‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She exhaled her confusion. ‘I thought so...but the more I’ve got to know you...’
And yet if the emergency this morning hadn’t happened, she couldn’t be sure that she would have said anything.
‘How did you even get to be a doctor without everyone knowing?’ He caught her by surprise.
‘It’s a long story.’
This was verging into territory that she didn’t want to go.
‘We have all night,’ he answered evenly, but there was an unmistakable steel to his tone.
‘It isn’t that interesting.’
‘It is to me,’ he refuted.
‘As is your life to me.’ She didn’t know where it came from, but she heard the words spilling out. ‘Yet you keep all your secrets whilst demanding all of mine.’
He scowled at her, but he didn’t refute what she said. Oti took that as progress.
‘Tell me something about you, Lukas. Something no one else knows.’
The room fell quiet. Almost deafeningly silent. And even though she knew he wouldn’t answer her, she couldn’t bring herself to break it. She didn’t want to be the one to speak first.
‘Something like what?’ he gritted out, taking her by surprise.
It took her a moment to regroup, her heart knocking around her chest as her mind rapidly sifted through the hundreds of questions that had flitted across her brain at once.
‘Tell me about your parents,’ she asked abruptly.
‘My parents are dead, but you know that. I think the world knows I wrote my first app aged fifteen in the bedroom of my foster home.’
‘A two-metre by one-metre cupboard that barely passed as a bedroom,’ she couldn’t help herself from saying. ‘Yes, I’ve read that, but...’
‘The size of the room was irrelevant.’ He cut her of
f unexpectedly. ‘It was my room. All mine. And the family left me in peace. I got shunted between multiple foster homes and care homes in the four years between my mother dying and my reaching sixteen, and that foster home was the only one where I felt safe. Secure.’
‘I never knew that.’
And, deep down, she’d never expected Lukas to share anything real with her.
‘No, well, the media prefer the lonely orphan story.’ His tone was impartial. As though he hadn’t told her something so personal. ‘And I let them use that line because it kept the press away from the foster family’s door, which has made it safer for other foster kids in care.’
There was something about his choice of language that caught her attention.
‘Has made?’ she queried. ‘As in, you’re still in touch with them?’
That definitely wasn’t widely known. Lukas narrowed his eyes at her, giving her the sense that he was weighing her up.
‘I hear from them occasionally. And I call from time to time. They’re in their eighties now.’
‘I didn’t know.’ She shook her head.
‘Why would you?’
The air grew heavy and expectant again, until Oti was sure she could hear the very hair growing on her head. He’d already told her such a lot—far more than anything she’d ever read on the internet or in magazines over the years—and yet she couldn’t seem to let the conversation end. She was suddenly hungry to know more, to understand better, and the voraciousness of her appetite should have terrified her.
‘But before the foster home?’ she began. ‘Before your mother died?’