sneaked a look at him. He looked tired, with dark circles she’d never noticed, as if he’d slept little and badly – and not just for one night. She held back her impulse to touch his hand as it gripped the gearshift.
‘Before you leave, can I take a photo of you?’ she asked.
He turned with a startled jerk, as if he didn’t understand what she meant, but his eyes grew even darker as he went back to looking at the road.
‘I need it,’ Penny explained. ‘I won’t show anyone and I promise not to steal your soul.’
Without even looking at her, Marcus murmured sharply, ‘Maybe you already stole it.’
‘I’m not a witch. I just want to remember you . . .’
Although she was sure she would never forget him, she didn’t want to run the risk of ending up like her grandma, who only had her errant memory to rely on. She needed proof, something that could show her fifty years from now that Marcus had existed and not only been some romantic fantasy.
Just then, they arrived at the beach. Sherrie’s house was a kind of wooden shack built directly on the sand, almost lapped at by the tongue of the sea. There was respite from the rain as a broken ray of sunshine pierced the clouds. Penny wondered how Sherrie felt about waking up every day with all this beauty before her eyes. Maybe, after so many years of compromising between necessity and horror, she had simply craved the innocent perfection of nature.
Marcus carried the huge box into the house. Sherrie’s home was small and pleasant, painted in bright tones of orange, red and Persian blue, with decor and furnishings inspired by the Seventies, just like in the diner. On a multicoloured striped sofa sat a golden cat, the spitting image of the one on the windows of the Gold Cat, which looked at them absentmindedly and then began to languidly lick its paws.
When they left the house and before they reached the car, Penny took Marcus by the wrist and asked in a pleading tone, ‘Can we please take a walk?’
He watched her as he had done since his arrival at the diner, with an intense and brooding look. ‘OK,’ he said. In natural light, his face looked even more tired.
They walked in silence along the wet sand by the furious ocean, which bellowed against the rocks on the shore. Penny pulled her hood up as her hair snaked around her face, and her emerald lock ended up in her mouth. She clung to Marcus’s arm as they walked, his hands tucked into his pockets, his eyes downcast, staring at his shoes which sank into the sand with every step.
Without realising it, she began to talk to him. If she had dwelled on her own life, on her sick grandma, on Marcus’s imminent departure, on what might remain for her after two amazing months in each other’s company, she would have started crying, really crying, and not just tears and sobs but something more – something far, far worse. Maybe she would indeed have collapsed on to that fine sand and begged him to stay, saying, ‘I love you! Don’t leave me! How will I live without the man I love?’
So to avoid precisely this scenario, she rambled on about other things, commenting on the beauty of the ocean, the sky, the little harbour just visible in the distance, the fishing boats, the seagulls, and the shells which she imagined had been abandoned on the shore by mermaids.
Suddenly, in the midst of her idle chatter, just as it was starting to rain again, Marcus halted abruptly. Penny winced, fearing that she’d said something to upset him, even though she had spoken only nonsense. She found herself standing in front of him, and he was so tall and massive that he shielded her from the force of the wind. With his hands still in his pockets, he stared at her as if he wanted and had to tell her something important.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, more and more worried by those dark circles, by that beard now long enough to be not the product of calculation but of neglect, by those tight lips.
For a while he said nothing and didn’t move a muscle, just continued to gaze at her, and Penny saw the stormy ocean reflected in his silver eyes. Suddenly Marcus drew his hands out of his pockets and hugged her so tightly that she seemed almost