The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw21955
(Monday 2nd June 2025)
Mental Health - (bereavement)
[ 30 minute read ]
5,539 words read at 190 words per minute. Read it here or download the story from the post 'Writing by numbers without numbers 7'
This is the final post on Toby's love story in which in order to write it I forced myself to face dragons from my past. There are areas in my mind that seem to eternally deny any probing. I shall just have to consider that part to be my 'dark'. However, I am lifted by the lyrics in a Alanis Morissette song, in which she thanks someone for loving both her light and her dark. Incidentally, I only remembered her song 'Everything' this morning, after I had finished the story. I strongly encourage you to listen to her song after you have read my story. You can find it on YouTube.
Lyrics from 'Everything' - written and performed by Alanis Morissette. Released in 2004
'You see everything, you see every part. You see all my light and you love my dark. You dig everything of which I'm ashamed. There's not anything to which you can't relate. And you're still here. What I resist persists and speaks louder than I know. What I resist you love, no matter how low or high I go.'
This is the completed love story with no comments and no highlighted changes, and is also now uploaded as ‘A complete Toby story 01 June’ as an attachment on 'Writing by numbers without numbers 7', along with all the other attachments from beginning to end, with all my comments, notes, and changes.
I am not a writer or tutor. If you are a student of creative writing, I strongly urge you to open yourselves to advice from your tutors.
This story is only to show how I faced a challenge to write about something that I recognise I find difficult to understand and show; love. I wrote the interaction between the characters and then embellished it to fill in with some background 'colour'.
Toby fell in love
Mimie and Chloe
(Spring 2023)
The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her older identical twin sister. Mimie looked fondly at her over the kitchen table.
‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’
‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said joyfully.
‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.
‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’
‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie.
She absent-mindedly rearranged the daffodils in a vase on the table. She was deliriously merry.
January 2024 (The following year)
Toby hated Winter. When he opened his front door a little slush fell in. The bare stems of a hazelnut shrub near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind and tiny particles of snow, like the ice scraped from the inside of freezers, chilled his face. The gusting blast had travelled countless miles from the East, and it had no gift of value, apart from a few partially decomposed, skeletal, leaves it blew across his path. Despite his flower beds still showing signs of frost, he took a few moments to carefully search for new growth, but found nothing he recognised. ‘Winter takes so long,’ he thought.
The sky, grey with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his rushed, light breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.
His shortcut to the main road, through a spinney, took him past a long-abandoned bungalow. Its roof, open to the elements, had collapsed and lay under a blanket of snow where the shaded sun could not reach. On the footpath, a young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way. She miserably passed him every day. Her face was reddened by the biting wind. Toby thought she always looked cold, and the baby must be, he thought. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days though, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he decided, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find. He kept walking, feeling helpless.
At the bus stop seven people were waiting. No looked at him. A couple of them rocked from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Apart from little crunches from their shiny shoes crushing small islands of late un-thawed snow, there was silence.
Like
every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb,
causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle.
Toby,
waiting
for everyone else to move before he did,
had time to see, in the puddle, a reflection of compacted dirty slush
from the road stuck at
the underside edge of
the
front wheel-arch, before he stepped onto
the bus. He
could
not recall there never
being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available
seat; the seat
that everyone
avoided every day.
Dave, occupying one half of the bench,
was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-hair covered clothes
spoke for him. Only
people
with head colds and wet tissues were immune
to
the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh air.
For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward as the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.
Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office building.
Where the block paving concourse had lain in the shade for two winter months there was a sheen of green algae beginning to spread up the abutting walls, in a corner where a small heap of frosty leaves poked through a clump of partially thawed snow, that was now becoming translucent and glossy wet.
February 2024
Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down, it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.
The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears in Mimie’s eyes starred her vision and she had to blink a few times to clear them. After making the baby as comfortable as she could, she gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room.
Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The man in the expensive suit blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, without knowing why, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.
The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. She desperately wanted to go home but went back to the flat.
The next day, near the fallen bungalow in the spinney, now that there was no snow to shroud it, she noticed all the accumulated rubbish. Crushed soft drink cans and crisp packets lay alongside empty polystyrene fast-food containers and sodden pieces of paper. The striped segments of sun and shade through the trees and saplings only served to highlight the decay. Looking away and mindful of where she trod, she saw a dry twenty pound note on the wet path. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening; she passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home back to the flat and dried and gently ironed out the crease down the middle, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.
March 2024
Now that the days had warmed and lengthened, the ground responded and Toby pondered which shoots to keep and which to keep, He had decided to give everything a chance unless the result was only an ugly thrusting of green mounted by tiny flowers that quickly faded, or easily recognised weeds that had deep roots that perniciously grew forth into the light from just the tiniest shred left in fertile soil. Constantly cutting back unwanted ribaldry that inevitably lead to insignificance or disappointment was not something Toby felt he wanted to do. He stuck to his plan of transplanting the seedlings he recognised as being escapees from his neighbours flower garden, and discarded the rest.
This morning, he got off the bus before it got to the road-works in the High Street.
Kate, the prosecutor on Toby’s current case, eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day, they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a kernel of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.
There was something sincere about Toby that she liked. His obvious compassion for the downfallen was apparent, yet he had a strong sense of propriety that she herself held to be valuable.
In the Greek restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.
‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’
The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had warmed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.
It was not until the third lunch that Toby noticed how her voice, now she was not projecting it in court, came from her holding it in her chest and larynx, though each word was carefully enunciated in a deep and smooth tone. When she questioned Toby, she did it with a neutral, genuine curiousity as a child might, or an inquisitive visitor from a different country or planet. A few times, Toby surprised himself by thinking her voice sounded similar to an AI assistive tool with an almost indistinguishable Californian accent, yet it evinced a good private English schooling. He felt held by it; supported by it; and warmed by it. Naturally a talker, Toby found himself hunting for questions to ask her, so he could listen to her rich voice. Eventually, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.
‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her equally straight dark eyebrows.
Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her she that had precipitated these meetings.
They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.
The restaurant they agreed to meet at was outside of town. Toby stepped out of the taxi onto a wet, recently lain car park. It had trees on two sides that separated it from fields. The trees however, did little to slow a damp wind that brought with it the merest puff of the scent of wood smoke that dissipated and then came again and faded. Not quite a full moon the light from it was alternately obscured by fast moving clouds, and waving branches that cast sweeping shadows across the car park. Expecting, but not knowing why, that Kate would be fastidiously punctual, he waited where he stood. Five minutes passed. Then, feeling foolish, he went inside.
Perfectly on time, Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. Despite there being some familiarity, and certainly an intriguing attraction, between them, they were still a little nervous, since this was an occasion at a different part of the day than their previous meetings and would have only one of two possible outcomes, one of which would be brought about solely by their mutual desires, and the other by a disconnect, or a shaped recognition of a job or meeting that they must return to in the coming days.
By the end of the following week, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another often, but Kate decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She suggested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love.
If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.
Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.
Toby
preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat
a large
but
disjointed
and hurried breakfast
as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other.
Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never
made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back
onto the plate.
April 2024
It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp, full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.
He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand would be, or on an arm or a leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.
His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely woman with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face and especially the bridge of her nose, wouldn't get so cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.
April 2024
In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings.
‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’
‘There’s twenty pounds down here,’ Toby said, pointing down.
‘Move along'
Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through.
‘Wait!’
Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.
'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.
'Okay, what's up?'
'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a pseudo-date, off the premises.
'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie grinned. Breakfast seemed too small again.
Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.
The lunchtime meeting with Mimie
Mimie, seated opposite Toby in the cafe near his bus stop on the High Street, appraised him and broadly smiled, her incisors were the same length as her canines. It made Toby think of a friendly spider, a beautiful vampire, and a cat all at the same time. Neither of them had ordered at the counter and so just looked at one another for a still, drawn out, moment. Toby, embarrassed by his obvious fascination with her face, reached for a menu on the table. Mimie, guileless, was not so fazed by rude intimacy and watched him with slightly raised eyebrows, and a mouth that was shaped for imminent speech. It was, for Toby, the complete immediacy of her that gave him trouble. He felt like he was drowning in fresh water while being dehydrated, and felt a pull at his stomach, a hollowness that had a metallic tang. He wasn’t hungry, but like an addict that had been free from drug abuse for years, he felt himself craving something he couldn’t identify, but conversely, he thought he might have found it.
‘You let me find money in the street’
Toby looked up.
She raised her eyebrows, ‘I don’t need it, you know.’ Now her confidence at being in sudden and indeterminate close-up interaction changed to a soft self-assurance. She gently placed the twenty pound notes she had saved on the table, but gave no thanks. Toby felt that she could just up and leave right now, and she would not look back at him.
‘The baby you saw me with, its not mine. It’s my sister’s… was my sister’s. She was in an accident in Rome, in December.’ Her face fell.
Toby felt his chair drop a little and he adjusted his body. She waited. A bus passed by outside.
‘What’s your name?’ he said.
‘Mimie’, she answered. ‘She died.’
‘The baby?’
‘No, my sister. I was looking after him at her place, waiting for her boyfriend to come back.’
She paused. A customer left. She swallowed. ‘The father. He never did. I was staying with him to help with the baby but he went out because he said he couldn’t bear to look at me any more. I felt so sorry for him. I waited for two months. I didn’t want to be with him. He knew that. He never came back. My mum has the baby now.’
She brightened, ‘C’mon!’ She stood, took his hand and started for the door.
Outside, she led him down an alley, gently pushed him up against a wall, turned to him, and pressed her body against him. Coolly, she looked him in the eyes and saw no objection there. Slowly, she pushed herself off his chest, all the time looking into his eyes, turned and went back to the High Street, and turned to him still in the alley.
‘Come on, silly,’ she laughed. They went back to the cafe. She ordered them both a cup of tea each, avoiding the promised coffee.
The next time he saw her she was in tight washed-out jeans and he noticed how her overall carefree bounciness could be attributed to athleticism. He felt guilty; he was more a poet than a labourer; more a human than an animal; yet more a man than a boy, and he could not help himself. Above all though, it was her suddenness; her penetrating intimacy that bordered on rudeness that captured his attention. She might break out into dancing or laughing at any time, or just as quickly, walk away, everyone else forgotten.
‘It is because she is so unpracticed. That is why I like her.’ he mused.
In her bedroom she was confident and experienced. Afterwards, Toby somehow knew he was no different to the lover who was there the previous night or perhaps a different one the next day. The knowledge was like discovering there were ants in a lemon meringue pie, or a sharp strawberry tart at a picnic, but only after he had taken a few bites. He wanted to spit but still imagined he could taste her mouth. His fun was sullied, but he tried to swallow his jealousy. She was ephemeral. She would never commit herself to a stable relationship. Something had broken her.
Later, at home, Toby remembered Mimie had told him about her sister dying in Rome as a new mother, and how Mimie had cared for her nephew and brother-in-law; even giving herself to Owen on one occasion, because in his grief he had wanted one last time with his wife and Mimie’s identical twin sister, Chloe. They had both weeped throughout, and afterwards he apologised over and over again, wandering the flat naked for hours before he dressed and left, she had said. Mimie had not wanted to bear the mantle of her sister’s role as Owen’s past or future partner, but in her grief she had fallen over herself to try to grasp a position from which to save herself from their drowning anguish. She had said that, since Chloe’s death, she felt like she was wearing roller-skates on the thin ice of a frozen lake, while everyone else around her was an accomplished figure skater on a safe and carefully maintained ice-rink. She had said she felt that she was always between falling and landing, and her arms were flailing to try to right herself before the inevitable impact that was always coming.
Remembering what Mimie had said, he replayed a scene in her kitchen when he had told her that her fridge door was still slightly open. Breaking his soft embrace, she had beamed him a grin, clasped her hands in front of her, held his eyes and keeping her feet together, made three little backwards jumps and bumped the fridge door shut with a sideways shift of her hip. She had gleefully laughed. Toby knew then that he loved Mimie. She knew fun. He wept for her and resolved that he would no longer be the kind of lover who just took what she freely gave.
May 2024
The compassion he had felt for Mimie in Winter, caring for and pushing a buggy with a crying abandoned baby, and combined with his new understanding of her, brought forward within him a protective quality. He was in deep with her. He was crazy for her, and his love of, and for her, had changed, She would notice it, and he knew that things would change between them. She would do what she had always indicated she would do, and what he feared she would do; she would walk away and not look back at him. He wondered then, where she got her money. In his mind, he saw her again in her tight jeans and remembered when she had pushed him up against the wall in the alley, and a message in her eyes that said. ‘You can have this. Just ask!’. He could taste ants again because he knew other men saw it.
She did notice his change towards her, and his soft concern, to her, manifested as being coarse and restrictive. Right then, she didn’t want to be loved, or to ever love again. It just hurt so much. Every day, she remembered her sister and how she had given herself in her sister’s stead to try to keep a link with her, and every day she had silently keened with grief. She liked being held but she soon wanted it all to go away, and she knew why Toby held her now; because he thought she was beyond sad; he thought she was somehow broken. It made it worse.
August 2024
Kate had a large back garden with flowers in every direction. It was bright, fresh and colourful. It was also, unlike Toby’s garden, overly well cared-for; almost manicured. Guests to Kate’s home delighted in spending time in the obvious attention to care that Kate gave out. Toby felt loved by her, yet somehow she sometimes blew a little frigid, was at times haughty, and the heat from her, though voluptuous, was never scorching like he had known, nonetheless, he loved her deeply and warmly.
One warm evening, under low-wattage garden lighting and shielded by high fences, Toby and Kate lay naked, dozing in the soporific scent of lavender, night-scented stock and honeysuckle, when a cold shower surprised them.
The
shock of it on Toby’s skin was exhilarating.
‘Mimie’, he thought.
Christmas 2024
Kate wanted to spend Christmas skiing in Innsbuck but consented to having a few family members at her house the day before she and Toby left. This was an occasion that Toby had been waiting for since the late winter at the beginning of this year. He would finally get to share,the fruits of his labours in his garden. Pests had decimated his crops throughout Spring and Summer, but strong sunlight and night-time showers had been kind. There had been triumphs and achievements. Eating the first strawberry of the year was always the best flavour he tasted in Summer. Alongside this, he had discovered that they also ripen off the plant, though not so sweetly. Yet, those less sweet fruits that were left to resolve themselves when severed from the bond of the group, and which developed from their own resources, tended to last the longest.
In Kate’s Aga heated, spacious kitchen of cold marble worktops; ideal for pastry-rolling; and warm varnished wood cupboards, Toby unpacked his backpack. The hazelnuts he would crush and lightly roast to go into a chocolate ganache. The home-made strawberry jam and frozen raspberries Kate wanted, to make a ripple ice-cream with. Toby fancied that his pickled walnuts would go with an evening cheese platter to enjoy with their close relatives who were staying over. He would especially enjoy the leeks he had pulled from his garden that morning, at 5am, by torchlight.
Later that evening
Keeping the engagement ring, meant for Kate, in his pocket he made his final resolution. Just like Mimie was not Chloe for Owen, Kate was not Mimie for Toby. She never would be. He left by the back door and called an antiques dealer friend.
Mimie was not at home, or didn’t answer the door. He gave up knocking after the second time, knowing that he, himself, would have been disturbed if he was with Mimie and someone kept knocking.
He
knew that just off the High Street there was a road junction
where young women loosely clustered. He found her there. At first,
her greeting was bright and inviting, then as she recognised him it
slowly faded to smiling familiarity, but still there remained hope in
her eyes. She knew why he was there but she was cold and there wasn’t
much going on that night.
‘I have something for you’ he said. ‘It‘s a ring. A special ring.’
Mimie’s heart plummeted and her face told him her fear. It was irrational of her, she knew, but she also knew how Toby felt about her. Toby knew then that he would never see her again. Their lives would, from now on, never cross again. He felt that he did already know that before, but now he was certain. The look of horror he thought he saw there was to him the outward effect of her feeling of repulsion of what she thought he was offering. He imagined she was thinking ‘Creep!’ But quickly she swept her face clean and placed a mask of firm implacability on it.
‘This is a Mourning Ring. It’s Victorian. People would wear these to show their love is connected to their loved ones beyond the grave. It has a diamond, which is for constancy, to show that their love will be true and never fail even when they are not here. You don’t have to take it, but if you do, it’s fine with me if you sell it. He paused and looked down.
It’s….it’s worth something.’
It was worth more than something, he had swapped a four thousand pounds engagement ring and paid an extra three thousand pounds for it.
She lifted her mittened hand and took it. Snow still clung to her mitten where she had touched a low wall and the ring lay among it. The ice nearest to it faded as the heat from Toby’s pocket, which was still held in the ring, melted it.
Toby thinking she might give it back, or worse still, see her casually throw it away, turned on the frosty pavement and walked away. His shoes crunched. It had begun to snow again, but with little half-frozen flakes that whipped in the nervous wind. On the other side of the road, a car crunched over the ice crystals forming on the road. The driver, possibly inebriated from a party, belatedly switched on the headlights.
Toby had passed three dark houses before he heard her call to him.
‘Toby!'
He turned. Her face was a pattern of sadness and pain, but a smile forced itself to the surface. She raised one mittened hand and waved goodbye. He thought he could make out her whispered ‘Happy Christmas, Toby’ as it crossed her lips.
Her head went down and she looked again at the ring on her now bare hand.
‘Happy Christmas, Chloe’. The warmth there restored some of the heat that was lost to the dark night air.
As she turned for her warm home, a soft puff of wind in the stillness blew up a tiny whirlwind of ice particles from the pavement near Mimie, swirled around her ankles, brushed her feet, and settled down again.
‘Happy
Christmas Toby’, she breathed. ‘Thank you.’