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Just as undisguised happiness had danced around in him at the idea that he was doing something for Effie, making her life a little easier.
Nell had been happy. Which meant that Effie was happy. Because her happiness was intrinsically linked with that of her daughter. It was sweet.
When the hell had he ever cared about anything sweet? But it mattered to him. She mattered. Yet he had no explanation for why. He didn’t even stop to consider it. Deliberately.
He didn’t want to dig into his emotions or responses. He didn’t wish to ask himself why he had practically jumped at the chance to insert himself deeper into Effie’s family life. He hadn’t allowed himself to ask any one of the hundreds of questions
which charged around his head.
He told himself that the only reason he’d insisted they stayed with him was because it would have been inhumane to knowingly leave mother and daughter in that freezing flat. He refused to acknowledge that it had anything to do with the kick which had reverberated around his body that first time he’d seen her stride into Resus. Or the fire which had ripped through him when he’d walked into that lobby to see her standing there so regally. Not to mention the passion that had later flared between them on that restaurant date.
It made no sense. Perhaps it was because he knew that soon Effie would be gone and life would revert back to normal.
The knowledge should please him. Not make him feel as though a weight was pressing down inside his chest.
It was the familiarity of it all, he concluded eventually. It was simply that he was drawing parallels between Effie’s life, caring for her only just teenage daughter, with his life growing up, when he had often had sole responsibility for his younger teenage siblings, Hetti and Sasha. And Rafi too, for that matter, although he’d barely been nine at that time.
He remembered those feelings of loneliness and being scared, especially when his mother had been going through one of her episodes.
But wasn’t that part of the issue? He and Effie had agreed to be each other’s buffers. Nothing more. She wasn’t supposed to be making him take trips down memory lane. He certainly wasn’t supposed to be playing at happy families and helping out with her daughter.
Was he somehow giving her the impression that there was something between them? Playing with Effie’s emotions in much the same way that his father had always so cruelly toyed with his mother’s feelings? Surely it was a case of like father like son. Rafi had definitely suggested that was the case with his own wife.’
‘I’m not our father,’ Tak growled to himself, but the accusation pounded through him, making the blood heat in his veins.
Abruptly he realised he was outside the hospital and at his car, with no memory of how he’d even got there. He hit the ignition button, revved the engine, and pulled neatly out of the parking bay and onto the road beyond. He’d go for a drive. A long, fast drive in his prized car—the kind of vehicle which wasn’t at all conducive to a man with a wife and kids. It would clear his head and remind him of exactly what he wanted his life to look like.
And it wasn’t settling down. Because what if he was wrong? What if he was like his father, much as it might gall him? If there was any chance he was like that man, then Tak knew he would inevitably hurt his family, exactly the way his own father had hurt his.
Which was why he couldn’t go home. Not with Effie and Nell there. Reminding him of the family he could never have. That life wasn’t for him, and the sooner he remembered that, the better.
* * *
It was the early hours of the morning when Tak returned home, his head finally clear. Or at least as clear as it was going to get.
He still hadn’t solved the puzzle that was Dr Effie Robinson, or why she so intrigued him. But he had convinced himself that he didn’t have time for riddles and games.
Their original agreement—to play each other’s buffer at the hospital gala—had worked perfectly. The rest of it was unnecessary complications which they should have avoided. That date at the restaurant should have been avoided. The kisses certainly should have been avoided.
But the beauty of it was that as soon as the central heating was fixed in Effie’s flat and the asbestos was gone, she would be gone. And he could pretend all this had never happened.
In the meantime, sleep was certainly going to elude him.
Tak wandered down to the games suite.
The last person he’d expected to see there was Effie. And he certainly hadn’t expected to see her, cue in hand, making the perfect pool game break, as though she was some kind of hustler.
He stopped, ridiculously enchanted all over again. Just like that.
It was only when he watched her pot the final black that he realised he’d watched her play an entire game. Lurking in the shadows like some kind of admirer from afar. Like some kind of adolescent kid.
‘I didn’t know you played,’ he said, stepping out into the room.
She jumped, as if he’d caught her red-handed.
He made a mental note to get the lighting in the room changed. It had been designed to be ambient, but right now he didn’t like the way the soft glow bounced off the walls, making the place feel so cosy, so...intimate. Yet ironically making him feel just that little bit too exposed.
He could put it down to the time of night—bewitched at the witching hour. But that suggested a ridiculous fancifulness with which he wasn’t commonly associated.
