylan gives a self-deprecating smile—“and became some sort of gooey little girl. When your letter arrived, I started reading it before I knew I shouldn’t. And by the time I finished it, well, I couldn’t help myself. I had to know you, I had to keep knowing you. So I sat down and wrote back.”

Milly closes her eyes and sighs.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan says. “I’m so sorry I ruined everything for you. Do you hate me for it?”

Milly opens her eyes and smiles. “How could I possibly hate someone who says something like that? And anyway, you didn’t ruin anything.”

Dylan stops pacing, overcome with relief. “Really?”

Milly nods. “Everything you wrote, your letters, I loved every word. I must have read them a million times over. I could quote them all to you, line for line, right now. Oh God,” Milly says, suddenly blushing, “I shouldn’t have just admitted that.”

“It’s okay.” Dylan smiles. He walks over to the sofa, then crosses his legs and sits on the floor in front of her. “I could do the same with yours. But I’d just be mortified with embarrassment if you reminded me what I wrote.”

He dips his head toward his lap and picks at the rug on the floor between his legs.

“Yes, of course,” Milly says, studying the thick dark curls of which she now has an unsullied view, “me too.”

“So, I was wondering …” Dylan looks up, the vanished curls replaced by his beautiful face and the gaze of his deep blue eyes.

Milly swallows.

“I was wondering if …” Dylan laughs. “Bloody hell, I never realized how much easier writing is than speaking—you don’t have to look at someone while you do it. It’s hard to find the words for—”

“Would you like to go for a walk,” Milly offers, “and see if, after all those letters, we still have anything to say to each other?”

“Those are the perfect words.” Dylan smiles. “Yes, I’d like that very much.”