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about Jase’s dad and his inexplicably horrible attitude to us that Jase has to clear his throat very loudly to get my attention. When I finally do pull my head out of the clouds and focus on him, I see that he’s frowning grumpily.
    “What is it?” I ask, just as he shoves his hand across the table, deposits a small wooden box in front of me and slides his hand back again, putting it in his lap, as if he doesn’t want to be held responsible for what he just did. He’s still frowning.
    “Jase?”
    I open the box, and gasp. Inside is a pendant on a fine silver chain. It’s a silver circle, with a blue stone fixed in a silver setting to the top of the circle, the whole thing about an inch and a half in diameter. The stone is an aquamarine, the same color as my eyes. I pick up the pendant by the chain and it dangles in the air, the stone catching the light and glittering brightly, the color of the Mediterranean Sea a little out from the coast, before it darkens to the depths of the ocean: a bright, clear, beautiful blue.
    I can’t speak. I just stare at it for what feels like hours. And then I lift my head to look at Jase, my whole heart in my eyes.
    “It was my mum’s,” he says gruffly. “She never took it with her when she left. I dunno why. I found it in her room. I thought for ages she’d come back for it, but she never did.”
    Jase’s mum walked out on him and his dad when he was young. It’s pretty sad. She doesn’t even live that far away, just a few villages over, but he barely ever sees her.
    “My gran threw out all Mum’s things after a while, but I kept a couple of ’em, just to remind me of her,” Jase says. “Hid ’em in my room, because Gran would’ve chucked ’em out if she’d found ’em. I was going through it all the other day, and this really made me think of you.”
    I know now why he’s frowning: it’s hard for him to talk about his mum at the best of times. And this is even harder, because it’s giving up a dream he had: that she’d come back to see the son she left behind.
    “I hope you don’t mind that it’s sort of secondhand,” he says, looking at me intently, trying to read my reaction. “But it’s so perfect for you—your eyes, it’s just the same color.”
    “Aquamarine,” I say, smiling at him, trying very hard not to cry at the same time. “It’s an aquamarine.”
    “Do you like it?” His bright eyes are worried now. “I was going to give it to you for Christmas, but we hadn’t been … I mean, we weren’t, you know …” He clears his throat again.
    I know exactly what he means. I agonized for ages about whether I should give him a Christmas present too, but I wasn’t sure what our status was, and I was terrified of putting him off by making him think I was too keen. Also, what I really wanted to give him was a pair of Ducati motorcycle gloves I’d seen in a Sunday magazine, which I knew he would love, but they cost a fortune. Not a problem for me with my trust fund, but it might have been overwhelming for Jase, reminding him of the huge differential between his spending power and mine.
    We just exchanged cards in the end, and then Jase went off on Boxing Day, straight after Christmas, on a fortnight-long skiing trip he’d had planned with friends for months, so I had plenty of time on my own to mope around, bored and restless, with Taylor off in the U.S. on holiday with her family. I was nervous that Jase might meet someone else skiing in France, some gorgeous French girl with the sexy bedroom eyes and unwashed hair all French girls seemed to have in films, but he rang me as soon as he got back. For the past three weeks we’ve been seeing more and more of each other.
    “And then I was going to wait for Valentine’s Day, but I just couldn’t hold out any longer,” he confesses, blushing a little. “Every time I saw you, I wanted to give it to you. Oh, no, Scarlett, don’t cry. Jesus.”
    “Who’s the cappuccino for, then?” the waitress