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‘I wouldn’t feel guilty about losing your temper as it sounds to me as if he had it coming.’
‘Maybe...’ She shrugged this time. ‘But perhaps, now that my temper has cooled, with the benefit of hindsight I can see that my outburst could just as easily do some good for our relationship as it does bad. Only time will tell. But what I already know is that when I see him today, I will not make that mistake again because out of every misstep or failure we learn, and we come back stronger and better equipped.’ Her thumb caressed his palm of its own accord and she decided not to stop, using the flimsy excuse of him needing the contact to justify the intimacy when she needed it just as much.
‘I know you carry an enormous amount of guilt over Cora—much of it unnecessary in my view—but you are not ready to accept that yet. What your father did to her all those years ago would likely still have happened even if you had been there. Because you can only hide such things for so long and you would not have been listened to by your father then either. So you can punish yourself for what happened to her afterwards, blame yourself for not being there all you want, but it does not change the two fundamentals which no amount of self-flagellation can deny.’
‘There are two?’ He wasn’t convinced but was humouring her.
‘First and foremost, you have more than made up for it afterwards and secondly, Cora must have had faith in you because she entrusted her daughter to you, secure in the knowledge that you would do the job right. You are as much, if not more, of a rescuer than I am, Jasper, because you care too much. That is why I couldn’t be more certain that you will excel as Izzy’s papa. You built a business from the ground up and rapidly made a fortune to save her mother, so I can only imagine what mountains you will climb for her daughter. But even you can only ever climb each mountain one step at a time.’
He squeezed her hand, obviously touched. ‘At least one of us has faith in me.’
Faith suggested some room for doubt, whereas Hattie was certain he wouldn’t fail. He was as stubborn as she was and twice as resourceful. ‘Seeing as you are as hopeless a rescuer as I am, and seeing as we are both tenacious and relentless in that endeavour, why don’t we take on this first mountain together and between us, work out how to help Izzy say goodbye to her mother?’
