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“What are you doing here?” Don’s voice thundered from the doorway. “Are you upsetting my wife?” he bellowed, and with long strides, he walked up to Caitlin and folded his arms around her before he fixed his blazing eyes on Dale.
Caitlin laughed and patted his cheek. “It’s fine, my darling, relax. He loves Zoe.” She smiled and kissed her husband.
“What?” Don asked while his wife was kissing him.
“He loves Zoe, that’s why he’s behaving like a lunatic.” She smiled wider. “Remember what you were like?”
Don hugged his wife to him. “That certainly explains a lot,” he said, but he was not smiling. “But that’s still no excuse for the way you’ve treated her.”
“I know, okay, I know!” Dale got up. “But I have to get her back. I don’t know how to go on without her. She’d somehow reached into my soul and rearranged my wiring. I need her to be able to function properly. But I can’t even get hold of her. I don’t know where she is!” He was sounding desperate, but at this point he didn’t care.
“She’s with our mom in Hermanus,” Caitlin said.
“Well, then I’ll go to her,” he said and turned to leave.
Caitlin grabbed his arm. “Think about what I asked you. You said you love her. But what then?”
“I have to get to her, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered and stormed out of the house.
Behind him he could hear Don roaring with laughter. There was nothing to laugh about, so what the hell was wrong with everybody?
*
It was cold.Zoe pulled her parka closer around her body. She was walking on Grotto Beach, one of the beautiful beaches of Hermanus. The sky was overcast, the sea stormy, the waves angry. It was June, the middle of winter and, typical of this time of the year, it had been raining since she’d arrived yesterday. When there was a break in the weather, she jumped at the chance to get out of her mother’s house.
Caitlin and Don had ignored her request to be taken to her flat in Green Point yesterday and had brought her straight through to her mother in Hermanus. Her usually happy and chattering mother was quiet, ran a bath for her, bundled her into bed, and had plied her with tea and soup. Zoe had finally fallen asleep.
The wounds on her hands had healed almost completely. What she could do about the wound inside of her, though, she had no idea. There wasn’t a bandage big enough to cover the hole, and she couldn’t think of an ointment that would ease the pain.
In spite of all the horrible things he’d accused her of, she missed Dale. She missed everything about him—the way his hand would automatically find hers when they were walking, the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed, the way he smiled when he saw her, the way he touched her body, the way he kissed her.
A sob escaped and she pressed her hand against her lips. Her heart had been broken into a million tiny pieces—how did one fix that?
Part of her daily job as an interior decorator was to make sure things worked out, to double-check that everything was going according to plan, that orders that had been placed were delivered—she fixed glitches, she solved problems. But she didn’t know how to fix her heart.
Her feet stopped walking. The roaring of the waves slowly receded as the one thought she’d just had exploded in her brain. Her heart was broken. A heart could only break when a person loved someone.
Zoe sobbed out a laugh and hugged herself. Of course she loved the idiot, she’d always loved him.
It started to rain again. She lifted her face up and closed her eyes, letting the rain wash her tears away while the pain inside her body increased with every cold raindrop.
She’d always known he’d walk away. It was going to happen sooner or later. And maybe it was better that it was sooner. And maybe, someday, after the hole in her insides had closed up, she was going to meet a wonderful man. One who loved her for who she was, one who understood her soul, one… how did her mother put it again? One whose smiles began with her.
She grimaced. And pigs will fly. Yeah, right. Fed up with herself, she stomped back to her car. If Dale didn’t want her, fine. She should have told him about asking for the plans, but if he’d told her about the bloody intern, she’d have understood and maybe they could have worked something out. But the fact was, he hadn’t spoken to her about anything of importance, really.
And he obviously hadn’t bothered to get to know her at all, otherwise he would not have accused her of all the things he had. Which meant he was the idiot.
