Chapter 8: Rain, One Umbrella

I got as far as the shuttered bank next door before Isla caught up with me.

She had an umbrella, which she held over her own head first and then, when she was close enough, mine.

"You'll catch your death," she said.

"I didn't ask you to say that."

"I wasn't aiming it at you in particular. It's a thing Scots say."

I looked at the pavement.

The rain was running along the gutter in a fast brown stream, and the neon sign of the chip shop was reflected in every puddle.

"You picked that clip on purpose," I said.

"I pick a clip every week."

"You picked that one."

"It was your best one," she said. "I wanted to see if you'd leave."

"I left."

"I noticed. They clapped, though. Did you hear?"

"I heard."

"Was that all right?"

I didn't answer, because the true answer wasn't a good one.

It had been the best sound I had heard in three years, and I had run from it.

She stepped under the awning of the bank, out of the worst of the wet, and I followed her into the dry slot of the doorway.

It was narrow, barely wide enough for the two of us and the umbrella.

She leaned the umbrella against the wall, and it dripped on our shoes.

"You're soaked," she said.

"I noticed."

She reached up and turned my collar out from where it had folded under, and her knuckles grazed my jaw.

It was the third place she had touched me, after my hand and my wrist, and the first time she hadn't had a reason.

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