Where the Missing Gather

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The coffee smells good. Georgie likes a good cup of coffee of a morning – and Fergus does too, she knows. He tends not to bring her breakfast in bed these days, though she can hardly blame him for that. Still, midsummer. That could be some kind of turning point, maybe, after a spring of such darkness it changed her; changed the way she works, the way she looks. She’s been watching Fergus too, looking for signs of a change in him, though it’s when she glimpses the old Fergus, sees him putting seeds out for the birds or dead-heading his roses with such tenderness that she feels a pang for what they’ve lost. That’s the new Georgie thinking, though. The old Georgie would just have wrapped her arms around his waist and given him a squeeze.

“That coffee smells good,” he says. “Thanks.”

He’s showered, dressed, ready for work. His new haircut is short and neat; it gives him fewer curls and a lighter shade of auburn.

“Toast?”

He shakes his head.

Georgie puts two pieces in anyway – she’ll eat them even if he doesn’t. She’s got an ongoing dispute about tyre slashing in the village and a pub that routinely serves underage kids, not to mention a talk for the school to write, a police station to paint.

Fergus stands, looks around, brushes non-existent crumbs off his clothes. “Don’t want to be late, love.” Georgie looks at him. He’s taken to ironing his top, even though the T-shirt fabric hardly needs it, and he wears his smart trousers since they told him it was his choice. The kids might wear jeans or joggers to work on the tills but not him, not Fergus.

“I’m having my breakfast,” she says. “Of course, I didn’t mean to rush you, I... I’m sorry–”

“No, I didn’t mean to... It’s okay. It’s okay.” He sits back down and waits while she coats her toast with peanut butter and jam, and then he seems to sit a bit higher in his chair as he says what he must have been saving up for a while:

“I’ve got a new member of the archaeological society. Someone you might be interested in.”

Her eyes flick up to his. She can see he’s trying to help, trying to reach out to her.