What is this place?’‘Heaven.’ She laughed, ‘with better drinks!

James looked at the people around his table. He stared at each one of them as though he were looking at a magic-eye puzzle and he could see all of the different pieces and the colours but not beyond what was on the surface, and the more he tried, the depth, the revealing images, were kept away from him.

From personal adversity comes great art

She wasn’t sure if she even needed him anymore and the thought made her sad. In consolation, she offered him a kind smile and reached for his dependable hand.

Are you in love with him?’She kept her lips tightly closed as if holding something back.‘Are you in love with me?’She tried to answer but nothing came out. She lowered her eyes to the floor.

In front of him stood the woman of his dreams, giving him one last chance to kiss her.Reason didn’t stand a chance.

Talking to you is like talking to someone I’ve never met before. When did you become so competitive? When did you decide that you needed to win all of the time?’He stopped dead in the promenade and grabbed her hand, turning her to face him.He caught her by surprise. She leant her neck backwards slightly in defence.‘When I lost you.

It has been utterly exhausting to love you.

She felt damned. As though she were marching to her death. She felt like had been sentenced. And yet she felt eerily free.

Their conversation was like root canal without anaesthesia.

After two decades there she was, in front of him, almost within touching distance, not faded like in his dreams, but bright and clear and vividly real, looking comfortably, almost defiantly, the same as she always had and then everything she had never been.

Seeing him again had been a gut punch.

You want me to paint you?’ Genna spoke up raising an eyebrow of displeasure.‘All of me.’ James bowed his head to Genevieve and whispered the words slowly.

Stop saying hurt.’ She turned on him; the wounded animal finally breaking free. ‘You fall over on the pavement, that hurts; you stub your toe, that hurts; you trap your finger in a car door, shit, that hurts. You did not hurt me. James. It was like you took a razor and pressed down hard in the tenderest place.

He hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t even bothered trying.

I think now we are simply strangers with some memories.