‘You’re getting soaked.’
Her eyes flicker, as though I’ve woken her up, and I can almost feel the shaky breath she takes, her chest shuddering in her simple black dress.
‘Where are you going?’
The strength has gone from her whisper-soft voice and she presses her hands to her abdomen in a strange gesture that leaves her looking every bit as fragile as her slight frame suggests. The urge to offer her comfort, to sweep the rain from her lashes, her face, burns through me—instinctive, possessive, and wholly unacceptable.
She’s not mine to warrant such care. She hasn’t been for so long.
‘I’m leaving.’ I clear my throat and reinstate the wall around my heart. ‘I never should have come back. Isn’t that what you were trying to say just now?’
‘I...’
She runs her teeth over her lower lip and I’m a prisoner to the move. Sent back in time. She used to do that when I teased her, when I turned her on. To remember it now is wrong—plain wrong—and yet my body reacts all the same. It seems my wall is not as solid as I’d like, and I don’t need that realisation to tell me it’s time I got the hell out of there.
‘You should at least speak to your mother before you leave.’
‘And say what?’
She shakes her head. ‘She’s just lost her son and her husband; don’t you think she needs you now more than ever?’
What can I say? It’s been seven years with barely a word spoken. My mother’s plea to return has come from her grief. Her forgiveness has come from the same place. My eyes sting. I’m on shaky ground. Any moment now the tumult of emotion will out and I’ll crumble.
But I can’t.
I won’t be weak—least of all in front of her.
‘I’ll call on her tomorrow...when we can talk in private.’
She gives a shaky nod and I drag my eyes away, force my feet to move once more.
My unspoken warning is clear: Make sure you’re not there.
* * *
I watch him walk away, my shoulders easing with every step he takes. The rain is pounding down, streaming off my face. It’s a welcome distraction from the pain that swells inside. It mingles with the grief, the hurt of losing Liam, of losing his father too. I wish I could be numb to it; heaven knows I’ve had enough thrown at me over the years.
My hands throb and I tear my gaze from his retreating form to stare at where my palms press tight against my abdomen, nursing the invisible wound beneath.
I’ve always known this day would come—part of me hoping for it, the other dreading it like the plague. But it is good he’s returned—for his mother’s sake. Marie has lost everything; he’s all the blood family she has left.
And then there’s me. An orphan, an outsider. Welcomed into the loving arms of the O’Connors when Cain brought me home to meet them all those years ago. I was fifteen and alone. And they took me under their wing, gave me a place to run to, a place where I felt loved, and that love never waned.
His did, though. Cain’s. The boy who became the man I believed myself in love with, was destined to marry, have a family with.
My hands clutch tighter. He’s the man who gave me the family I always wanted and then crushed me by walking away.
I look back up and see him stumble as he reaches the kerb, the downpour making the ancient path from the church unstable. I feel my hand reach out on instinct and snatch it back. He doesn’t deserve my worry, my aid, and he certainly doesn’t deserve the flicker of awareness that rippled through me the moment his glittering grey gaze collided with mine.
I felt his presence the second he walked into the church. It was the same as always—the strange flutter, the sudden awakening in my body. Almost as though I’ve been programmed from birth to detect him, to seek him out, with the rows upon rows of people between us doing nothing to douse it.
And Marie felt it too, in her own way. I saw her turn, saw the hope spark in her eye, a flash of something other than the grief she’d worn for the last few weeks. Waiting for the bodies to be fished from the sea, the plane crash to be investigated, the confirmation that the freak weather was to blame.
I couldn’t stop myself chasing after him. It didn’t matter that the service was still underway, that Marie needed my comfort. The fear that he would walk away and leave her with nothing, not even a word, drove me to follow him.
She deserved something, anything—no matter the cost to me of coming face to face with him again.
Seven years ago, he broke my heart, ripped it from my chest and left me with nothing...