‘Sure,’ I said, my focus on the photograph I could still see on his phone screen. He was two steps away from the hallway when he accepted the call.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he said in a gentle tone that confirmed everything I’d already guessed.
‘Daddy!’ cried a voice, so loud and excited that I could hear it even as he was walking away from me.
And just like that, the fairy-tale romcom I thought I was starring in took a totally unexpected detour.
Chapter Five
When Rhys returned from talking to his daughter on the phone, I was sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping on the glass of wine I’d poured, regardless of whether the doctors would have approved or not.
He looked sheepish, and he had no need to be. Not really. I hadn’t asked the right questions, and he hadn’t volunteered the missing information. I’d assumed that because there was no significant other at his hospital bedside, there was no significant other. I was usually cannier than that, and I couldn’t blame it on the lightning this time. I hadn’t asked, because I hadn’t wanted to know. Of course a man like Rhys was spoken for. It was obvious.
‘I’m sorry. I had to take that call.’
It wasn’t his fault that I’d gone so far down the wrong path. That was all on me. Faster than the lightning that had struck us, I reined in my expectations.
‘What’s your daughter’s name?’
Rhys had the look of someone who’d been floundering in the water and just been thrown a life ring.
‘Tasha.’
I had no siblings, so there were no nieces or nephews in my life, but I still knew the right questions to ask.
‘Do you have any photos of her?’
It was an icebreaker – one I regularly asked clients before getting down to business, and it always worked.
His eyes were twinkling. ‘I might have one or two on my phone,’ he confessed before revealing a collection so vast it would have taken me until dawn to view it all.
‘You’re going to regret asking,’ he said, thumbing through endless photos to find some recent ones.
‘Not at all.’ I was fascinated by how his face lit up as he shared his phone’s gallery with me. Tasha was a beautiful little girl, with huge china-blue eyes and long curly blonde hair. Like most people who don’t have children, I was rubbish at ageing anyone under sixteen, but I took a stab at seven and surprisingly hit the bull’s-eye.
‘I’m trying to see if she looks like you,’ I said, taking his phone and tilting it to better scrutinise one of the images and then looking beyond it to study Rhys.
‘Not really. She’s more like her mum.’
Every question I was dying to ask must have been written on my face.
‘We’re not together right now.’
His answer felt like a slamming door, and I wondered if he realised how telling his choice of words had been. I’d certainly have preferred ‘anymore’ to ‘right now’. ‘Right now’ felt messy and complicated and the kind of situation I should avoid at all costs. ‘Right now’ was the kind of thing that got a person’s heart broken and it would take more than a pair of arresting green eyes and a dazzling smile to make me disregard my one unbreakable rule: never become part of a triangle.
I took one last look at the photo, and my annoyingly vivid imagination conjured up a woman in her early thirties with the kind of face that probably gave men whiplash every time she walked down a street.
‘Did you tell your daughter what happened to you?’
Rhys shook his head. ‘It’s half term and she’s away with her grandparents for a few days. It’ll be less scary for her if I explain it properly when she gets home. And hopefully these will have gone by then,’ he said, looking down at his forearm as though it belonged to someone else.
I nodded, hoping the media attention would allow us to remain anonymous for that long. Which, for someone who spent as much effort as I did on publicising their life on social media, was an unusual thought.
It didn’t surprise me when a short while later Rhys announced that he should probably call a cab and let us both get some much-needed rest. The phone call with his daughter had altered the dynamics of the evening, and the events of the day were finally catching up on me.
‘Let me give you a hand clearing this lot up first,’ Rhys said, surveying the takeaway detritus that was spread across practically every kitchen countertop.
‘No, that’s fine. It won’t take long. You should go.’