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‘Who are you?’
At the aggressive growl the photo she was holding slipped to the floor. Not that she appeared to register the sound of breaking glass. Soren watched as she closed her eyes, braced her slender shoulders and painted on a smile before turning around to face the hostile suspicion being directed at her by a now fully awake Tor.
‘Hello, Grandpa, it’s Anna. I came to visit. I brought you some things, some photos from your study and—’
‘Who are you?’
‘The book we were reading...would you like—?’
There was the vicious expression in Tor’s watery pale eyes and he tried to rise from his chair but collapsed weakly back. ‘Help, thief...put that down!’
She tensed, her soothing calm paper thin, and she pitched her voice to a coaxing gentle murmur. ‘It’s me, Grandpa... A-Anna.’
Despite all her effort her voice cracked emotionally. She knew it was the disease not her grandpa speaking, throwing out the wild insults, but it was always heartbreaking to witness.
His mood could change without warning; the episodes of aggression that turned him into a stranger were occurring with more and more frequency.
She flashed Soren a look tinged with desperation. ‘Please go,’ she said, reacting instantly to her deeply embedded protective instincts, moving to shield her grandfather from this uninvited guest’s scrutiny. Heartbreaking enough that this disease had robbed Grandpa Henry of his dignity without there being an audience.
Soren didn’t say anything; he had no intention of going anywhere.
‘I know what they think but I didn’t kill anyone!’
‘Grandpa, no one is saying that.’ She gasped, horrified at the idea he was lost in this nightmare.
‘It wasn’t me...he was weak and stupid. What sort of man deserts his family?’ he spat out contemptuously.
Every muscle in Soren’s body clenched. It was only by a cosmic effort of will that he didn’t challenge the man sitting there taunting him. The insidious pity that had been creeping up on him instantly died, because this performance was for him, of that there could be no doubt.
‘Who are you?’ He turned to Soren. ‘Get her out of here, Stein. I have a very important meeting... Where is everyone?’ As abruptly as it had emerged the aggression seemed to drain out of him, leaving a tired, shrunken old man sitting there.
‘I’m here,’ Anna soothed.
‘Get her away from me!’
‘Please don’t be afraid. I’m...’ She saw his face change once more, saw the anger, but as always it was the fear she could sense underneath, worse even than the fact that the angry words that fell from his lips had no meaning, that he didn’t recognise her—he wasafraidof her—that cut the deepest.
Blinking back tears, she told herself fiercely that thiswasn’thim, not Grandpa Henry, as she began to slowly back away.
It broke her heart; he was in there somewhere, lost.
‘I’m going, it’s fine, I’ll get Tanya or Will...or—’ Her progress came to an abrupt halt as she backed into solid male.
The impulse to lean into the warm, solid strength was hard to resist, but she was used to standing on her own feet.
A rock face would have had more give. Before she could compose herself enough to pull away, hands came to rest lightly on her shoulders. They were large and heavy, not restraining her. She stood there for a moment breathing in the scent of his soap, feeling the warmth of his body, the strength of this stranger’s hands.
She was seized by an irrational conviction that if she could absorb some of his strength, she could cope with the fact her grandfather was waving his walking stick at her and yelling what was probably meant to be abuse but was unintelligible.
If hearts really did break hers would be lying on the floor right now in a million pieces.
She was willing back the tears she knew were shining in her eyes as she attempted to pull away. For a moment he didn’t react to her murmuredsorryand a request for him to get a nurse.
When the pressure of his big hands lifted she felt strangely ambivalent about the broken physical contact, which was ridiculous. She had been standing on her own feet for... Well, for ever, really. There had only ever been Grandpa Henry standing between her and being totally alone, and now there was...no one. Straightening her shoulders and tugging herself free of this spiral into pathetic self-pity, she went to move forward but the visitor, still ignoring her request to fetch help, stepped past her.
Soren swore softly under his breath, it went against his every instinct to play the old man’s game, but watching her radiate hurt as she fell totally for Tor’s act had nudged his dormant protective instincts into inconvenient life. One thing the scene had revealed was that there could be no doubt at this point that for his granddaughter this pretence was real.
While it didn’t mean she didn’t know, and that she might be deeply involved in the illegal house of cards that was about to crash down on her grandfather was still a question mark, she did believe Tor’s act and no one deserved that.
