Two Stops

Tressa stopped outside Elian’s flat on Sunday afternoon and discovered that she had not arranged how to say goodbye to a weekend.

His bag was at his feet. Her own was in the boot, with a damp swimsuit inside a carrier bag and a postcard she had bought for herself. They had swum in the supervised part of the bay on Saturday, eaten fish beneath an awning and spent an hour apart while she painted something that might have been the harbour. There had been no miraculous afternoon in which she ceased to think about her son. There had been hours when she did not think about him at all.

Now Elian took off his seat belt and stayed where he was.

“Do you want to come up?”

She did. She also wanted to go home, open her windows and put things where she kept them. It seemed an ungrateful…