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capable of controlling a vehicle—’
    ‘I don’t care how capable a driver you are—you are not driving Bailey around in that bomb you have parked in the driveway. And given that the whole point of this exercise is that you can pick up and drop off Bailey now and then—and sometimes at short notice—I’d prefer it if you used the Jeep while you’re here.’
    ‘Ooh, I can live with that!’ Charlotte grinned. After all it was hardly a hardship—a blessing actually. She desperately needed new tyres! It seemed she was staying. Now she just needed to get to know the elusive Hamish. ‘So how have you managed?’ she asked, a trace of sympathy softening the directness of her question.
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Belinda said that your wife died when Bailey was six months old. I was just wondering how you managed to hold down such a demanding job and raise a little one.’
    He stared across at the table, taken back by the directness of her question. In the eighteen months he’d been a widower no one had actually asked him.
    ‘I don’t know how you manage!’ was an almost daily observation, along with the infinitely annoying: ‘I just couldn’t cope if it happened to me…’ As if he somehow had a choice but to cope. Sure, he’d had endless help from his sister and, till now, Elsie, but for Charlotte, for someone he’d known less than a day, to actually ask him how he did it all was confronting, yet strangely refreshing.
    ‘With great difficulty.’ Hamish answered the direct question with a very honest answer. ‘Both demand a great deal and both merit a lot more attention than I’m able to give them.’
    There—he’d said it! Taking a drink of water, Hamish realised he’d actually admitted to another human being what he hardly dared think himself—not that he expected her to come up with an answer, not that he expected the conversation to go any further. It was just so nice to actually talk, to sit with another adult at the end of a long and difficult day and share a little of what was on his mind.
    Only he didn’t yet know Charlotte.
    ‘Well, this little guy’s not going anywhere.’ Charlotte dug a spoon into her potato and smeared it around her plate, soaking up the last of her gravy like a ten-year-old would while offering the opinion of someone far wiser. ‘So that leaves a big question mark over your work. Have you thought about changing jobs?’
    Hamish held his water in his mouth for a long time before swallowing. ‘To what?’
    ‘I’ll have to think about that one.’ She smiled across the table at him and it was somehow as if she actuallyunderstood, somehow knew the pain that was locked inside him. For an incredible second she wasn’t a stranger, wasn’t yet another necessary intruder in the chaos his life had become since Emma’s tragic death.
    Bailey’s spoon, which he had been clutching in his free hand, clattered noisily to the floor as he crept deeper into slumber, breaking the bizarre moment.
    ‘Seems a shame to wake him to bath him,’ Hamish said gruffly, embarrassed by his revelation, stunned at his own thought process and just wanting to get the hell out of there. ‘Still, I won’t have time in the morning and can hardly send him off to day care with his hair stuck together.’
    ‘Leave him here, then.’ Charlotte shrugged. ‘He can watch me paint.’
    ‘Er, two-year-olds and paintbrushes aren’t the best combination. Anyway, that’s a lot more than a casual babysit. Tomorrow’s your day off.’
    ‘I don’t mind,’ Charlotte said honestly. ‘It would be really nice to get to know him.’
    ‘You see…’ Hamish was chasing his peas around his plate, clearly not comfortable with asking for help. ‘I’m actually on call tomorrow night. If we are going to give this a trial, I was actually hoping, if you weren’t going out, or if you didn’t have a date or anything, that maybe you could listen out for him. I can’t promise he won’t wake, though, as he’s teething