Page 46 of Watch For Me By Candlelight

But too late — he saw her and raised his hand in an apologetic greeting. ‘Hey. Can I buy a ticket?’ he tried with a half-smile. ‘I took a wrong turning in Derbyshire and somehow found myself down here.’

Kate shook her head. ‘No. Sorry, we’re closing soon.’

‘Ah. I thought so. Just as well I don’t really want to see the museum today after all. I’d rather see you.’

‘Would you now? Theo, this isn’t a good time.’ Her heart was rattling in her chest, so much so, that she wrapped her arms around herself.

‘It’ll never be a good time for you, will it? Not after the way I left.’ He dropped his head, looking embarrassed, then looked back up, a challenge in his eyes. ‘Are you back with Chris, then?’

‘No.’ She stared at him silently for a moment, taking in the dishevelled look and the shadows beneath his eyes. ‘How’s your daughter? And her mother?’ She tasted bitterness in that word, but couldn’t help it.

Theo shrugged. It was his turn to wrap his arms around his body. ‘That’s what I came to talk to you about.’ He looked away, beyond her, somewhere she didn’t know existed. ‘I’d prefer to do it face to face. Is there anywhere we can go?’ He brought his attention back to her and her heart stuttered a little.

‘Yes.’ She was surprised to find herself agreeing after all. ‘We could go to the Dragon if you wanted. There’s a beer garden. Well. Bob calls it the beer garden. It’s three picnic tables and one umbrella between them, on a patch of grass that used to have a shed on.’

Theo’s face broke into a grin and, reluctantly, Kate found herself grinning back. ‘I’ll just lock everything up and then we can go.’

‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said softly, and despite herself, she felt thrills of desire prickling up her spine.

* * *

They had managed to get a table in the beer garden and sat now with two glasses of home-made lemon and elderflower pressé between them. Bob’s micro-brewery, Kate told Theo, had recently expanded to make what Bob called ‘botanical drinks’. The story around the village was that Bob foraged the surrounding countryside for whatever he could use in them, for free, which was why, they joked, two drinks never tasted the same.

Whatever Bob put in them, the pressé was very good. But they weren’t here to talk about drinks, Theo acknowledged, and so he stared at his glass, trying to think of the best way to tell her.

Eventually, he decided that he just had to say it. ‘Okay.’ He looked up and saw her watching him. Her expression was still guarded, but at least she was here with him. ‘So, I have a daughter called Poppy, and she’s two. But you already know that. And, obviously, Poppy has a mother. She’s called Lori. We hadn’t been together very long, when she told me she was pregnant. It was a bit of a shock, but we decided to have the baby and try to make the best of it. We’d try, we said, to be a proper family, and see where it took us. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out how we’d expected; and we don’t live together anymore.’

‘Oh!’ Kate’s shoulders suddenly seemed to relax. ‘Why didn’t you say—’

But Theo shook his head to stop her, and saw her tense up again. ‘It’s not that easy. You see, I didn’t realise Lori had a drinking problem until Poppy was about a year old. By then, we’d gone our separate ways, and I used to take Poppy on a weekend. I’d have taken her more often, but my work kind of negated that. A baby’s not the best thing to be carrying around when you’re trying to shoe a horse.’ He tried to smile, but couldn’t. ‘And then Lori told me Poppy wasn’t mine anyway.’ His brow furrowed, remembering. ‘It’s not easy to think that you’ve been bringing up another man’s child as your own. It turned out she’d been seeing someone else all the time she’d been with me.’ He pushed his fingers through his hair.

‘That’s when I threw myself into anything I could to make me feel better — to stop me feeling so numb. To fill the gap.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s when I did the dive up in Scotland with Maeve. Part of me probably wanted to be thrashed to bits on the rocks, but it never happened. Anyway. The guy she’d been seeing started to suspect Poppy wasn’t his either.’ He paused. ‘It was after Poppy’s first birthday party that one of our mutual friends told me he thought Lori had a problem. And my reaction? So what? What the fuck has it to do with me?’ He looked at Kate, gauging her reaction.

She just sat in silence, staring at him.

Then she managed to ask a question. ‘What had she been doing? At Poppy’s party?’

‘What hadn’t she been doing? I was told she was so drunk, she passed out in the bathroom and had to go and get her stomach pumped.’ He pulled a face. ‘The guy she was seeing, who was supposed to be Poppy’s father, had to look after the baby, and that cramped his style. And then it was everything to do with me, because apparently, at the party, she started arguing with this guy and taunting him, saying Poppy was mine anyway, you could tell just by looking at her. So.’ Theo twisted the glass around. ‘I suspect that’s when he decided Poppy wasn’t anything to do with him. And just to complicate matters, Poppy was starting to look a lot more like me, and a lot less like either of those two. But by then, I’d missed out on so much. Obviously, Poppy’s first birthday; and her first proper words, that sort of thing.’

‘Shit.’ Kate looked stunned.

‘Very shit. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I went back to her after that. I felt I owed it to Poppy to try and make it work, but it was awful. Beyond awful.’

‘Did you live with her again?’ Kate’s voice was quietly horrified.

Theo nodded. ‘Yes. Until I realised she didn’t want me around for me. She wanted an unpaid babysitter while she went out partying. So I walked away and she told me I’d never see Poppy again.

‘That’s when I came here, to try and sort things out in my head. The first time I saw you, I started believing there might be a life beyond Lori — when I bumped into you in the street, that very first day.’ He smiled down into his glass, remembering it. ‘So I came down again — and you went to break up with Chris, although I didn’t know that, of course.’ He looked up at her and she blushed, not meeting his eyes. ‘I’d been looking for you all day and was just about to give up when you came back. But my friend Jared messaged me. He told me Lori was up to her old tricks and she’d been spotted in a bar. And he thought that Poppy was in the house, on her own, because Lori was down the road, in a pub, with her tongue down some bastard’s throat, telling everyone I was back again and Poppy was with me. Jared found out that wasn’t true, so he called me.’

‘Dear God!’ Kate reached out and squeezed his hand.

‘Oh, that’s not all.’ He grinned at her, so brightly it was entirely fake. ‘It was all fine, because she had the baby monitor with her, so she’d know if there was a problem. Oh. Forgive me.’ He snapped his fingers, as if he’d forgotten something. ‘That’s right. It was all fine apart from the fact that the monitor didn’t reach further than 50 feet and the pub was two blocks from her house, besides which she left it in the toilets of some bar, then she’d gone home with a guy she’d only just met.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But she did it all the time, and Poppy was no worse off, so what difference did it make?’

‘She said that?’ Kate’s cheeks were scarlet with rage.

‘She did.’

‘Well why is Poppy still with her? It’s neglect, pure and simple.’