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His mind was filled with panicky, unfinished thoughts and unanswered questions. All except the one he should have asked. And all the time he knew he should leave, but to do so would be to accept the unthinkable, the unbearable...
After the first hour the bar staff kept their distance, as if rejection and betrayal were some kind of terrible, contagious disease. By the end of the second hour they were actively avoiding looking at him.
At a little under four hours after he had arranged to meet Dove, he looked up and saw a man strolling into the bar as if he owned it. He had a juddering moment of déjà vu, and then the man was walking towards him, his handsome face lit up with triumph.
‘You must be Gabriel Silva.’ He stopped next to the table. ‘I’m Oscar Cavendish, Dove’s father. She’s fine,’ he added, dropping into the seat opposite. ‘There’s just been a slight change of plan.’ His mouth curled into the smile of a pickpocket palming a wallet. ‘I’m afraid she won’t be joining you.’
Gabriel stared at him, his brain doing cartwheels. The panic of earlier had returned, and now it was pressing in on him like a thick cloud, sliding over his skin, squeezing his throat.
‘I don’t understand...’ Except he did. He knew exactly what was happening because it had happened before.
‘Yes, It’s all a bit awkward.’ Oscar glanced down at the bag by Gabriel’s feet. ‘She’s had a change of heart.’
Gabriel stared at him, felt his own heart lurching against his ribs. He felt as if Oscar Cavendish had scooped out his stomach and dumped it on the table, and he was grateful that he was sitting down because he felt too hollow to stand.
‘She feels dreadful...truly dreadful. She honestly never intended it to get this far. And she hates being the bearer of bad news. Always has. That’s why I’m here.’
There was a scraping sound as Gabriel pushed back his chair. ‘I want to talk to her. Ineedto talk to her.’
The ache in his voice, the intensity of it, made him flinch. He had never felt more exposed...more powerless. More unwanted.
‘I know... I know,’ Oscar said soothingly. ‘But she doesn’t want to talk to you, so it would probably be best for everyone if you just stuck to the plan.’ He touched Gabriel’s bag with the toe of his handmade shoe. ‘Look, I know it’s upsetting, but you’re young. You have your whole life ahead of you. You’ll find someone who feels the same way. And in the meantime...’
Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out his phone and slid it across the table.
‘Your former boss, Bill, is a great friend of the family. He gave me your bank details.’ He tapped the screen. ‘Dove wanted you to have a little something by way of compensation, so I took the liberty of transferring some money into your account. With the understanding, of course, that she won’t be hearing from you again.’
It was like a meteor strike. Everything crashed and burned around him, just as it had before. The hotel bar imploded, the table and the undrunk drinks turned to ash, and inside his chest, his heart shattered into a million pieces, devastatingly and irrevocably broken...
When he finished speaking the silence in the room was sharp-angled, serrated. Dove was staring at him, her gaze frozen on his face.
‘That’s not what happened.’
She was shaking her head, her grey eyes pure with shock and denial. Actually, her whole body was shaking. He could see her legs and her arms trembling, as if she was standing in a high storm.
‘It’s not true. You’re lying.’
Her eyes were huge and dark and stunned, as if he had hit her.
‘He didn’t do that. He didn’t say those things. He wouldn’t do that.’
He stared at her, his heart pounding. He had dreamed of this moment so often, and in his dreams she’d looked just as crushed and diminished as she did now. In his dreams, he revelled in her misery. But now that it was happening for real he didn’t feel satisfaction or triumph. He just felt her shock. Her distress. Her pain. As if it was his.
It rolled through him like a pyroclastic cloud, flattening the memory of that day, swallowing up his need for revenge. And what was there to avenge? She had been telling the truth. She had known nothing about what her father had done that day until now.
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not lying. Everything I’ve told you is the truth.’
Not the whole truth—but there was no time or place in the world for that.
She was still staring at him as if he was a stranger. A dark, menacing stranger with a terrible weapon. And he knew only too well that there was no more terrible weapon than a truth you didn’t want to hear.
‘You didn’t send your father.’
It was a statement of fact, but she shook her head as if he had asked a question. ‘I was on my way out of the house...on my way to you—’ she swallowed, cleared her throat ‘—and he was waiting for me. I remember being shocked that he was there, scared that he’d found out about us...’ Her voice shook around the word. ‘And that he was going to stop me. But he just told me that he had something to show me on his phone.’
She was looking past him now, at the stupidly cheerful sun outside the window.
‘I didn’t understand what I was looking at, at first, and then I did.’ Her face seemed to lose shape, like a flower in the wind. ‘He told me that he didn’t trust you, so he’d gone to find you and offered you money to leave me. And it was there, in black and white, the transfer to your account.’ She shivered. ‘I never told him to give you money.’
