My dinner date with the detective

‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to drive his Aston Martin back to England.

I wanted to ask the same question of another man, a widower friend of a friend, who said, in an otherwise ordinary message: ‘This isn’t an offer or a request, but how do you feel about sex?’ I told him he might have well asked me how I felt about polar bears.