I switched my attention to the specials board and rambled on for a good two minutes about the merits of the café’s excellent BLT over their quiche in a voice that sounded like a parody of mine. I could see Rhys looking at me curiously across the width of the table, and I could hardly blame him. This wasn’t the same Ellie he’d left semi-naked in her bedroom just under a week ago.
‘I get the feeling I’m missing something here,’ he said, a troubled expression on his face as he got to his feet to place our order at the café’s outdoor counter.
I allowed my eyes to follow him as he wove past the tables to the till, wondering how it was possible to be so entranced byeverything a person did. From his easy loping stride, to the way he chatted amiably to another queuing customer, to the smile he gave the woman at the cash register. There was nothing about Rhys that I didn’t like. And that was the problem.
I reached for my sunglasses and slipped them on, because either the pollen count had suddenly shot through the roof or I was dangerously close to changing my mind, or crying. At this point it really could go either way.
The park café had been a convenient meeting point, situated as it was halfway between my morning appointment and the property outside town that I was visiting later that afternoon. It was only now, when I looked across the expanse of grass and saw the lightning-struck oak in the distance, that I questioned whether this had been the best location for us to meet. It was as though I kept dropping lighted matches into a box of dynamite, waiting to see how many it was going to take before everything blew up in my face.
Rhys was making his way back to the table, carrying two cans of chilled soda, and behind the privacy of my darkly tinted glasses, my eyes softened as he paused and bent to stroke the park cat. It was the same one his daughter had been fascinated by on our last visit, and a timely reminder of what was important here.
Rhys returned to the table and set down the cans of Coke.
‘How is Tasha?’
It was a good opener, because I wanted his daughter to be front and centre in our thoughts throughout this conversation.
‘She’s doing great.’
I already knew from his text messages that Tasha had recovered quickly from the flare-up on the night of the award ceremony. If it really was a flare-up, said a suspicious voice in my head, which sounded remarkably like Mel’s.
‘She doesn’t appear to have any after-effects at all.’
He looked down, as though pulling the ring free from his drink can required all his concentration. ‘It’s strange though, because normally the summer months are the best ones for her. It’s not until the colder weather gets here that she tends to suffer most. That’s when things can sometimes get dicey.
‘I think,’ he continued, picking out his words carefully, as though the wrong ones could be dangerous, ‘Annalise might have jumped the gun a little the other night.’
‘I imagine that would be very easy to do. It must be terrifying watching your child struggling to breathe.’
‘It is. But we’re usually better at not panicking.’
The ‘we’ hurt. There was no point in hiding it. But it was probably exactly what I needed to hear.
‘Are we going to talk about what happened on that night, Ellie?’
I was mid-gulp, and it took all my concentration not to splutter a mouthful of fizzy drink all over myself.
‘Yes. I think we should.’
His eyes were on me, and I already knew this was going to be so much harder than it had been when I’d practised it in front of my bedroom mirror. ‘I think, maybe, getting interrupted on Friday might have been the best thing that could have happened,’ I said.
His frown told me he didn’t agree. ‘I think you and I must have vastly different opinions on the best way for a night to end.’ He shook his head. ‘Walking away from you was torture. Seeing the look in your eyes. It’s haunted me all week. If it had been anything else, anyone else, nothing on earth could have made me leave you like that.’
‘I think we were about to make a huge mistake.’
‘I don’t see how something that felt so right can be called a mistake.’
With just one sentence he’d conjured up the memories I’d spent six days trying my best to suppress. Once again I could feelhis hands on my body and my own travelling down the planes of his stomach, inching closer to freeing him from his clothes. I shook my head, but the images refused to budge.
‘What worries me most, what I can’t get out of my head, is that when Tasha needed you the other night, you were with me. I’m afraid that I’m getting in the way of where you ought to be. I never want to be the reason that you’re not going back to Annalise,’ I said firmly.
‘Annalise is the reason I’m not going back to Annalise. If I’d thought there was even the slightest possibility of getting back together with her, I’d never have let anything happen between us that night.’
‘But you do want to be with your daughter. And she wants to be with you.’
I wasn’t playing fair, but none of the usual rules applied here.
‘She has me,’ Rhys said, leaning forward until our faces were tantalisingly close. ‘She’ll always have me. I loved that little girl before I even met her, before I held her in my arms for the very first time. For as long as I live, until the last beat of my heart, I will love her.’ He took a moment. ‘But the last two years have shown me that I don’t need to share her address to share my heart with her, and that maybe a dad who is happy elsewhere is better than one who is miserable right there beside her.’