‘Four days later, the couple who owned the cat turned up and took him home. Noah put on a brave face and said goodbye, but he was devastated, I could tell. He was kind, caring, considerate.’ Her voice faltered. ‘But he lost his way.’
Tears flowed freely down her cheeks now. ‘I should’ve done more. I should’ve found him, nurtured him back to the boy he once was, shown him the way. It was my job,’ she cried, ‘as a mother. And I failed him!’
‘I need to get out of here.’ Jack held up his hands to tell his father to back off when he tried to reach out for him. ‘I need to leave here, now. I can’t do this.’
‘Jack, wait!’ Kent called after him but let him go, let him storm from the office. This was a lot to take in, far too much, and Jack needed to cool off before he’d listen to reason. If he ever would.
Kent knelt down in front of Nicole, holding her hands as she sobbed.
‘Is this why you told Evie to get away, when she showed up on your property that night?’ Nicole asked now.
Kent sighed, pushed himself to standing and pulled over a chair opposite. ‘I hated you as much as I hated Noah, until that day you came to the house,’ Kent explained. ‘But from that day, you became a friend, the closest one I’d ever had, as it turned out. I didn’t plan it that way, not at all, but you slotted right in to our lives, and with every day that passed, it became harder and harder to tell you who I was. I’d long since hidden away all the photographs of Cynthia—something Jack despised and which didn’t help our relationship—because they were too painful. Who knows, if I hadn’t hired you, maybe I would’ve put them on display again. But I knew I couldn’t risk you finding out who I really was. I knew it would scare you, it would break the friendship, and your friendship was something I found myself clinging onto almost as soon as I’d found it.
‘The night I saw Evie outside my property and realised you were helping her, two things happened. All I could see was a homeless person just like the figure who’d killed my wife. She was of the same mould and I wanted her gone.’
‘You said two things happened.’
Kent hesitated. Despite the winter outside, the heat in the office was working overtime and he removed his cufflinks, dropped them in his breast pocket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘You’d been with us for thirteen years, a lifetime, and the other thing that happened to me that night when I found you with Evie was that the fear inside me that you could be snatched away reared its ugly head. I realised how scared I was of ever losing you, like I lost Cynthia.’
Nicole’s hand reached out and covered his forearm and he stared down at it. All the years she’d been in the house their skin had never been so close, their minds had never intertwined as they were now. ‘You were always a good man to me, a real friend.’
Kent stood up, faced the wall. ‘That’s just it, you see. I realised I wanted to be more than a friend. I was falling in love with you and that night I realised just how much. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. Falling in love with the mother of your wife’s killer. It’s the stuff of chat shows! It’s almost laughable. And the guilt I felt. I hadn’t breathed a word of the truth to Jack over the years. I wanted to protect him from the cruel world and what had really happened. How could I ever explain my feelings to him?’
Nicole didn’t say anything, but he heard her get up and walk over to him. He felt her by his side, where she’d been for thirteen years without realising it.
‘You think I’m some kind of sick bastard, don’t you?’ He still didn’t look at her. Her body was inches away from his own.
‘No, I don’t.’ Her voice conveyed her understanding, her relief. ‘Oh, but I wish you’d told me all of this.’
‘You’d have run a mile.’
‘You’re right.’ She sighed. ‘Kent, please look at me.’
He turned slowly. ‘Are you telling me we could’ve ever been together, knowing my wife died at the hands of your son? Are you telling me it wouldn’t have driven an impossible wedge between us?’
Nicole reached a hand up to his cheek, brushed her fingers slowly down towards his mouth, grazing the faint stubble that couldn’t yet be seen unless she took a step closer. ‘Is that why you fired me? Because the situation was impossible?’
His hand covered hers. ‘I was scared. Scared of what would happen when you knew the truth, frightened of how Jack would change his view of you. And I could never have told you I loved you without explaining who you were, who we were. That would’ve magnified the lie, and I couldn’t have lived with it. A lie like that is no way to start a relationship. But I’m so sorry I did that to you.’
‘I left New York, you know. When it happened, when Noah … I went to Sicily, travelled around. I was trying to make sense of everything, or at least something. I wanted to get away from the news, the horrible things that go on in a big city. It was a couple of years until I felt ready to return to New York, and that was when I found work with a housekeeping agency and found you.’
She put her hand against his chest and his heart beat beneath her palm. ‘I always knew there was more to you than you revealed. I knew you had something you were keeping from me, from Jackson. I knew you had an inner kindness that most people never saw, but the night Evie showed up you were like a different person entirely. I think if you hadn’t fired me, I’d have had to walk away anyway. I couldn’t be with a man who didn’t believe in second chances, with a man who didn’t believe in the greater good.’
He reached out and hooked a corkscrew curl behind her ear, looked deep into chestnut eyes he’d missed since she’d stopped coming to the house every day. ‘Do you believe in second chances?’
Nicole leant her head against his chest, her arms snaking around his waist. ‘I do now,’ she said.
