It felt like he’d reached into my chest, found every secret hope that I’d hidden away, and exposed them all. The love a father might feel for his daughter was a mystery that I’d never been given the chance to unravel. After thirty-five years it shouldn’t still hurt this much, but damn it, it did.
‘What are we doing here, Rhys? What exactly is this?’
It was hard watching some of the light slowly dim in his eyes.
‘Us?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘We’re getting to know each other.’
‘And then what?’ I was pushing, I knew that, and I could see him bristling a little uncomfortably.
‘I don’t know, Ellie. Does it have to be labelled and categorised upfront?’
‘For me, yes, I think it does.’
A stave of frown lines appeared on his brow.
‘I don’t want to pigeonhole this. I’d rather just take things slowly and see where it goes.’
I shook my head sadly. ‘That could be a problem, because I’m a big fan of pigeons and the holes they live in.’ I gave an unhappy sigh. ‘We are so different in so many ways.’
‘That’s meant to be a good thing, isn’t it? Opposites attract.’
‘Not always.’ I chewed anxiously on my lower lip.
He was quiet for a long moment, his face unreadable.
‘Something inside me changed two years ago.’
My mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘When you and Annalise broke up?’
‘When I came home and found her in our bed with Marco. When the person you trust most, the person you thought you’d grow old with, does something like that, it breaks you. And I hadn’t seen it coming. I was totally blindsided. I swore I’d never allow myself to get hurt like that again.’
‘I get that.’
‘I convinced myself that being a good father to Tasha was the only role I was interested in. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have listened to Olly and gone to see someone professionally and talk it all through. But I thought I was coping just fine.’
‘And now you’re not?’
His lips tightened as though he wasn’t sure if he could hold back the truth behind them. ‘When you asked for a label just now,a definition of what we were, my knee-jerk reaction was to get up and walk away.’
I swallowed audibly.
‘So perhaps I’m not as well adjusted as I thought I was.’
‘At least you didn’t say it’s not you, it’s me.’
‘Don’t do that. Don’t make this into something flippant and unimportant. Because that isn’t how it feels to me. I know you still believe it can all be explained away by science; that it’s simply something chemical, an after-effect of both getting struck by the same bolt of lightning. It’s obvious you think that whatever this is, it won’t last, just like the marks it left on my body.’
My eyes went to his t-shirt as though I had X-ray vision and could see through the fabric. ‘Nothing ever does.’
My words seemed to make him sad.
‘But those marks are still there, even though everything we’ve both read says they should be gone by now.’ I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. ‘So maybe what we feel isn’t going to disappear either.’
‘What are you saying? That we keep seeing each other until the Lichtenberg figures disappear?’