wet Saturday in March, and even when I was feeling so utterly miserable, a tiny shiver of pleasure ran through me.
‘A fountain! There’s a fountain, Danny!’ I’d squeaked when we’d first walked in through the back gate, and he’d laughed and squeezed my hand. We’d wondered why the letting agent had suggested meeting at the back of the house instead of at the front door, but it suddenly made perfect sense. It was stunning.
‘It’s more of a water feature, but OK. You and your fancy courtyard fetish,’ Danny had whispered as we were led indoors, both of us knowing instantly that no matter what the interior was like, this place already had me hooked. He was right; I’d always yearned for a courtyard garden. A peaceful place to entertain friends, to sit in the sun with a glass of wine on a summer evening, to lounge with a book on a Sunday afternoon, and no lawn to mow? Pretty damn perfect in my book.
We’d had a lovely home in London, but as so often in the capital, a place in a central location with any sort of decent outside space was hard to find. We’d made the small roof terrace of our apartment as beautiful as we could, but the Bristol courtyard had seemed huge in comparison.
‘There’s even a proper bicycle shed, look, down there in the corner of that lower level. I can finally stop having to chain my gorgeous bike to the front railings and you can finally quit moaning about how it lowers the tone,’ Danny had said, and I’d clapped my hands and done a little happy dance, making him laugh.
That Saturday though, as I stared out of the window, I could see that, just as it had been since I came back from my trip, the smart wooden lean-to where his beloved bike usually stood was empty. I looked at the blank space for a few more seconds, my vision blurring, then jumped as a cold, damp nose nuzzled my hand.
‘Hey, Albert. Where’s Danny then, eh?’ I whispered, and he cocked his head, eyes fixed on mine, and whimpered. I didn’t blame him; I felt like whimpering myself. My stomach churning, my eyes dry and scratchy from crying and lack of sleep, I glanced at the empty courtyard one more time then turned from the window and started pacing again. Albert stood watching me for a moment, then whined softly and trotted off to his bed in the corner of the kitchen.
On Friday night I’d finally ordered pizzas, picking at mine as I constantly refreshed my emails, expecting an apologetic message from Danny to pop into my inbox at any moment. When nothing came, I’d finally, grumpily, assumed he was pulling an all-nighter, and had gone to bed, noticing as I crawled under the duvet that he’d even changed the bedding while I was away, the pillow case fresh and crisp against my cheek. His bloody job, I thought. He loved it, but I wasn’t always so keen. Danny was an IT security specialist, analysing and fixing systems breaches, defending companies against online hacking.
‘I fight cybercrime. I’m basically a security superhero,’ he’d announced with a theatrical wave of his arms on our first date, and I’d rolled my eyes, grinning and, if I was honest, not quite understanding what he did at all, while still being secretly impressed.
What the job meant in reality though was long hours and frequent emergency call-outs, and although this would be the first such occasion in this new job, it wasn’t that unusual for him to have to work through the night if something had gone wrong with an important client’s computer system. When we first met he’d been working for a company in Chiswick, in west London, earning a healthy six-figure salary. When we’d talked about leaving the capital, I’d assumed it would mean Danny accepting a lower wage, but that hadn’t been the case, something that had surprised me until I realized that his new firm, ACR Security, had itself relocated from central London a couple of years back, taking advantage of the lower rents in the UK’s eleventh biggest city.
‘Makes sense,’ Danny had said, when he’d first floated the idea of us moving out of London. ‘There’s a great job up for grabs in Bristol, and the internet’s the internet, my job’s going to be the same anywhere, same pay too. And think how much further our money will go without London prices, you know? And you