This wasn’t supposed to happen.
If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up believing their relationship was for real instead of a fiction to keep his family happy.
To stop himself thinking about touching her, he twisted round to look at the shelves behind the sofa. There were several framed photographs propped against the books. ‘These are your family?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
There was one of them all together, very similar in style to the one he had on his computer screen at work—but he noticed immediately that Fran wasn’t in it. ‘Where were you?’ he asked.
‘Behind the camera. Which is where I prefer to be.’
‘You’re worried about posing for a photograph?’ Without giving her the chance to answer, he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket, flicked it into camera mode and took a snap of her. He looked at the screen critically. ‘It’s perfectly OK. You don’t take a bad photograph.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t have a phobia about having my picture taken, Gio. I just prefer being behind the lens, not in front of it.’
On the outside, looking in? Or was he reading too much into it? He changed tack. ‘Is that what you thought about doing when you were a kid? Being a photographer?’
‘No, I’m not that arty.’ She shrugged. ‘I take reasonable snaps, but I’m not under any illusions that I’m the next David Bailey.’
‘So what did you want to do, when you were at school?’
‘Can’t remember.’
Her back was to him so he couldn’t read her expression. He had the feeling that she was fibbing, but he didn’t want to push her too hard, so he let it go. Instead, he picked up the group photograph and settled back against the sofa to study it more carefully. ‘You’ve met my family. They’re going to grill me about yours—and if I say I don’t know, they’ll smell a rat. Come and tell me about them,’ he invited.
‘There’s not that much to tell.’ She brought the coffee over and handed him a mug. ‘Obviously that’s my mum and dad—Dad’s head of the local middle school and Mum’s a geography teacher at the local high school.’
Again, he noticed, she’d given him the least information she could get away with. ‘Honestly, getting details out of you is like pulling teeth! I ought to take lessons from Nonna. What are their names?’ Gio prompted.
‘Carol and Warren.’
They looked pleasant enough. Physically, they were nothing like Fran; they were both tall, and, although Warren’s hair was graying, he’d clearly been fair, as had Carol. Her siblings were tall and fair, too. So he could see why Fran, being little and dark-haired, felt the differences so keenly.
‘Did you take this in your parents’ back garden?’
‘Yes.’
It was incredibly neat and tidy; clearly someone in the family loved gardening and took pride in the flowers. Something Fran had had in common with them? But he couldn’t think of a way to ask without risking her clamming up on him.
‘Tell me about the others,’ he invited.
She put her mug on the floor, then pointed to the younger woman in the photograph. ‘This is Suzy—she’s the baby of the family. She’s training to be a dentist.’
Again, the bare minimum of detail. What was Suzy like as a person? If anyone had asked him to describe Marcie, the baby in their family, he would’ve said she was little and funny and noisy and arty—she worked in a gallery and, although she could barely draw a straight line with a ruler, she had a real eye for colour and detail, and the pieces she bought for herself were already worth at least three times what she’d paid for them.
‘Does she get more information out of you than anyone else?’ he asked.
She frowned. ‘How?’
‘By pulling…’ He stopped. ‘Never mind.’ It was a poor joke, and he didn’t want to annoy her so that she clammed up again. ‘What about the twins?’ he asked. They were definitely identical; he couldn’t tell them apart.
‘This is Ted and this is Dominic.’ She pointed them out in turn. ‘Ted’s a forensic scientist and Dominic’s doing a PhD in history—he’ll probably go on to teach at uni because he runs a few tutorials and lectures already.’
Again, very little detail. But one thing he had noted: her family were all academic, with three teachers and two scientists among them, and he already knew Fran felt bad about the fact she’d failed her exams. No wonder she felt so out of place—but he’d just bet her family appreciated her other qualities: the way she was unflappable, dealt with things coolly and calmly and was so neat and organised.