Chapter Five
When Rhys returned from talking to his daughter on the phone, I was sitting at the breakfast bar, sipping on the glass of wine I’d poured, regardless of whether the doctors would have approved or not.
He looked sheepish, and he had no need to be.
Not really. I hadn’t asked the right questions, and he hadn’t volunteered the missing information.
I’d assumed that because there was no significant other at his hospital bedside, there was no significant other.
I was usually cannier than that, and I couldn’t blame it on the lightning this time.
I hadn’t asked, because I hadn’t wanted to know.
Of course a man like Rhys was spoken for. It was obvious.
‘I’m sorry. I had to take that call.’
It wasn’t his fault that I’d gone so far down the wrong path. That was all on me. Faster than the lightning that had struck us, I reined in my expectations.
‘What’s your daughter’s name?’
Rhys had the look of someone who’d been floundering in the water and just been thrown a life ring.
‘Tasha.’
I had no siblings, so there were no nieces or nephews in my life, but I still knew the right questions to ask.
‘Do you have any photos of her?’
It was an icebreaker – one I regularly asked clients before getting down to business, and it always worked.
His eyes were twinkling. ‘I might have one or two on my phone,’ he confessed before revealing a collection so vast it would have taken me until dawn to view it all.
‘You’re going to regret asking,’ he said, thumbing through endless photos to find some recent ones.
‘Not at all.’ I was fascinated by how his face lit up as he shared his phone’s gallery with me.
Tasha was a beautiful little girl, with huge china-blue eyes and long curly blonde hair.
Like most people who don’t have children, I was rubbish at ageing anyone under sixteen, but I took a stab at seven and surprisingly hit the bull’s-eye.
‘I’m trying to see if she looks like you,’ I said, taking his phone and tilting it to better scrutinise one of the images and then looking beyond it to study Rhys.
‘Not really. She’s more like her mum.’
Every question I was dying to ask must have been written on my face.
‘We’re not together right now.’
His answer felt like a slamming door, and I wondered if he realised how telling his choice of words had been.
I’d certainly have preferred ‘anymore’ to ‘right now’.
‘Right now’ felt messy and complicated and the kind of situation I should avoid at all costs.
‘Right now’ was the kind of thing that got a person’s heart broken and it would take more than a pair of arresting green eyes and a dazzling smile to make me disregard my one unbreakable rule: never become part of a triangle.
I took one last look at the photo, and my annoyingly vivid imagination conjured up a woman in her early thirties with the kind of face that probably gave men whiplash every time she walked down a street.
‘Did you tell your daughter what happened to you?’
Rhys shook his head. ‘It’s half term and she’s away with her grandparents for a few days. It’ll be less scary for her if I explain it properly when she gets home. And hopefully these will have gone by then,’ he said, looking down at his forearm as though it belonged to someone else.
I nodded, hoping the media attention would allow us to remain anonymous for that long. Which, for someone who spent as much effort as I did on publicising their life on social media, was an unusual thought.
It didn’t surprise me when a short while later Rhys announced that he should probably call a cab and let us both get some much-needed rest. The phone call with his daughter had altered the dynamics of the evening, and the events of the day were finally catching up on me.
‘Let me give you a hand clearing this lot up first,’ Rhys said, surveying the takeaway detritus that was spread across practically every kitchen countertop.
‘No, that’s fine. It won’t take long. You should go.’
The Uber he summoned arrived in record-breaking time and suddenly there was no opportunity to say any of the things I’d thought of saying. And maybe that was just as well. I followed him to my front door.
Despite knowing there was a car idling at the kerb outside my building, I don’t think either of us knew how to end this most unusual of meet-cutes.
‘I hope everything works out okay for you – especially with Tasha,’ I said. I think I scored extra brownie points by remembering her name.
‘For you too. And don’t worry about the memory thing, Ellie. I’m sure everything will come back.’
We were struggling. How did you tie up the ends of something that never really was?
‘It’s been . . .’ Rhys began and then faltered.
‘Electrifying?’ I suggested, going for the easy pun, because leaving each other smiling seemed like the best thing to do at this point.
‘Exactly,’ he said with a grin. A blast of a car horn from the street made us realise there was no time left for anything else.
‘Look after yourself, Shoe Girl,’ Rhys said, laying a hand on my good shoulder and giving it a gentle squeeze.
He turned towards the stairs and ran lightly down the first half-dozen treads before suddenly stopping and climbing back up again just as quickly.
I had my phone in my hand, and he reached for it before I realised what he was doing.
His fingers flew hurriedly over the screen before passing it back to me.
‘That’s my number. Just in case you feel the need to talk about what happened with someone who gets it. We’re a club with very few members, I think.’
‘Thank you.’ There was more I probably could have said, but my throat was feeling curiously tight, and I had a horrible feeling that I might be about to cry.
He left then. I waited until I heard the clunk of the car door closing and the engine firing up before I sent a message to the newest number in my phonebook.
And now you have mine . . .
I thought long and hard about whether to add a single x to the message, but good sense decreed that was somewhere I really shouldn’t be going.
My tread felt weary as I returned to the kitchen after Rhys had gone.
It was messier than I’d ever seen it. There were black bin bags beneath the sink that I could be filling, and a bottle of the antibacterial spray that I used so frequently I should have bought shares in the company. But I reached for neither.
In a day of shocking experiences, the one that stunned me the most was when I simply turned off the kitchen light and headed for my bedroom without clearing away a single thing.
I had no idea who this new, laid-back, it can wait until tomorrow person might be. But she certainly wasn’t the same Ellie Harker she’d been this morning.
Despite falling exhaustedly into bed, I chased sleep for hours before I finally managed to catch some. But it wasn’t enough to save me from the panda-like rings beneath my eyes in the bathroom mirror next morning.
Feeling like a very old person and aching almost everywhere, I stood beneath the hot jets of the shower and tried to wash the previous day off my body.
But it wasn’t going anywhere. I felt different, and even though my only wound was the relatively insignificant burn on my shoulder, I felt marked by an event I still didn’t understand.
Admittedly, not marked in the same way Rhys had been, but the lightning had got to me in other ways.
The previous day kept playing on repeat in my head as I briskly towelled myself dry, and as hard as I tried to extract Rhys from those thoughts, he was entwined in every memory.
There’s someone he shares a child with. And his words implied they might not be over yet. No good can come of this. The voice of my conscience was particularly salty as I tugged a comb through the long damp strands of my hair. It was way harder to dismiss than the tangles.
Leaving the takeaway remains to congeal overnight had been a bad decision and I was so busy scrubbing sticky smears from the worktop that I almost missed the segment on the local TV news that was playing quietly in the background.
‘Just yesterday, this peaceful-looking park was a scene of panic and mayhem when two members of the public were unexpectedly struck by lightning during a freak summer storm,’ said a young TV reporter.
I lowered the antibacterial spray as though surrendering a weapon and stared with a mixture of horror and fascination at the screen as the park and the youthful presenter disappeared and a grainy piece of footage began to play.
It didn’t matter how many times I’d already viewed it online, it still felt like watching a horror film, the kind you know will give you nightmares.
‘We understand that both of the casualties were discharged from hospital yesterday.’
The camera swung back to the presenter who was closing the piece, which she kept referring to as a ‘modern-day miracle’.
Her words made me uncomfortable, a sensation that only got worse when the camera zoomed in for a close-up, making it feel as though she was staring right at me through the plasma screen.
‘The names of the victims might be a mystery, but there’s one thing we do know about them: they are, quite possibly, two of the luckiest people alive. ’
Her closing words lingered in my head as I finished tidying the kitchen, and were still there when I nibbled on a slice of toast that was as appetising as buttered cardboard. Even my much-loved morning coffee tasted wrong. Being half of a miracle had left a decidedly bitter taste in my mouth.