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“No. I don’t need to.”
She was quiet, waiting for him to continue, and eventually her patience was rewarded.
“It was Gower.” He stared straight ahead, his mind being unwillingly dredged back to the past. “He’d just remarried. I found her in the middle of a heap of old pictures. Wedding photos. Baby photos. It was all very dramatic. Like something out of a cheap film.”
Finn shook her head slowly. She was lost for which words would be best, and so she said none.
Surprisingly, Caradoc found himself continuing regardless. “Gower was the love of her life. Or so she said.”
Finn sipped her coffee. “You don’t agree with that. Or you don’t believe her. I can’t tell.”
His laugh was gruff. “God damn it, Finn. Stop reading my mind like that.”
She shrugged. “It’s not your mind so much as your voice.”
His eyes were thoughtful. “You’re right on both counts. I think they were a terrible couple. I was only young when they split, but what I know of my mother, and what I came to understand about Gower … there was no way he’d ever have been able to answer her emotional needs. It wasn’t him she loved, so much as the idea of being the victim. The poor wife who was left stranded with a young son. Loving him in such a tragic way really played into that image she had. Suicide right after his marriage? The cherry on top.”
“Caradoc!” Finn was appalled. “How can you trivialise it like that?”
“Easily. You can’t imagine what these people are like. You’re worlds apart
.”
“It’s too, too cynical,” she said with a shake of her head. “Even for you.”
His smile was half-lit. “That’s who I am.”
It was a caution she chose not to heed. “You don’t think that maybe your mum just loved him that much? That desperately?”
“No.”
“But to have tried to … I mean, it’s really dramatic for someone to do what she did.”
“She’s dramatic.”
Finn pulled a face. “I think you’re wrong.” She held up a hand to forestall his objection. “Okay, I don’t know your mum, and I never met Gower. But you’re being too dismissive of her love for him. It’s like the notion of that kind of desperate love offends you.”
“It does,” he said simply. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe in an emotion that can be so hurtful.”
“So you’re saying love’s not real?”
He dragged a hand through his hair. “Jesus, Finn. Why are we even talking about this?”
Her heart was tingling. Her mouth was dry. Her pulse was a torrent of fast-moving feeling; it beat like a drum in her ears. She ignored his question. Something was pushing her to dig deeper into his feelings, even though she knew she was exposing her own vulnerabilities wide open. “Why do you think something like Romeo and Juliet has been so universally and historically adored? It resonates with people for exactly this reason. We all believe in the powerful hold of tragic love. Deep down, it’s something we all fear. Loving someone so strongly that you’ll do something totally out of character … we’re all capable of that, Caradoc.”
He had spoken from deep in his soul. But now, he was listening, and he was hearing her words with a sense of concern. “You sound as though you speak from experience.” Careful. Guarded. Cold.
She flicked her gaze down to the table top in a gesture that was as betraying as if she’d spoken.
“I speak from … I mean … it’s just a fact of life. Try looking at your mother through the perspective of her heartbreak. Try to see every decision she made, after leaving Gower, as a woman who was deeply, desperately unhappy. Who’d had everything she wanted in life and then lost it.”
He swallowed and his Adam’s Apple jerked in the thick column of his neck. “I will never understand it,” he said simply, finally. And to underscore his point, he continued. “I would never love like that. I have no interest in the kind of mess my mother made of her life. Or Gower, for that matter. Love is an excuse for stupidity. It’s self-indulgent and it’s weak.”
She sipped her coffee, and beneath the table, she curled the nails of one hand into her palm. She dug them deep into her flesh, hoping that the pain would distract her from the greater ache she was feeling.
Why was she so upset? After all, she’d known that loving him was a dangerous, risky proposition. Never had she hoped he would actually return those feelings, had she? Or had she been nursing that stupid hope in her chest this whole time? Had she really been thinking they might have been falling in love with one another?
“Do you hear that?” Caradoc was teasing her, and Finn lifted her eyes to his face in confusion.
