A Touch of Heaven by Portia Da Costa Read Free Book Online

night. Again, I battle the urge to rush to him and cuddle away his sorrow and our conflict.
    At the threshold he pauses. “May I come to visit you tomorrow? During the day time perhaps, in the garden? So we can talk?”
    So we can talk about what? About his ridiculous claims? How he does what he does? Talk about the infinitesimally slight and frankly terrifying possibility that he might actually be telling the truth.
    “I don’t know. I need to time to think. Some space.” I babble the usual clichés, everything inside me helter-skelter. I do need to be alone so I can attempt to find a calm place.
    “Very well.” Patrick already seems to be in a calm place, but I’m not too sure he likes it. “I’ll wait until you’re ready.” He yanks in a breath, and his exquisite old-young face shifts and changes in a rapid shadow-play of stark, conflicting emotions. “But…well, I might not be here too long now, and I’d like us to come to some kind of agreement and to be friends before I go.”
    “Okay, okay. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”
    He nods and the moonlight glints on his hair. “Goodnight, Miranda.” He starts away across the balcony, and like an idiot I do scoot across to him. But I stay on my side of the divide, in my darkened room.
    Still at sixes and sevens, I say the first stupid thing that comes into my head.
    “Aren’t you going to fly then?”
    He jumps, looks completely taken aback. A flare of hope lights his eyes for a second then dulls again.
    “No, not this time.” With a final nod, he starts away down the stairs.
    While I head for the kitchen, seeking a cup of tea, my body still shakes.
     
    The next day, I have my time and my space, but I still don’t arrive at any conclusions. I fumble through a morning at the charity shop, making so many mistakes that they send me home early. And a while later, I’m sitting in the kitchen, comfort eating a chocolate éclair and turning over everything I heard and saw and felt and did during my two brief but astounding interludes with a man who may or may not be an angel—or a confidence trickster—when the phone rings.
    “Hello, Miranda, love. How are you doing?”
    My ex’s familiar voice used to make my heart flutter but today that organ feels indifferent to him and disappointed that it’s not another voice. The voice of someone I’m wishing and wishing and wishing would come around and see me, even if he is probably as bad for me as my ex-husband.
    Even so, as Steve and I chat, I start to warm to him, and it’s as if I only remember the good times, not the bad. We skip from one inconsequential topic to another at first, but pretty soon I begin to hear the tension in him, the edge I recognize from the beginning of our end. When I ask if anything’s wrong, it all spills out, a tale of woe.
    His business has failed. His new relationship is rocky. He misses me, or so he says. Part of me almost believes him. But when massive debts are mentioned, I grit my teeth, indentifying the real reason for his call.
    Of course, he couches it in a touching display of regret for what he did to me, and heavy-handed intimations that we should get back together again, but we both know he’s really tapping me for money. And quite a lot of it.
    As we talk, it’s like I’m in a play or following the action in a book. The real me is thinking, what would Patrick do? I don’t know why, but it seems important to know what he thinks and to take the course that he’d approve.
    Why? Why? Why? I’ve only known him two days and he might well be even more self-serving than the man I’m speaking to. Or he might be just the one to set me on the true, right path.
    When Steve gets my unspoken message that I don’t want him back, he comes out and lays his cards on the table. He asks for a loan.
    “I’ll pay you back when I can, you know that, love, don’t you?”
    What I do know, or at least suspect, is that if I give him it I’ll never see it, and probably him, ever