He was twenty minutes late, uncharacteristically. He had sounded distressed on the phone, but he was always reliably on time, even when tense or upset. After twelve years together you know someone. You know what they like for breakfast; you know how they respond to bad drivers; you know the smell of their skin when you embrace. She knew he preferred to order when they ate out, his inherited provider instinct irrepressible despite her deconstructing, nudging, persuading, lampooning, arguing; innate dispositions are strong, even when you know they are problematic. Even so, she knew him well enough to order coffee, expecting him to arrive on time and to appreciate the forethought.

She had suggested this particular coffee shop. ‘Spinnato’ — named apparently in honour of the finest coffee shop in Palermo, maybe in all of Sicily — had quickly gained a reputation as the best in town. (What had happened at the meeting this morning?) She had wanted to try it for a while, and the Sicilian connection made it appropriate for the happy news that had arrived in the post that morning, after he had left for the office — a good place to put right what started to go wrong on that liminal holiday, almost two years ago now. Fortunately, Spinnato was not too far from his work and, given how he sounded on the phone, the quicker he could get here the better.

It had been a long twenty minutes, not that she resented the wait: it gave her a moment to sink into the joy in this morning’s letter. She stroked the envelope in her bag, but there was no need to re-read it for every word was already committed to memory, the incarnation of years of labour and a decade of yearning.

The shop had a latent homely scent of butter shortbread fresh from the oven, though there were none on sale that she could see. (Had Doug lost it with them?) A young couple had come in and sat two tables away, heads down at the screens in their hands, talking to people elsewhere but not to each other. A high shelf near the front window held five or six healthy Mediterranean plants she recognised but could not name, all foliage and no flowers with verdant, lush cascades of green spilling over the sides of their pots and hanging down below the shelf. She enjoyed the contrast they brought: tamed nature, softening the modernist decor, the hard pewter-grey walls and white, square-edged furniture. She wondered who watered them, if it was someone’s job in particular, or someone’s passion, deciding it was the chatty young woman behind the counter with the large camellia tattoo on her shoulder. The man with the short hair and long beard was the one behind the renowned coffee in the cup she twirled in her fingers, she figured, making it with a craftsman’s care and precision. She watched them for a while, attentive and supportive in their tangoed movements behind the counter, and surmised the café was their shared adventure. Her cup had a light crema, a fine white, gold-streaked tiara of foam crowning the ebony liquid, a sight to linger over, priming her tongue, which moistened in anticipation. She caught a caramel aroma as she raised her cup, gently sipped, and started at the peaches and dried pineapple in her mouth, swallowed, breathed out slowly, her eyes closing involuntarily. The café really was as good as its reputation, then. (Or had it miraculously turned around?) Limp steam rose from his cup, its syrupy fragrance waning.

The wait was a surprising oasis, here amongst the lush plants (the name and the plants was all the Sicilian inspiration the café had taken, it seemed), the medley of scents, the happy hubbub, more so for being unexpected. The last twenty-two months had been exhausting and utterly absorbing for her: reading up on her competition; planning and re-planning a structure; compiling photographs; developing a reputation on social media; networking; writing and rewriting the example material; crafting the proposal; and then making the approach and the pitch. Being forced to stop, even for these twenty minutes, was a micro-therapy. She opened her bag just to check it was there again, but the door opened and he bustled in, heavy, muttering. (Oh, no, please no!) The daylight outside dimmed, a thickening of the day’s light cloud, maybe; or was she mistaken, just an impression? He was always particular about coffee, but he just sat down, appearing not to register that his drink was quite cold. You could be surprised, even knowing someone for twelve years.

He did not look at her, could not look at her, just stared at his cup, swept an imperceptible crumb from the table, straightened a paper napkin, aligned his knife with the table edge, searching inside for whatever resources he needed, even though they were sitting right in front of him: his urge to provide, to care, to sustain, still hard to repress let alone overcome. He was cross with himself for being like this; she deserved better, much better. He breathed slowly, deeply, to calm the pounding in his chest.

She waited, calm, patient, knowing that taking his hand would not help, even though she wanted to touch him, to soothe him.

Slowly he lifted his head. Her smile was the thing that had first enraptured him all those years ago, the way it started at her eyes, then took over her face, moving her ears and hairline before drawing in her shoulders, too. She was like that in everything, he quickly discovered, wholly committed without reserve, dedicated, drawing in everyone around. She smiled now and his exasperation collapsed (she knew it would), though the weight remained.

‘It’s happened, at last,’ he said. ‘After all we’ve done this last year-and-a-half. All that effort, all the extra hours, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t … .’ His voice trailed away, shoulders sagged.

He had hated having to fly home halfway through their holiday in Sicily. The ‘research trip’ they had called it, some kind of replacement for their tenth anniversary stay in Venice that had been cancelled by a client project gone bad. She had planned it in detail: a villa with reliable internet so he could work while she was at the cookery school, a forest at the end of the lane for late afternoon walks, good restaurants in town for warm slow evenings together (and for ‘research’). They had looked forward to it for months, poring over guide books, making plans. He was so angry with Doug but there was no alternative when the business was in such a crisis. She was graceful and understanding, of course, reassuring him of her pride that he was honourable and hard working; his distress at pulling out was only exceeded by his compulsion to work, to toil, to solve the crisis, to fix the business. And work he had, flogging himself to turn things around, futile though it was ultimately.

The screen-absorbed couple rose without any apparent signal to each other, put on jackets and woolly hats, paid, and all the time he was a statue of a man holding a cup. The couple left, pulling the door firmly shut with a jolt that awoke the bust across the table. He breathed in heavily, chest ballooning momentarily, and took her hand, tracing a tendon down to her wrist and back up, then turned to stare without focus out the window. His hand was cool in hers, chilled still from the walk from the office. She curled her fingers to gently grip his hand, wrapping it with her other, wanting to convey with touch what easy, empty platitudes could not, frustrated it seemed inadequate, knowing that nothing could be.

She loved his hands. Although he worked inside, they had a year-round honey tone that deepened to chestnut in the height of summer. His fingers were longer than seemed necessary and moved with a fluid, serpentine precision as if they craved to touch, to feel, to hold; the apotheosis of tactility, she had always thought. Her skin tingled when he touched her, in mundanity or in intimacy, never fading despite the familiarity of their years together. Sometimes it was too much, prickling, stinging even, and she could not bear to be touched and would sit as far away as she could to avoid any chance contact. But mostly she longed for him to hold her and, like now, delighted in the tremors that burst through the skin and saturated her hands, soaking her up to the shoulders.

He turned back. He took a plain white envelope from a pocket in his jacket, slowly folded it back, fingers curling inside to pull out the flimsy folded page from inside. He laid the envelope down, lining it up squarely with the edge of the table, and opened out the letter. The thick paper resisted, trying to maintain its folded zigzag.

‘I can’t believe it ends like this. We worked so hard. Kate and Jonny and Steve and me. And Gillian. We believed in it. We put everything we had into it. And it just ends like this, fizzling out. How can it end like this?’

He passed her the letter and absently massaged his forehead as he stared out the window again, rhythmically smoothing a small blemish above his left eyebrow. It was a short letter, perfunctory, setting out in writing what everyone already knew.

‘There’s nothing left. The things, you know, the equipment, the fixtures and fittings … they’ll all be sold to pay off the debts. Nothing left for staff. Doug says he’ll write us all glowing references, and he’s got some contacts who’ve said they’ll interview anyone who’s interested. But it’s just so sad, you know, after … everything. Nothing else will be the same. It’s so sad. I just … can’t … .’ He felt things deeply, viscerally. She had found that profoundly attractive in him right from their first few dates in a way she had never with any previous boyfriends, and was surprised how differently it made her feel about him, so early on: an unexpected confidence that their relationship would be deep, entire, integral.

She folded up the letter, put it back in the envelope and set it aside. ‘It’ll be OK. We’ll be all right.’

‘Will we?’ he said, his voice and his eyebrows rising with his disbelief.

‘Yes, we will.’

‘But the mortgage … we’ve only got a couple of months in savings. And the cars. We’ll have to get rid of one. Maybe both. Get back on the bikes.’

‘It’s OK. Don’t panic,’ she said, reading the embodied anxiety in his hunched shoulders and knotted eyebrows. ‘We’ll be OK. Things will work out.’

‘But, you know … it’s all so … .’ His voice trailed off, the fight he had sustained for months finally drained. Absently he took up his coffee cup, sipped, realised it was cold and put it down. ‘It’s just so sad.’ He stared blankly at the cup, his sinuous fingers twisting it slowly back and forth.

She had only seen him cry twice in their twelve years together. The first time was at his grandmother’s funeral, as he read her favourite poem, only just getting through the first stanza before the tears came and he could no longer speak. The second was at the denouement of a teen movie, inexplicably. He seemed on the edge of tears now, biting hard to keep control of himself, not wanting to cry even though he needed to, least of all in a public place. Her own joy felt fraudulent, misplaced, mistimed yet simultaneously perfectly timed.

It is curious how in the most intense moments your senses can suddenly interject and distract you with details. She caught a fresh waft of butter shortbread and noticed the woman with the camellia tattoo pop close the lid on a plastic box. There were three large round shortbreads on a display plate on the counter now. A burly young man working at the back of the café, his computer and papers spread across a table big enough for four, had noticed as well and was making his way to the counter.

She picked up her bag and took out the precious plain brown envelope.

‘I had a letter today.’ She opened it and slid out a small bundle of papers. ‘It’s from the publishers.’

‘What, sorry?’ he said, so consumed with his thoughts, his loss, he had missed what she said.

‘A letter from the publishers — it arrived today, after you’d left. They liked what I wrote. About Sicily. They liked it!’

‘Really? The Sicily stuff?’

‘Yeah, the whole thing. They liked the whole thing. The food parts — you know, the recipes and the chefs and that — and the travel story, too. They really liked the whole idea, the way it all fitted together — “interwoven,” they said. “A distinctive approach,” they called it!’

‘Really, the whole idea? They went for the whole thing? That’s so great, such good news,’ he said, smiling. And yet she could see in his still-knotted eyebrows, could hear in his voice, his residual heaviness.

‘They want me to do at least three more places in Italy, for a full book, maybe four or five. They’re gonna pay for me to go, and you can come too. Get away from all this stuff with the business. Recharge, rethink, help me out, y’know. I’ll have accommodation booked anyway, so it would be easy for you to come too.’ She grasped his hands, gently squeezed, resonating with his touch, transmitting her care, exuding her joy. ‘So, you see, you don’t have to worry. Your work, you know — you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to do it all. It’s my turn. This is us, together. We’ll be OK.’

She drew his hands to her face and gently kissed his fingers. For the first time since arriving he looked at her. He looked, and he saw unfathomable tenderness in her eyes and tears flowed from his own. And she knew, at that moment, in his chest, he felt his heart quietly break and his worth bleed out because he could not provide any longer. But she also knew that because of Sicily she could, and in time he would learn that his heart was not broken, just wounded, and, in enough time, he would find that it had healed.