“If I could turn the clock back that’s probably the approach I’d take, but at the time I thought I’d killed your dog and then I heard your voice and you sounded—” she snatched in a breath “—and I saw you and you looked—It flustered me.”
Flustered was good. He could live with flustered.
Her gaze slid to his, and he saw the flicker of something there before she looked away again.
“So you decided to pretend to be Harriet.”
“If I’m honest, there wasn’t a whole lot of planning behind that strategy. It was more of an impulse. A conditioned response.”
“The conditioned response being to avoid me?” He waited, refusing to allow her to dodge it and finally she scowled.
“So I wasn’t comfortable seeing you. Turns out I’m clueless when it comes to ex etiquette.”
“That exists?”
“I don’t know! But I didn’t know how to handle it.”
“So you pretended to be Harriet, which made it a different conversation.”
“That was the idea. A different conversation was exactly what I wanted. Goal achieved.”
“But you’re here now. As yourself. And this time we’re having the conversation I want.”
“Yes. So let’s get it over with.” The expression on her face suggested she was about to be dragged off to a torture chamber. “If there are things you need to say, although I can’t imagine why there would be after all this time, then you need to say them. Go right ahead.”
You need to say them.
What he really wanted was for her to talk to him, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen in an instant. You couldn’t change the habits of a lifetime overnight, and Fliss had been keeping things to herself for her entire life. He needed to be patient. And persistent. Last time he’d given up and walked away. This time he wasn’t doing that. Not until he’d explored what might have been. If losing his father had taught him one thing it was that life was too precious to waste a single moment doing things that didn’t matter with people who didn’t matter.
Fliss mattered to him. She always had.
He knew that now. What he didn’t know was why it had taken him so long to follow up on it. There had been plenty of reasons why walking away from it had seemed like the right thing. They’d been too young, it had all happened too fast—the list was long, and topped off by the fact that she’d never returned his calls. Nothing on that list had explained why he hadn’t been able to leave her behind.
She hovered, wary, her weight on her toes. She reminded him of a deer, alert for danger, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
And he wasn’t going to give her a reason to run.
“Do you want a tour?”
“A tour? Of your house?” She relaxed slightly, as if she’d been given a reprieve. “Sounds good. Great idea.”
“You’re my first visitor, apart from Chase, and he doesn’t count given that he’s had eyes on the place every week since the project started.”
“Have you spoken with him?”
“Yes. He flew back last night the moment I called him.”
“The advantage of helicopter travel.”
“He’s with Matilda in the hospital, but I think she’ll be coming home today.”
“I wondered. I would have texted her, but of course she dropped her phone. And I didn’t want to get in the way by showing up at the hospital.”
He wondered if that was all it was. The image of her face when he’d walked into the room and seen her with Matilda’s baby was welded into his brain.
“I doubt they would have minded.” He picked up the empty beer bottle and strolled through to the kitchen. “He’ll be calling you. To say he’s grateful would be an understatement.”
“Why would he be grateful? I didn’t do anything.”