“Boyfriend?” he wondered.
For a fleeting moment, he wondered if that had been too searching a question, but pushed the thought away just as quickly as it had arrived. “No. I don’t have a boyfriend,” she answered him, a playful smile creeping back on to her face; it was the same smile she had worn when she’d first approached him.
Adam nodded carefully. “It’s just that it looked… significant,” he scrambled for the right word before committing to it.
Clarissa’s smile fell away, replaced by a wistful, almost melancholy air that threatened to encase her. “I suppose it is. It’s – it was given to me by… by someone who used to mean something.” She sighed, working through how much to tell him and then deciding that the truth, the whole truth, would always be enough. “I went away,” she explained.
