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INTHEBOARDROOMof the Silva Group’s headquarters in New York, Gabriel shifted back in his seat and gazed across the city skyline. It was eleven o’clock and the meeting had just broken up for coffee and the protein bars that were delivered every day by a local bakery.
But, unlike everyone else in the room, he wasn’t interested in either. Nor was it eleven o’clock. For him, there was only one time. London time.
Picking up his phone, he turned it over in his hand.
It had been that way since the moment he’d returned to the States a month ago. At first he’d thought it was jet-lag. But then it had carried on, day after day, week after week. And now it was the fourth week, and it was just how he lived, mentally adding five hours on to the time that everyone else worked by.
Because despite the very real truth of his being here, in New York, his head and his heart had never left that hospital corridor in London.
He saw her face everywhere. Pale, devastated, crushed. And it hurt more than anything in his life. He wanted to put that part of himself away somewhere, so that he could forget her, but that would mean not seeing her face, and living was hard enough right now. He couldn’t live in a world where he couldn’t see Dove’s face.
He missed her unbearably. It was continuous—an overwhelming, endless awareness of her absence.
And he didn’t understand it. Every hour that passed should be easing his pain, but if anything it was getting worse. So many times he had almost picked up the phone and called her...
‘Gabriel?’
He turned. His CFO Bill Brady was looking at him expectantly.
‘Sorry...’ He frowned. ‘I was miles away.’Three thousand four hundred and fifty-nine miles, to be precise.‘Where are we at?’
‘The acquisition.’
He stared at Bill blankly. What acquisition? The question echoed inside his head. And then he remembered, and he was stunned. How could he have forgotten? How could something that had been his purpose in life for so long suddenly be so unimportant?
His CFO cleared his throat. ‘The Fairlight Holdings acquisition.’
Bill smiled at him, the kind of reassuring, placating smile you might use with someone who was lost. And hewaslost, Gabriel thought, his fingers tightening around the phone. Lost for so many years...held in limbo between an unknown past and a present that should be enough but always felt incomplete, so that his whole life he’d felt as if he was missing something.
Except with Dove.
With her, he wasn’t lost in himself, or in the pull of the past. He was present and whole and happy.
‘There’s still some pushback about the name-change.’ Bill was speaking in that same, careful way. ‘But I think they’re tiring. So we’ll stand firm. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind?’
He felt the combined stares of the ten people sitting round the boardroom table. He thought about Dove, and he could hear her voice telling him that things were different...thathewas different.
Still holding his phone, he shifted back in his seat. ‘No, nothing’s changed.’
It was a hot day in London.
Too hot, Dove thought, to be dragging boxes around. But luckily she was going to have help. Having made a proper nuisance of herself, her mother had managed to persuade the removal company to turn up a day early.
Although she didn’t really mind wrapping up her mother’s teacups and saucers in old newspapers, Dove thought. There was something oddly comforting about it, and it gave her a chance to think. Not brood. That would be a bad idea. But so was ignoring things, burying them, pretending they didn’t exist.
It was hard to change her ways. It was what she had done all her life.
But not this time.
This time she was trying something different. Being someone different.
And that meant thinking about her father and Gabriel.
She had forgiven her father—and she still thought of him as that. She accepted that she would probably never know why he had done what he had to Gabriel, but she believed her mother when she said that Oscar had loved her.
Just as she’d believed Gabriel when he’d said that he didn’t. Not in the way she needed and wanted him to love her.
She hadn’t wanted to believe it...
