Chapter Eight
I closed the office early, which wasn’t as surprising as the total lack of guilt felt as I set the alarm and locked the door two hours before quitting time.
The high street was still busy with shoppers milling around the stalls set up on both pavements.
Friday was market day and the road was closed to traffic, which was why I had arranged for Rhys to pick me up for our ‘non-date’ at the corner of a nearby residential street.
I was about ten minutes early, so I perched on a convenient bench to wait and lifted my face to the sun.
The wooden slats were warm beneath my bare legs, and there wasn’t even a whisper of a breeze to stir the leafy trees that lined the road.
Behind my sunglasses I could feel my eyes begin to close.
I didn’t hear his car pull up. Nor the sound of the driver’s door opening as Rhys climbed out. I only woke up when he stood before me, his shadow blocking out the late-afternoon sun.
‘Ellie.’
I jolted upright, momentarily thrown to be caught napping in the middle of the day. My sunglasses fell from my nose as I jerked awake and Rhys bent to retrieve them, kneeling at my feet to haul them out from beneath the bench.
A noisy thumping sound filled the air. Still half asleep, I wondered if it was my heart, which had a habit of pounding louder and harder whenever Rhys was around.
But it was only an approaching car full of teenagers, the stereo ramped up to a level their eardrums would one day regret.
It slowed down as it drove past, and heads leant out of the rolled-down windows.
‘Say yes!’ one of them called.
‘Let’s see the ring,’ yelled another.
Rhys was grinning as he straightened up with my sunglasses in his hand.
I grabbed them and hurriedly slipped them on, wishing they were larger so that my blush had a chance of hiding behind the tinted lenses.
I’d wanted to appear so cool and composed today.
Unflappable. But just five minutes in and I’d already failed in that mission.
‘Well, that was embarrassing. Can we start over?’ I asked as he held open the passenger door for me, still smiling.
He gave an easy-going shrug. ‘We can if you want. But I think the Sleeping Beauty intro and the proposal bit are going to be hard to beat.’
I gave a reluctant chuckle.
‘Mostly, my dates tend to fall asleep at the end of the night, after I’ve bored them rigid. And I’ve always been more of a propose-on-the-third-date kind of guy.’
I giggled, caught his eye, and we both burst out laughing, and it felt so right, so easy, like something we’d done a thousand times before, even though we hadn’t. It intrigued and scared me.
‘This isn’t a date,’ I reminded him, feeling the need to draw boundary lines in the sand one more time before one of us forgot what they were and did something stupid.
‘Whatever you say,’ Rhys said amiably, pulling smoothly away from the kerb.
I was still holding the denim jacket which I’d brought but doubted I was going to need.
‘You can throw that on the back seat, if you want,’ Rhys said, his attention now on the traffic, which was beginning to build up as rush hour approached.
I swivelled around to do as he suggested.
The jacket landed on the upholstery, beside a large white paper bag.
It was the kind you get from pharmacies when you pick up a prescription.
There was a label on it, but I was too far away to read it.
And anyway, it was none of my business. But something about the bag bothered me.
Even though I laughed at all the appropriate places in an amusing story Rhys related as he drove, the bag kept snagging at my thoughts and tugging at the hemline of my conscience like an impatient toddler.
We stopped just once on the journey for petrol, and my inner Pandora finally got the better of me.
When Rhys left the pump to go inside to pay, I twisted around as far as my seat belt would allow.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to see on the bag’s label, but I don’t think it was his daughter’s name.
I bit my lip worriedly, knowing I was being overly curious – or downright nosy – but that looked like an awful lot of medication for one little girl.
Twenty minutes later we swung onto the gravelled forecourt of a pub I’d never been to before. Despite the hour, the car park and the bar were already busy.
‘Shall we try the garden?’ Rhys asked, resting one hand at the small of my back to guide me towards a pair of glass doors that led out to the patio and a lawned area beyond.
‘Sure.’
His hand fell away the second we emerged into the lingering warmth of one of the hottest June days I could remember.
For late afternoon, even the beer garden was surprisingly full.
We scoped the area and ended up snagging the only free table, which happened to be next to an enormous lavender bush.
From the low hum of bees who were buzzing in and out of the foliage, it was easy to see why this had been the last table to be claimed.
‘Would you rather sit inside?’ Rhys asked, his eyes following the flight of a bee as it circled my head.
‘No, this is fine,’ I assured him as I slid onto a wrought-iron chair and repositioned my sunglasses from the top of my head to my nose.
The arresting green of Rhys’s eyes was hidden behind dark-tinted shades, but the black t-shirt he’d paired with faded jeans did little to conceal the marks the lightning had left on his body.
They appeared, if anything, even more pronounced than the week before.
He caught me looking and pulled a rueful expression.
‘They’re still here,’ he said.
I nodded and then stepped over so many boundaries I should have been arrested for trespass. ‘They’re not unattractive,’ I said. ‘And they’re the mark of a survivor.’
Rhys lowered his sunglasses and looked at me over their rim.
‘That’s a very glass-half-full way of looking at things.’
‘I suppose it is. And if you’d have said that about me a week ago, I’d have told you that wasn’t me at all.’
‘But now?’
I gave a confused sigh. ‘Now everything feels a little different.’
‘Different isn’t always bad.’
The day was hot but the heat from his eyes was even more intense.
I swear I could feel myself about to combust, my sleeveless shift dress too warm and my hair too heavy for the back of my neck.
I swept it up in one hand, praying for a breeze.
I couldn’t tell if his gaze lingered on the curve of my neck longer than it should have before I released the flame-coloured strands or whether the lightning had fried some important circuitry in my brain and I could no longer differentiate fact from fantasy.
I licked my lips, which were suddenly incredibly dry.
‘What would you like to drink?’
‘A really cold beer,’ I said, with so much feeling he laughed.
I tried hard not to let my eyes follow him as he strode back inside to get our drinks, but he pulled my gaze as though it was magnetised to him.
Sitting alone in the sunshine, my thoughts went back to the bag of medication in his car.
How rude would it be, on a scale of ‘perfectly okay’ to ‘totally unacceptable’, to ask him what the meds were for.
Unbidden, my mother popped into my head, like a parental Jiminy Cricket.
She was right. Good manners prevented me from asking.
But once in my thoughts, Mum proved hard to evict.
I’d tried to reach her several times over the last few days but still hadn’t been able to make contact.
I glanced towards the pub doors, but there was no tall, dark-haired man standing in their frame. So I reached for my phone and quickly rang my mother’s number again.
It wasn’t unusual for weeks to pass between our phone calls – sometimes even longer if we’d fallen out over some stupid disagreement. But something was starting to feel wrong about not being able to reach her for the best part of a week.
This time, when I got her voicemail, I did leave a message.
‘Hey, Mum, it’s me. I was just wondering where you are. Is it your WI day, or the day you go swimming? I can never remember your schedule. Either way, give me a call when you get this, okay?’
I bit my lip as I severed the connection and slid the phone back into my pocket, unable to silence a strange feeling of disquiet at the back of my mind. It felt like something important was hovering there, but each time I tried to grab hold of it, it evaporated away like smoke.
We drank icy-cold beer straight from the bottle, clinking them together in a toast to new friends, which tasted almost as good on my tongue as the Bud Light.
For a man who was so good at keeping a conversation alive, Rhys was equally skilled in the art of maintaining a comfortable silence. So he surprised me when he broke it.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what happened to us last week.’
I sat up straighter in my chair.
‘Do you think it was something more than just pure luck that we both survived it?’ he asked.
I blew out a long breath. ‘That sounds like something my friend Mel would say. She’s always been way more woo-woo than me.’
The corners of Rhys’s eyes crinkled appealingly whenever he smiled. The ever-present grooves there suggested it was something he did a lot.
‘She’d probably say it’s a sign we’re meant to do something big – something important – with our lives from here on.’
‘Maybe the universe was giving us a wake-up call?’ Rhys suggested.
I tossed the idea from one side of my thoughts to the other, unsure how I felt about it.
‘What? Like we’re meant to do something spectacular going forward? Because as much as I’d love to find a cure for cancer or solve global warming, I’m actually much better at just selling houses – or at least I used to be.’
He smiled. ‘Perhaps the message is more like checking we’re on the path we’re meant to be travelling. Maybe the lightning has given us a chance to do a system reset.’
‘And now you sound more like my other friend, Jackson, who’s a computer genius. Are you sure you don’t work in tech?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Still graphic design,’ he said, confirming what he’d previously told me.
There was a long pause, and I honestly thought we were done with the topic when he returned to it in a way that suddenly changed everything.
‘The other day, when the lightning struck, I was on my way to meet with Tasha’s mum, Annalise.’
Damn it. Even her name was pretty.
The buzzing of bees filled the silence as Rhys appeared to be weighing up whether or not to continue.
‘She wants us to try again.’
The words fell like an unexploded bomb between us. The ‘we’re not together right now’ suddenly made sense.
‘We’ve been separated for two years.’ There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but Rhys’s eyes were suddenly full of them. ‘It wasn’t a pain-free split. I was on my way to meet her to discuss things when the storm broke and I took shelter beneath the tree.’
‘Had you made a decision? If that’s not too personal a question to ask.’
It was as personal as hell, but he didn’t seem to mind.
‘Made it and changed it back again God knows how many times before the rain came down. I guess I was hoping for some kind of sign.’
I gave a humourless laugh. ‘You got struck by lightning, Rhys. I think that might have been your sign, right there.’
‘Maybe.’ He turned away from me then, his green eyes focusing on the sun, which was slowly sinking towards the horizon in an amber ball. ‘It’s hard to think about walking back into the fire when you’ve been burnt once before.’
There was a lot to unpack behind his words. Whatever had happened between him and his ex, it had hurt him badly.
‘I guess only you can say if the good bits outweigh the bad,’ I said, realising I absolutely sucked as an Agony Aunt. Giving relationship advice when I’d yet to have a successful one myself was a joke.
‘Every good memory I have of that relationship is tied up in Tasha and being her dad.’
It felt like everything had suddenly gone quiet. As though every customer in the beer garden had fallen silent, the warm summer breeze had stopped rustling the leaves, and even the bees had ceased buzzing. As much as I wanted to join in the silence, my conscience wouldn’t let me.
‘I’m going to stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong, because I know how it feels growing up without a dad.
’ My throat was getting tighter with every word, making it hard to carry on.
‘It was a lot. It always felt like something was missing in my life.’ I paused for a second, gathering up the strength to continue.
‘Maybe you and Annalise owe it to your daughter to try again.’
Rhys just looked at me for the longest moment.
It’s hard to conjure up an encouraging smile when you’ve just sabotaged something that could have been everything. But I gave it my best shot.