There was a lot of kissing, a lot of hand-holding. Endless talking. And laughter, God, they made each other laugh. There was an innocence to it, almost like a playground romance. If you’d seen them together that first week, the two of them and Lola, you would have thought they were a family. The way they moved, they were in step with each other. They looked like they’d been together forever. Every night they would fall asleep all tangled up in one another. And when they woke up the next morning they would find themselves still entwined. Nobody pretended it was just about the sex. The most complicated things, the things that had been live minefields in other relationships, they were topics for discussion here. They were things you could talk about. “Were you ever pregnant?” he asked her. Even at the time Addie thought it was the most extraordinary thing to ask. And yet the most fundamental, if you wanted to understand a woman. Their third night together, a Sunday night, they’d stayed in to nurse their hangovers.
