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‘Cain?’
Alexa’s soft prompt pulls me up sharp and I know I need to escape soon, that it’s getting too much, but I can answer this question easily enough. I can talk about the youth centre in my sleep. It’s my passion to help those that need it. To make sure they have a place to go to, to belong, when they don’t have a home of their own or home is part of the problem. I know it chimes a chord with me—Alexa even more so, when I really think about it.
‘We have a youth entrepreneur scheme. Once a year they get to pitch to investors and I always sit in.’
I look at my plate, which is almost empty, and I can’t stomach any more. I roll my shoulders and try to think up an excuse to leave that won’t disappoint Mum.
There isn’t one.
‘And do they get investment?’
I look at Alexa, note her continued interest and feel a sudden pull to tell her more, to share the importance of this venture and why I care about it so much.
But sharing with Alexa...it opens me up, makes me vulnerable. This past week—these last three months, even—have proved just how much I’m not over her. That no amount of hate will protect me from her.
‘The ones that are ready, yes,’ I say. ‘The others get invaluable advice from the best in the business. It gives them drive and confidence in their abilities to succeed.’
‘As well as giving them a place to call home when they don’t have a real one to go to,’ Mum chips in.
I don’t know whether she realises it, but she’s just described me. The man I was when I set up the centre. I wasn’t a kid, or a teen with good reason to feel how I did. I was a man who should have known better—who had thrown it all away because I was jealous, obsessed with being pushed out and not feeling good enough.
Something that had only been reinforced
when I returned after those first three months, hoping to make amends, to win Alexa back, only to find they’d all moved on quite happily without me.
My body burns with the memory—the sight of them on the steps of the registry office, taking photos, laughing, smiling. I never should have gone. The second I learned of their location—from my father’s PA, of all people—I should have bolted, put myself on a plane to America and not looked back.
Instead I stood there in the shadows, a frozen statue, incapable of moving until they disappeared out of sight.
And now I’ve come back again, when it’s all too late and that family is irrevocably broken...lost.
No, not completely lost. You still have Mum. And she needs you as much as you need her.
But what of Alexa?
It seems she’s part of the package, thanks to her closeness to Mum—a bond that only seems to have grown over the years. Hell, she’s even taught her to cook, something I never thought Lexi would take to or show an interest in. And they have such an easy awareness of one another’s routines, an obvious fondness in their eyes when they look at one another.
Yes, she’s definitely part of the package.
I meet Alexa’s eye and I don’t want to see the admiration she’s directing at me now. I don’t want to react to it with the warmth that’s spreading inside, soothing the hurt with scary ease.
‘It sounds great.’
I know she means it. I know that in spite of our past she’s praising me.
It’s the kind of youth centre she could have done with when I first stumbled across her, lost in the corridor of our crowded school, wide-eyed and alone. She was the epitome of a troubled teen, tossed from foster home to foster home, school to school, as they struggled to tame her. And I, the sports hero, fell for her hook, line and sinker.
I took her under my wing, brought her home, gave her everything I could. And my family took to her too, her intellect making her the perfect study buddy for my brother. They were the same age, after all.
It didn’t matter then. They studied together, but I got to date her, and our relationship grew over the years. But then so did theirs. They finished school together, graduated from university together, worked in the family company together...
My gut twists with that old familiar pang, but as I look at her now, in that oversized sweater, with those ridiculous socks covered in bunnies beneath the table, the last seven years evaporate. I’m transported back to cosy nights on the sofa when she’d lie with her legs across my lap, book in hand, while I’d catch up on the football. Occasionally she’d shake her head at me as I shouted at the screen, but her eyes would be filled with love, all for me.
The reimagined scene flickers to life inside me, and as I continue to watch her I feel that old protective need come alive once more, the desire to have back what we lost growing out of my control.
And if I can’t depend on my control to keep those feelings at bay then I know I’m in trouble.
Heart, mind and soul.
