Chapter 38
Confusion tussled with hope, although there was always a clear winner with Ginny: hope.
‘How do you know about Rhys?’
‘He was just here. We had a very strange conversation.’
That sounded like Rhys. ‘What was he doing at your house?’
‘He seemed to think you didn’t want to see him and he had something to give you.’
‘What?’ Kira asked.
‘Rhys was at my parents’ house,’ she whispered back. She’d enjoy accusing Kira of being just as much of a gossip as Mattia when the call was over.
‘How about you come for dinner tonight?’ her dad suggested. ‘He said something about chestnuts to roast? Mum is very disappointed she missed him, so you might have to fill us in.’
‘Seems like you have to fill me in,’ Ginny muttered. ‘But all right. Tell Mum no third degree, though, otherwise I’m going home.’
Saying ‘Mum’ reminded her of another conversation with Rhys. She hadn’t told anyone that stuff before – she had barely allowed herself to think it.
‘You’ll want to see what he left for you, anyway.’
‘Dad, you can’t dangle that in front of me and not tell me what it is!’
‘I’m sorry, but it will only deliver its full impact when you see it – and you’ve been moody, so I want to make sure you actually come and let us feed you.’
‘I have not been moody,’ she protested despite the stab of guilt at the lie. ‘Are you going to see if Elspeth is around? Or Harry?’
‘No, sweetheart. We just want to see you tonight. Plus, inviting those two means their partners and then suddenly we have a house full and I’m not sure we can feed everyone.’
‘Lucky I’m single,’ Ginny said drily. ‘See you then.’
‘He’s grand gesturing you!’ Kira blurted out as soon as Ginny ended the call.
‘That’s not a thing,’ Ginny grumbled to cover the leap in her chest. ‘Or if it is, then Rhys wouldn’t do it.’ He didn’t do gifts, although apparently he’d made an exception just before his departure. ‘He thought I didn’t want to see him, so he went through my parents.’
‘You know what this means,’ Kira said, giving her a pointed look.
‘No?’
‘Ginny, you thought he didn’t want to see you and he thought you didn’t want to see him, but maybe you’re both wrong? You have to talk to him before he goes.’
Her stomach twisted at the prospect. Part of her was desperate to see him again. But she also knew their ‘moment’ was over. Just because he’d turned up at her parents’ house didn’t mean otherwise.
‘He’s still leaving,’ Ginny said with a sigh.
Arriving at her parents’ terrace that evening, she allowed her dad to enfold her in a squeezier hug than usual before thrusting the bulging paper bag of chestnuts at him.
He peered at them and although there was nothing incriminating in Rhys’s scrawled note, she still felt self-conscious handing it over.
It was the only example of his handwriting she had and she was apparently still a hopeless romantic if she’d thought of that.
Her stepmum, Vivienne, embraced her as though this were a funeral. Perhaps it was – for her love life.
‘Okay, first have some wine.’
Ginny peered doubtfully at her dad. He didn’t usually thrust wine into her hand as though she might need it.
‘Now sit down here.’ He ushered her to the sofa.
With a flash of imagination, she pictured Rhys sitting here and wished she could have been a fly on the wall.
‘We’ve lit the firepit and it’ll be great for those chestnuts. I’ve looked up how to roast them. So we’ll check on the fire and get dinner ready while you look through your photos.’
‘Photos?’ Of course. What else would Rhys give her? He’d promised to develop the film she’d shot that day at the chapel. Maybe all she’d find inside was a photo of a vulture circling.
When Greg handed over a plain envelope, she pressed it between her fingers without opening it at first. It was too thick to be just the three photos she’d taken. Her curiosity quickly got the better of her caution and she opened the envelope.
She was in tears before she got to the third photo.
He was a genius. She swore there was more in those photographs than anyone had seen on the day.
He captured context, some kind of truth, and she had to wonder whether that instinct was more intense now he couldn’t remember faces.
It was especially disorienting when that truth was herself.
They were mostly candid shots and more often than not her hair was in her face and the angle clearly caught the bend in her ears, but he made her look whole, a complete person living her own unique life in the way she was meant to.
He couldn’t have been certain what he’d captured on her face, but it was a lot more than any awkward selfie where she was hiding everything for the aesthetic.
She flipped over to the photo she’d taken of the mountain village with the Dolomite peaks in the background and then she was smiling through her tears.
It wasn’t a great photo, a little grainy and out of focus in unexpected places.
But the light was extraordinary because of Rhys’s expertise with the exposure settings he’d set up before handing her the device.
The next photo – the vulture shot she’d been expecting – was downright terrible. She apparently had no luck with photographic moments or romantic ones. But when she flipped to the next one, her breath stopped entirely.
Although she remembered him snapping the shot almost carelessly, he’d turned her face into art.
It was nothing like most of the photos of herself she’d had taken, where she was smiling brightly into the camera, still the school kid trying to look nice in the class photo.
Here, she was form and colour, skin and bone, beauty and soul.
This photo was the greatest gift anyone had ever given her.
With her jaw wobbling, she turned to the last photo in the stack. If her close-up portrait had stopped her system in shock, everything revved up again at the sight of him peering up at her from the photo. The framing was basic but his face wasn’t.
In that one reserved look, she saw all of the smiles he’d sparingly bestowed on her. How had she forgotten the way his eyes drew her in?
I love you.
Would she have said it, if they’d talked properly that Sunday after the wedding? Knowing her, she probably would have. But did he want to hear it?
‘Darling?’ Vivi peered through the door from the kitchen. ‘You okay?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘But you can come in.’
‘Your dad said I shouldn’t look at the pictures unless you wanted me to. He took a peek while Rhys was here and thought perhaps he shouldn’t have.’
Ginny managed a chuckle, imagining the interaction again. ‘You’re welcome to see. Rhys already told me he took far too many pictures of me during the wedding. He must have gone through and sifted them out before sending the files to I Do.’
She pushed the photos in her stepmother’s direction and she flipped through them, oohing and ahhing.
‘I took these,’ she explained when Vivi reached the landscape shot, ‘on a film camera. It certainly made me think differently about photos. The camera is older than I am, apparently.’
‘I remember those days,’ Vivi commented. She gasped when she reached the art portrait. ‘That is stunning. Oh my. Ah, and this is the man himself? Did you take this?’
Ginny nodded, her gaze clinging to the photo again.
‘Dad said he was very reserved,’ Vivi commented.
‘He is.’ But he talked to me in the car and in the meadow – in bed. He just never mentioned he was leaving. It seemed unbearable now, that she didn’t know why he’d kept it from her.
The sliding door to the garden rattled open and Greg poked his head in. ‘Want to help me put the chestnuts on the fire? Then we can eat outside if you like. It’s just warm enough with a blanket.’
After shedding so many tears, Ginny found the deep calm in her blood and the warm fire brought an unexpected sense of well-being. When she reflected on it, that sense had been growing ever since she’d realised she’d misunderstood his behaviour on that last day.
He hadn’t callously thrown away their time together. Her panicked hurt had scuppered what could have been their last chance to put their relationship into some kind of context in their lives.
And he’d reached out. She appreciated what it would have cost him.
‘Ginny,’ her dad said after they’d finished eating their steak burgers and salad and Vivi had taken the plates back into the kitchen, ‘you don’t have to talk about anything if you don’t want to, but Rhys mentioned something you’d said to him about when Mum died.
He didn’t go into detail, but I hope you feel like you can talk to me about this. ’
It was strange to realise how much attention Rhys had paid, even back when she’d been convinced he didn’t like her.
‘You don’t have to worry about hurting me,’ Greg continued. ‘I miss her too, you know. Still.’
That was all it took to set off Ginny’s tears again. ‘I didn’t realise,’ she blubbered. ‘I thought you had to shut it out to be happy. I thought I was the only one—’
His arm came around her. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t notice how much this still bothered you. I thought you were young enough that maybe the grief wasn’t as bad.’
‘I always feel like a piece of myself is missing. Always.’
The firepit and her parents’ garden were little more than a blur of watery colour, but she saw clearly for perhaps the first time in her life.
She’d started to see it during the wedding.
A relationship wasn’t filling a space in the soul where something was missing.
Everyone’s soul was battered and pockmarked and repairing it was the work of time, gentleness and patience.
‘A piece of our family will always be missing, sweetheart,’ her father murmured.
‘But you married Vivi so quickly,’ Ginny said, daring to use her stepmother’s given name to utter the reproach she knew was childish, but it needed saying anyway.
‘There are no photos of Mum on the walls. It was like you wrote over her in our lives when, for most of my teenage years, all I wanted was her.’
‘Oh, my precious girl,’ was all her father said at first. ‘I’m so sorry. That’s not what I meant to do. I should have realised. I know the way you love. I should have guessed how deeply you still feel all of this.’
‘I’m not sure I realised myself,’ she said gently.
‘Well, I’m your father. I still should have realised.
’ He paused, staring into the coals. ‘I agonised over it, you know. I was worried my feelings for Vivi were just compensating for the loss of your mum. But I decided to trust it was real and Elspeth responded so well to her – I thought you did too.’
‘Turns out I have hidden depths,’ Ginny said with a half-hearted laugh.
Her father went still. She could feel his curious glance at her. ‘I think I saw those depths today – in his photos.’
Her hair stood on end and she bit her lip against the fresh urge to cry. ‘Yeah,’ she responded inadequately, but she was done waxing lyrical about souls.
‘I think he loves you.’
That knocked her back into the present. She was the one who was supposed to have hopes like that, but she hadn’t dared, when she loved him too much and the stakes were too high. ‘What?’
‘I thought you might have known that.’
‘No. Why would I know that? He doesn’t tell me anything.’ That wasn’t quite true. ‘He didn’t tell me he was leaving.’
‘Ah, is that why you don’t want to see him?’
‘No,’ she said again, this time quiet and miserable.
‘I do want to see him.’ That much was clear, now she understood his behaviour at the castle and he’d sent her these photos.
She had to see him. ‘It was a misunderstanding. He’s been through a lot and I don’t think he can love me.
But even if it’s just goodbye, I do want to see him. ’
Greg nodded solemnly. ‘Okay, then. It’s good you’ve worked that out now since he’s leaving tomorrow night and everything.’
Tomorrow!
It wasn’t long enough to plan what she was going to say, work out what gift was the right thing to communicate ‘I love you, but you don’t have to love me back’, what gesture she could make to prove she meant it.
She knew she was overcomplicating things. Rhys didn’t need gestures and gifts. Either he would respond or not. She couldn’t control the outcome and it scared her to think how much more devastated she’d feel if she told him she loved him and he politely patted her on the shoulder.
But one thing hadn’t changed: Ginny was stubborn and she wouldn’t give up until he damn well told her to.