‘I’m so sorry, Daniel. I can only imagine how you must have been hurting then.’
‘You asked me once about the tattoos. The Arabic one says, Without pain you can’t know joy. That was something my Moroccan cook used to say to me when I was a little boy. I got that tattoo when Amahoro died.’ She could see him retreating back into the memories. ‘There are times when I think most of us would forgo the love to avoid that much pain afterward. I never wanted to know that kind of pain again.’ He gave her an apologetic smile. ‘I’m not a great believer in the adage that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. The numbers tattooed into my skin are the dates of Amahoro and Alice’s deaths.’ He smiled apologetically again. ‘All that’s to explain why I’m not willing to tell you if you should go or stay. I can’t be responsible for those sorts of decisions. In any event, that was the space my head was in when you turned up in the village.
‘I hadn’t expected to be attracted to anyone. I thought I owed Alice my loyalty for longer than three months, and I still think that. Meeting you, and feeling the way I did about you, rocked me to the core. Every day I promised myself that I wouldn’t go back to your hut but every night I did. And then every morning when I left I beat myself up over it.’
‘I wish you hadn’t felt like that about us.’
‘Well, I did, and for a long time I’ve wanted to explain all this to you, so when I discovered you were in Kabul I knew I had to do it.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, I didn’t.’ He looked amused. He also looked relaxed again, like he had the evening of the fundraiser. ‘That’s my weakness around you again, Sofia Raso.’
Uncurling her legs, Sofia slipped her feet back into her shoes and sat forward in her chair, her knees touching the coffee table. She had no idea whether what she was about to say would be a mistake, but she was leaving Kabul, and she was leaving him, and she had to say something to let him know how she felt. As her father would say, she needed to lay her cards on the table.
‘It feels like … and it might not feel this way to you … and maybe I’m being overly dramatic and making a fool of myself …’ She laughed, aware that she was making a muddle of it. ‘I think of all the possibilities and how much we’ve lost by not giving us a go.’ They hadn’t been the words she really wanted to say but they were the best she could do.
He shook his head. ‘Maybe it just wasn’t our time back then, Sofia.’
Her shoulders slumped. That had not been what she had been hoping to hear. ‘Maybe.’
‘I have something I want to give you,’ he said. Rising from the chair, he walked over to the desk where he shuffled through some papers until he found what he was looking for. Sitting back down again, he handed her an old envelope.
‘After returning to Kabul to discover you’d been to the office but hadn’t wanted to leave a message, I began looking for you. I asked around everywhere but no one seemed to have heard of you, so in the early hours of the morning before I left Afghanistan – for what I thought would be the last time – I wrote this letter to you. In it I tried to explain what had been happening for me when we’d been together and how important it had been to meet you and how I’d hate it if we never met again. I thought about leaving the letter in the Kabul office in case you ever returned but decided you probably never would, so I’ve carried it around with me ever since in case one day I ran into you again. You should also know that I’ve never opened it.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’ve always thought of it as my night letter, written in those early hours of the morning when everything is so raw and there’s no place to hide. I think it’s a love letter to you, Sofia Raso, but you’re the only one who can be the judge of that.’
When he saw the tears in her eyes, he leaned over and wiped them away with his thumbs. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said, making light of the letter, but when she went to open it he reached out and covered her hand with his. ‘Not now. Later, when you’re on the plane.’
‘What do you want from me, Daniel?’ she asked. Despite all he said she still felt unsure of herself. He may have written a love letter to her five years before, but what did he feel now? ‘I don’t know what you want from me, or even if you want anything. I feel like I could be making a complete fool of myself here.’
Pushing the coffee table between them aside, he leaned in and grabbed hold of both sides of her chair to pull her in closer to him.
‘And that’s the difference between you and me. I’m a negotiator and I close deals so I’ve learned to hide my emotions, but you’re different. I’ve always
