And all this stress and chaos because a guy she liked had invited her to a pretty village for a baking-themed booty call? Surely there’d been a time in her life when good news hadn’t fucked with her head this much.

Week Four

Biscuits

Thursday

ALAIN LIVED IN a chocolate-box English village called Something-on-the-Wold or Whatever-on-the-Water, which was sufficiently hard to get to by train that Rosaline had been forced to choose between travelling at an inconvenient time or for several hours. Having plumped for “inconvenient time,” she had arrived at Thingummy-on-the-Thinagammy station at five to ten for a twelve thirty lunch date. Texting Alain to say she was early—two hours early—felt a little bit Fatal Attraction, so she decided to make the most of a nice morning in the countryside.

And she tried. She really tried. But as she wandered, doing her best to appreciate the little cottages and the sleepy wend of the river between them—a waterway of such profound local significance that it had apparently inspired the council to brand the village as the Venice of the Cotswolds—her mind kept drifting back to her biscuits, her daughter, and her job. All of which she would, in one way or another, have to make up for lost time with.

Eventually she gave up the attempt to soothe her weary spirit and went to the pub instead.

Of course, Alain had said it was a pub but it was clearly an inn—it called itself an inn, it had rooms, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had a stable. And inside it was all fireplaces and wood furniture, and a man at the bar who’d clearly been sitting there for the last seventy years. As a general rule, Rosaline tried to avoid drinking before noon, but it was a special occasion of really needing to. She compromised and, despite being more of a local gin person than a local ale person, got herself a beer.

Once it had got to a level of earliness that was at least vaguely socially acceptable, she sent Alain a quick text to say she’d arrived, and he replied with Just need to take my biscuits out the oven. With you as soon as I can. And sure enough, he turned up a little after twelve looking, as usual, well-groomed enough to leave Rosaline teetering between attracted and intimidated. Whereas she, conscious she had multiple train journeys in her future and packing primarily for a TV baking show with a strict but bland dress code, had failed to push the boat anywhere resembling out and gone with the comfortable sort of jeans and a slightly-nicer-than-usual blouse. But at least she’d dipped into the sexier end of her underwear drawer and, in her experience, people remembered the finale better than the preamble.

“Have you been waiting long?” asked Alain, sliding in opposite her.

“Not too long.” Oh God, she was lying to him again. But this was the kind of polite British lie that was practically mandatory. “I took a bit of a walk around the village. It’s beautiful here.”

He smiled at her across the table, his eyes brightening as if she’d praised him personally. “I know. I’m rather in love with it. My parents have been wanting me to put down roots for a while—get on the property ladder and all that, although my father’s in real estate so I suppose he would say that. And I tried looking in London for a while but since I didn’t want to pay half a million for a two-room bedsit above a public toilet, I decided to go for something more rural. It makes getting into the city harder, but where you live has such an impact on how you live, you know?”

To be honest, the primary questions that occupied Rosaline when she’d been looking to turn a timely inheritance from a Grandparent into a deposit on a house had been how much she could afford to pay and how long she could afford to keep paying it. Followed closely by “Are the schools okay?” and “Is there any asbestos?” At the time, though, she’d been pretty pleased with her purchase. It was homey and it was hers—one of the few things that absolutely were. But now, imagining how it might look through Alain’s eyes, it felt a lot more like a scruffy two-up, two-down in a crappy commuter town.

“Yes,” she said. “It does, doesn’t it?”

He nodded. “It’s probably very dreary and sincere of me, but I really like that sense of continuous history you get in a village. There’s evidence of habitation here going back six thousand years, and some of the historical buildings are fascinating. Take the church—it’s mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, but you can still see traces of the original fourteenth-century structure, and even the Norman building before that, and the barest evidence of the Saxon original and the Roman Temple under that.”

She wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Nothing should have changed—Alain was as charming and engaging as he’d been before, especially when he was talking about something he cared about. But something was different. Maybe it was just that the show created its own little universe so someone telling you about art or architecture or Victorian grottoes felt natural. Now it reminded her how far she’d drifted from the life that Alain had and that she’d been meant to have.

Except, as Alain had reminded her, it didn’t need to be that way at all. She could trade shortbread and the school run for a life wandering through the Venice of the Cotswolds, showing Amelie the Saxon Church and explaining to her what the difference was between the Saxons and the Vikings and that no, the Saxons didn’t have horns on their helmets either. Or would it be a life where she spent the next seven years studying and the decade after that constantly on call?

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she blurted out. Well done, Rosaline. Take a nice conversation about something someone else cares about and sharply derail it into talking about yourself.

“Oh?” His brows went up.

“You know, about going back to university. Because I could, couldn’t I? I mean, I should, shouldn’t I?”

“Well, it’s your decision obviously. But I’d say it’s probably a good time.”

She took a sip of her beer, wishing she liked beer more. “It’d make my parents happy.”

“I’m sure it would.”

“And it’d be better for Amelie in the long run. As career moves go, it’s way more sensible than trying to win a baking show.”

“I don’t think it should be about what’s right for your daughter,” Alain said carefully. “It needs to be about what’s right for you. And after all, you’ve always wanted to be a doctor.”