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Flavia froze. What on earth …?
Apart from her grandmother’s solicitors, no one knew she was here. Her eyes hardened. If her father were trying to contact her, using them to do so, he would not succeed. She would have nothing to do with him ever again. On that she was adamant. She was free of him now, and he would never harm or injure her again.
Not that he’d made any attempt to contact her before. She’d presumed he’d accepted he had no more hold over her and therefore he could not use her for his own purposes again. So she had ceased to exist for him. What he was up to these days she neither knew nor cared. Presumably Leon had bailed him out, and he was merrily sporting Anita—or her successor—wherever he wanted to be.
She walked down to the office and went inside.
‘Did they leave any message?’ she asked.
The other carer—Maria—shook her head. ‘They just wanted to know if you worked here,’ she told Flavia.
Flavia stiffened. ‘Did you tell them?’
‘Yes.’ The other woman nodded. ‘Shouldn’t I have?’
Flavia gave a quick smile. ‘No, that’s fine—don’t worry.’
But behind the smile she was frowning. Who could it have been if not her father?
She could feel her heart convulse. Heard a name leap in her head. Immediately she crushed it down.
It isn’t Leon! He won’t get in touch! I know he won’t! He’s got no reason to—none at all!
She would never see him again. She knew that. Accepted it. Had made herself accept it.
It’s over—completely over. I treated him shamefully and though I have tried to make amends, it cannot be mended. Because I can’t undo what I did to him. My father pimped me to him and I went along with it. It doesn’t matter why I did it—I did it. So all our time together was a lie! How could it have been anything else?
Anguish filled her. Well, she’d been punished for what she’d done. Punished in a way she had never foreseen. With a perfection of justice that was exquisite in its torment.
I went to him at my father’s bidding and my punishment was to fall in love with him—and for him to know what I’d done and hate me for it …
She was in love with a man who had every reason to hate her and despise her, and that was something she would have to live with from now on. Until surely, she prayed, love withered and died. For it must eventually—it must wither and die without nurture, without hope.
I made amends in the only way I could and I have to leave it at that. I have to.
She took a razored breath, setting off back down the corridor to go on
with her work. As she tended her next charge, washing and bathing her, helping her into fresh clothes, settling her comfortably once again, she almost she found herself envying her patients’ dissociation from the world. Wherever their minds were, they did not have to deal with the emotions that knifed through her so tormentingly. They had gone beyond emotion—gone beyond love …
Beyond loss.
Her hours at work passed swiftly enough, for there was never a shortage of things to do. It was a good care home, Flavia knew, but seeing its inmates she also knew, with absolute conviction and certainty, that her grandmother would have hated it—however good the quality of care. She had only been contented at Harford—knowing somewhere in the depths of her silent mind that she was at home. Safe.
The knowledge was another layer of torment in the vortex that twisted constantly in her heart now.
I could only keep Gran at Harford by doing what I did to Leon—there was no other way. No other way.
But, whatever the motive, the deed was the same. Shaming her. Damning her.
So I have to pay the price without complaint, without self-pity.
‘Flavia!’
The sound of her name broke her reverie of misery. She looked up. Matron was beckoning her. Dutifully, Flavia went over to her.
‘You’ve got a visitor,’ Matron said. ‘Usually I don’t allow such things in working time, but on this occasion I will make an exception.’
There was the slightest ruffled look about her normally brisk manner, but before Flavia could speculate, Matron was ushering her inside her own inner sanctum, which she hadn’t been in since her original job interview nearly four months ago. But she had hardly got inside the doorway before she stopped dead. Frozen.
