Checking her appearance in the rear-view mirror she was happy enough with how she looked, but could already feel the nervous rash breaking out across her chest. She wrapped a silk scarf loosely around her neck, fluffed her hair, re-applied her lip gloss and pushed her shades up onto her head.
‘Right,’ she said to herself as she locked the car, ‘Let’s do this.’
They’d arranged to meet outside The Java Bean – a coffee shop they used to hang out at. Whoever got there first was to order two flat whites to go and they would sit on the grass and talk.
‘Nothing else – no other expectations. Just talk and enjoy great coffee, huh? How ‘bout it?’
His words buzzed around her head as she walked towards the rendezvous point. As she rounded the last curve in the sandy path, she saw him standing there. Her heart pounding in her chest, she stood for a moment and stared, barely unable to believe it was really him. After all this time, after all the pain and belief that she would never see him again, there he was with a Styrofoam coffee cup in each hand, waiting for her.
She took in every detail of him. He looked taller than she remembered him and had let his hair grow longer. It suited him. He was casually dressed in a sweatshirt, pale denim jeans and trademark Converse sneakers. She watched as he shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to the other. He looked as nervous as she felt.
And then he turned.
Their eyes met.
Grace felt as though her heart would burst from her chest it hammered so hard.
They stared silently for a few moments and a steady smile grew across his lips as she walked towards him. It felt good. It felt OK.
‘Grace Butler,’ he said, standing tall in front of her. ‘Well, wow, would you look at you!’
‘Look at you,’ she replied, smiling. ‘You look great!’
They laughed nervously, the spark of attraction they’d sensed during that first college lecture instantly there again, hanging in the air between them.
‘I would hug you,’ he said, gesturing to the coffee cups in his hands ‘but I’m kinda stuck here! Flat white with an extra shot?’
‘You remembered!’
Laughing, Grace took one of the cups from him and they shared a long embrace, not saying anything, just remembering the touch of each other and inhaling the familiar scent of perfumes and aftershave.
‘Shall we walk?’ she suggested, keen to escape from the prying eyes of the coffee shop customers and the continual flash of cyclists rushing past them.
‘Yeah. Let’s take a stroll. So, that was some amazing story you pulled out of the bag. I bet O’Shea nearly crapped himself when that manuscript landed on his desk. You did an awesome job, really, I loved it – and what about your great-gran? Who would have known that quiet old lady had such a massive secret hidden away. How come she decided to tell you after all those years?’
As they walked, Grace told Jimmy all about Maggie’s confession at her twenty-first birthday party and how she’d found the small suitcase with some of Maggie’s Titanic possessions in the attic.
‘She seems to have just reached a point in her life when she wanted people to know,’ she explained, enjoying the light breeze against her cheeks. ‘She told me she had missed being able to talk about it with great granddad, who was the only person in the family who knew about Titanic. I think she just wanted to make sure that the story was left within the family before she…you know….dies.’
‘Well, if she’s anything like I remember her, she’ll not be doing that anytime soon!’ Jimmy laughed. ‘She’s an amazing woman. I reckon she’ll live to be at least a hundred.’
‘Oh, I dunno Jimmy. There’s something different about her these days. She looks older somehow. More fragile. She looks her age, I guess.’
They sat on a grassy bank and talked easily about how Grace had contacted Professor Andrews and about the amazing reactions she’d had to the article. She told him about Edward Lockey and Maggie’s coat and letters and how Maggie had been able to piece together some of the missing pieces from that night and put to rest some of the things she had worried about and carried with her since that awful night.
‘I don’t think she’s ever gotten over it y’know. After all these years, I really think she has never really been able to come to terms with what happened – or that she survived when she watched so many others die. It must have been so terrible. I just can’t imagine. She once told me that she sometimes feels like she has never really gotten off that ship. That she walks those stairwells and decks every day, looking for her lost friends and family.’