'It's been a while since I did that.' Roger's voice broke the silence which had descended in the room as we'd both caught our breath. My head had found its old resting place on his chest.

Now I lifted my head. 'Did what?'

'Made out in my parents' house.'

My stomach twisted uncomfortably as he reminded me of exactly what we'd done, something I'd managed to block out for the last half hour or so. Now I gave a low moan and tried to bury myself within Roger's embrace, something he found endlessly amusing to judge by the way his chest reverberated with the sound of his laughter.

When the embarrassment had somewhat faded and the silence had descended again, I ventured to ask, 'So when was the last time then?'

'Last time for what?'

'The last time you made out in your parents' house.'

There was a long pause and I assumed he'd decided not to answer it. There was nothing unusual in that and it wasn't as though the question held any relevance. Yet somehow it irked me; it had taken so little time for us to start avoiding each other again.

'Then, 'Rachel Zuckerman. January fifteenth, nineteen-eighty-two.'

'Wow.' I lifted my head again to look him in the eye and fully express my shock. 'She must have been good!'

He gave a low murmuring laugh again. 'She wasn't bad.'

'Who was she?'

'A girl I knew from high school.'

'Your girlfriend.'

'No. A girl from high school.' He gave me a pointed look which told me there was a clear difference between the two things. It wasn't something I knew much about. 'It was the night before I left for New York.'

It seemed unusual to have marked such a momentous occasion with a quick fumble with 'a girl from high school', but I decided that it was neither the time nor my place to question it. It had happened nearly thirteen years ago after all. Momentarily, I wondered what had become of Rachel Zuckerman, the last woman to share this bed with Roger. Before my wonderings could become more, Roger spoke again.

'Why did you tell me you were engaged?'

'Why didn't you guess I wasn't?' I waggled my left hand at him, half-hoping I could banter the conversation away. When it became clear that Roger wasn't going to be distracted, I sighed and gave a small shrug. 'I don't know.' I paused before adding, 'I suppose I wanted to hurt you.' It was on my tongue to take the comment back, horrified that such a thought had crossed my mind, let alone my lips, but then I let it lie. He'd asked me to say something true earlier; there were very few truths as honest as that one.

Roger stroked my hair for a few moments, making some moves towards detangling the mess it had got into as soon as the snow had landed on it earlier that day. My body tensed against his as I waited for his reaction. When it came I felt each muscle relax. 'Yeah. I can see that.' His fingers continued to work their way through my curls as he said, 'So he hasn't proposed again then?'

'Not yet.'

'You're expecting it?'

'My mother said he was planning on proposing this Christmas.'

'Do you think she was right?'

'Probably.' I thought about Sam then. We could have been engaged less than twenty-four hours ago, could have been planning our wedding right at this moment. And instead I was thousands of miles away and in bed with somebody else. I should have felt guilty. It took me a long time to realise that what I really felt was relief.

'What would you have said? If he'd asked, I mean.' Roger tried to sound disinterested and as though he was just making small talk, but he couldn't keep the keen desire for an answer out of his voice. He looped a strand of my hair around his finger and his hand froze as he waited.

I gave the matter some thought and finally decided to be honest. It was a policy that had served me well so far this evening. 'If he'd asked me a week ago, I'd have said yes.' The memories of those frozen days in New York City where nothing seemed to relieve the pain and misery deep down inside me made me certain that, if Sam had taken a break from his life and come to find me, I'd have willingly gone with him wherever he had wanted to take me. He'd have been a hero, at least in my eyes.

'And now?' He tightened the tension on my hair ever so slightly, almost making me wince with the pain as he tugged on my scalp. It was clear that this answer was the one which counted, which could alter the course of the evening entirely. It would have been easy to laugh it off, to joke that it was unlikely Sam would ask me right at that second considering I was lying naked in bed with a strange man. But that would be wrong.

'I'd say no.' I linked my fingers through his and nuzzled into his chest. He released the strand of hair which bounced up against my shoulder defiantly, as if it too was relieved to have survived the encounter. His hand strayed down to my hip and pulled me ever so slightly closer towards him. I wasn't complaining.

Long minutes passed as we lay alongside each other. For one of the first times since I'd come back to New York this winter, I felt each and every muscle let go. Breathing in the ever familiar smell of cigarettes and sheer Roger, I realised I'd spent the last four months searching just for this, this feeling of utter contentment. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that it was feeling that wouldn't last, that daylight would bring new challenges and difficulties. Whatever I'd just restarted with Roger wasn't going to be easy. But it was right. I'd never felt so surely in my life that something I'd done had been the right thing to do. There was a certain satisfaction in that.

Roger had been quiet for so long that I assumed he had gone to sleep after his hard day. That is, until he pressed his lips to my forehead.

'What was that for?' My own voice was muffled as I fought against sleep myself. A day of pacing the house and worrying had worn me out. Now I came to think about it, worrying was what I'd been doing for the past week or so, maybe even the last few months. That was a good excuse for how exhausted I was feeling now.

I felt his lips twitch into a smile against my head as he replied. 'Nothing. Everything.' He sighed into my hair and pulled me ever closer, as though he wanted to tuck me inside him for safekeeping.

Soon after that, exhausted and warm for the first time in so long, I fell asleep.

'I can't believe you talked me into this,' I muttered, kicking snow up in front of me as we walked back up the hill we'd all but rolled down two days earlier. I rammed my hands into my coat pockets and ground to a halt. 'Seriously, Roger, what part of "I hate snow" don't you understand?'

Roger turned to face me, a smile dancing across his mouth. That smile still had the power to surprise me; it had been such a fleeting part of our relationship before and even now it seemed rusty and ill-used. Yet it had been an ever-present sight that morning since I'd woken to find the same mouth trailing kisses across my skin. It changed everything about him, softening those sometimes too-intense eyes and giving his fading tan an extra boost. Despite my reluctance to continue this walk any further, my own lips twitched into a reply.

Now he held his hand out towards me. 'I thought you Brits were all stiff upper lip,' he teased. 'Come on.' When I still didn't move, he gave a small laugh and, stepping towards me, pulled one of my hands out of a pocket and wrapped his own hand around it. 'Come on!' With a small tug he encouraged me to keep following him up the hill.

Despite my moans, I knew that I was largely playing a part. I wasn't half as irritated by this walk as I wanted to seem. In truth, there was little which could stop my mouth creasing up into a smile that morning, much as I tried to hide it. From the moment Roger had woken me up, it had felt like the best day I'd had for a very long time. The sun was shining brightly and the snow was beginning to drip from the trees. With Roger's speciality pancakes for breakfast, it had felt like a pretty perfect day until he'd insisted on my accompanying him outside. It had only been his reminder that it could have been worse, he could have been forcing me to ride Delilah, that had got me this far.

Nevertheless, I was grateful when we reached the top of the hill. All those walks with Chas and Dave throughout the autumn hadn't prepared me for the snowy hills of New York State, and I stopped again to catch my breath. Only when I could breathe again properly did I glance up at where Roger had wandered to. And I found him watching me with that smile on his face again.

'What?' I frowned and rubbed at my mouth self-consciously, wondering if I still had some maple syrup on my face. Or perhaps it was my hair which was more unruly than ever. My nose was bound to be red as well. On reflection, I certainly didn't look at my best, no wonder he was staring. 'What?' I repeated, slightly more high-pitched and anxious.

'Nothing.' The smile widened to a grin. It seemed Roger was as unused to that as I was, as he ran a hand over his face and tried to hide it whilst shuffling his feet. 'It's just…' He shrugged and put his hands inside his jeans' pockets for safe-keeping, that grin still firmly in place. 'If anybody had told me six months ago that I'd be here… with you…'

I felt my cheeks redden to match my nose. 'Where did you think you'd be?' I asked, hoping to deflect the attention away from me.

'Dead.'

I tried to hide the shock the word injected into me. 'I hate it when you do that,' I told him quietly.

'Do what?'

'Joke around like that.'

'Who's joking?' He shot me a challenging look before dropping his gaze to the ground and turning away from me, as though by doing so we could forget the conversation ever happened. Within seconds, he'd pulled his cigarettes out and was lighting one.

'Well, they won't help with that,' I muttered.

'Meems used to say the same thing.' For a moment I thought I'd misheard him or imagined it. I was prepared to ignore it. Then he turned to look at me briefly and added, 'She hated me smoking too.' He turned back to whatever he was looking at, leaving me to deal with what he'd said on my own.

It took me several minutes to pluck up the courage to say anything at all. There was no way of preparing for this, and if I was honest, the mere mention of Mimi's name had shocked me. It had been taboo for as long as I'd known Roger, so much so that I'd only ever heard him say her name once, let alone refer to her by his pet name for her. I had no idea how to go about addressing this; it was a million miles away from my comfort zone.

Then, finally, I took a few steps towards him, hoping that when my feet stopped, my mouth would start moving and something sensible would come out.

'You never mention her.'

'No. I know.'

'Or April.'

'No.'

'Or Angel. Collins hated that.'

Roger turned to look at me and his eyes revealed a thousand apologies and regrets which were running through his mind. 'I know,' he said simply, before turning back to gaze at the field of sheep in front of us.

I followed his gaze and tried to put aside the notion that he was deliberately blocking me out. He'd shared more of himself than usual over the last couple of days; perhaps he needed to keep this to himself in order to hold onto some semblance of what made him Roger. And yet I couldn't help feeling hurt. He kept telling me how much I'd done for him, how grateful he was, but when it came to it, he still didn't trust me enough to share this with me. A burst of jealousy exploded in my chest as I thought of all the people who knew about Roger's past, and immediately felt guilty for envying Collins. What was there to envy a dead man?

Without warning, Roger moved forwards again, leading the way down the other side of the slope. His hands stayed firmly tucked into his pockets and he made no effort to invite me to join him. I could have turned back and gone into the house, tucking myself away from the snow and the casual way Roger hurt me without even trying.

I followed him. We covered the ground at breakneck speed and I find myself almost tripping over my own feet as the snow tried its best to hamper my progress. The knot in my chest tightened as my frustration grew. Finally, as Roger paused to open a gate, I came to an abrupt halt, my breath ragged in my chest. For a moment I thought he might turn back and offer me some comfort, a smile which showed he'd remembered I was even here. When he pushed through the gate without a backward glance, the knot was pulled too forcefully and snapped.

'Are we really doing this?' When I got no reply, I added in a slightly choked voice, 'I thought you'd decided to stop running away.'

A frown creased his features. 'Who's running?'

Tears blurred my vision and I tried to blink them away, unwilling to show just how upset I was. After such a perfect start to the day, it was partially shock at how quickly things could change which caused my distress now. It was something I should have been used to with Roger by now and yet he never seemed to fail to surprise me.

I took several careful breaths before saying, 'I just want to know. Why do you keep doing this?' Before he could so much as flicker an eyebrow in confusion I blurted out, 'Why do you never even mention them? I know they've… gone,' I added, wishing I had the nerve to just say it, just say the word died. 'I know that, I know… I just don't see how this is helping.' I hugged myself in the absence of anybody else to do it for me. 'What about if it was me? What if I…?'

'Don't!' Roger cut in, his voice fierce. 'Just… don't.' In the snowy silence that followed, I studied his face as a hundred emotions seemed to pass across it in quick succession. His jaw was set in a grim line by the time he finally spoke, his voice softer and more gravelly than usual. 'So what do you want?'

It was difficult to put into words. I wanted him to finally stop avoiding me, for him to give in and let me inside the wall which only Mark ever seemed to have fully broken through. That envy passed through me again, but this time it wasn't accompanied by guilt. For the first time, I felt as though I had a right to know this. Whatever this was.

Eventually I came to a conclusion. 'I want to know.' I made a vague gesture between us. 'If this… if we are going to…' I shook my head, the words failing me once again, and I went back to my original answer. 'I just want to know.'

There was a pause, and then Roger nodded. 'Yeah.' He held out his hand, and for a moment I frowned, unsure if that was the end of this conversation, if he was once again evading the issue. Sensing my reluctance, he added, 'There's a shelter round the corner. You might want to get comfortable.'

True enough, as he led me across the next field we came across a small three-sided shelter, presumably intended as some kind of shepherd's hut. Two sheep moved out of it with what I could only assume were disgruntled expressions on their faces as we sat down on the hard bench inside. It wasn't the most desirable location I'd ever been taken in my life.

And yet it was there that Roger let his guard down once and for all, laying his past out for me like a tapestry which finally explained the mystery of Roger Davis.