When she reached his car, the first thing she saw, after the whiteness of his shirt and the welcome on his face, was the card, a bright red envelope laid where her feet would be. In spite of the glare of the sun, she read through the glass - 'To My Secret Lover' in blue ink in his convoluted hand. As she slid into his passenger seat, tucking her feet in behind it so as not to soil it, he said, "And don't you dare cry."

She didn't trust herself to look at him. Instead, she focused on the card and her feet, curled as though bound.

"May I open it?"

Casting a glance over his shoulder, he turned the key, then leaning across, he dropped a series of tiny kisses along the length of her thigh while he retrieved the card and placed it carefully on her lap. "Of course open it. Idiot!"

Inserting a fingernail, she slid it across the flap, revealing two cartoon bears playing "touch-me-not" with each other.

"And you will notice sweetie," he said, easing the car out of the station car park. "I didn't go for soppy."

Drawing the card from its crimson wrapper, she scarcely saw the illustration but instead the long moment of his choosing, his anticipations of her reactions, his piano fingers fishing for coins in his pocket, his holding that small manifestation of their time with each other. And no doubt, leaving the shop, he would have tucked it inside his jacket lest it be seen and misconstrued. Construed.

She pulled it open. "For my Suzy. On the first of our many anniversaries. If things were different..."

She slid a hand to his thigh. "My lover," she said. "Thank you."

"You can't keep it," he said, his attention more on the road than on her.

"What d'you mean, I can't keep it? Of course I can keep it. What else?"

"You can't keep it," he repeated. "It's not safe. Keep it for today, for these few hours, then lose it somewhere."

"Tom!"

"Sweetheart," he said, pulling into the lights and turning to run the soft pads of his fingers across her cheek. "You know you can't keep it. We'll think of something. Don't worry. Everything is fine."

Later, sated with wine and love in a room rented for the purpose, she sat upright and turned to him, excited. "Isn't there a river?"

He nuzzled into her neck. "There is," he said between kisses. "With real boats, and swans, and a pub. Even a pub!"

"Let's go," she said, pushing at him. "A river is on our Wants list!"

"Take the card," he said, casting around on the floor for his clothes. "We can find a bin and dump it."

Wandering hand in hand along the riverbank, they moved beyond the noise and detritus of the business end to where the water was cleaner, clearer. A single swan glided, preened, hissed a languid warning at them. Bending, Suzy smoothed the grass beneath her then sat cross-legged, looking up at him. When he joined her, she leaned into him, took in his scent, aware of a comfort she had scarcely felt before, an ease that had been a long time coming. In their early days, given her various hurts, she had been unable to trust in spite of his attentions, his reassurances, the bald statement that if things were different, for both of them, they would be together, no question.

When she thought about her reluctance, her inability to trust, it seemed to her now that it was about her not trusting who she was in his eyes. As though his version of her could not hold, could not have relevance, because it was born of shared hopes and dreams, of fantasies uttered from their other lives, their shared world of surreptitious phone calls and coded messages.

As he caressed her back through the thin fabric of her blouse, a tiny Tupperware yacht stalled in front of them, her sails head to wind as the skipper fought to regain control. They had talked of living on a houseboat in one of their incarnations, before they moved their dreams to Greece, and olives, and Aldo the dog. Now, as the skipper grimaced and cursed, they smiled and waved, and when he saw them, he relaxed and threw up his hands in supplication. As he did so, the sails flapped in urgent response then captured the wind. And he was off, with a grin and his shouted thanks.

"Let him take the card," Tom said suddenly.

Suzy laughed, caught in the moment. She whipped the card from her bag then tossed it into the air, where the breeze claimed it and thrust it back at her.

"Hopeless!" Tom said. "Here, give it to me!" With a practiced flick, he sent it skimming across the water, where the soft wash of the little yacht gathered it up, turned it, and dunked it. Suzy held her breath and waited. For a moment she thought it was lost, but then it re-appeared only a yard or so from the riverbank. As she watched, she fancied she saw a smoky shimmer of red as the color started to bleed, then the words lost each other, lost context as they floated from the surface, set adrift to find their own way downriver. 

Later, restored to the dapple-gray safety of her real life, she dreamed of swans hissing, vomiting blood, their necks hooked to the curls in his words, their vast white wings shot through with crimson.