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He didn’t look it, but this wasn’t the time to disagree. In fact, it wasn’t the time to say anything at all, so I reached for his hand, and waited.
The minutes ticked by. Ten passed before he spoke.
‘I’m sorry if I freaked you out. It’s been a long time since I had that dream.’
‘Is it something you want to talk about?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Not really. It feels like I’ve spent hundreds of hours and thousands of Aussie dollars doing that already.’ He looked down at me in the glow of the twinkling LED lights. ‘But you do deserve an explanation.’
‘Only if you want to give me one.’
He lifted his head and nodded slowly.
‘I’m guessing this is something to do with your parents’ accident,’ I prompted.
‘Yes and no,’ he replied mysteriously. ‘And it wasn’t an accident, not in the true sense of the word. My parents died trying to rescue me from a house fire.’
‘Oh my God, Finn. How terrible. I had no idea.’
His eyes were fixed on our joined hands as he continued. ‘They’d been out for the evening and returned home before the emergency services got there. The babysitter had managed to get out of the house and raise the alarm, and there was a crowd of neighbours gathered below my bedroom window yelling up at me to jump. But I was too scared. When Dad realised I wasn’t going to be able to do it, he ran into the building to get me. Five minutes later, when he hadn’t come back out, Mum followed him.’
Finn finally lifted his head, and his face was awash with tears. ‘They died trying to save me, because I was too fucking scared to jump.’
I was trying to wipe away his tears with my fingers, but they were falling faster than I could keep up with. As I pulled him close, I had a sudden flashback memory of Finn’s reaction to the hotel fire at The Manor House on our first proper date. Now, horribly, it all made sense.
‘How did you get out in the end?’
‘The fire eventually reached my bedroom. Everything was going up in flames around me. And that’s when I climbed out on to the windowsill and finally jumped. If I’d done it just ten minutes earlier, my parents would probably both still be alive today.’
‘You can’t blame yourself. You were just a child.’
Finn gave a long, shuddering sigh. ‘I thought I’d dealt with the grief. But really all I did was bury it. I genuinely thought the quitting thing I kept doing was totally unrelated.’
‘“Quitting thing”?’
Finn’s hand gently cupped my face, his thumb running over my cheek as he spoke.
‘Whenever something – anything – in my life was going great, I’d find a way to sabotage it.’
I blinked up at him. He wasn’t making any sense; Finn was one of the most successful people I’d ever met. My head was filled with a million questions, but this wasn’t the time to ask any of them.
‘I was predicted a first at uni, but I dropped out halfway through finals. I threw everything I owned into a backpack and bummed around Europe for a year. Even without a degree, I managed to get a great job – several great jobs, in fact – but I found a reason to leave every single one of them when I was at the top of my game.’
‘Or you chose to walk away and give the job to the only other candidate in the running,’ I said softly.
Finn’s thumb brushed across my lower lip in a soft caress. ‘You were always the best man for that job.’
‘And is that why you sold the coffee shop rather than expand the business like the new owners did?’
Finn nodded. ‘I found reasons each time to justify my decision to move on: I was bored; I needed a new challenge…’ He paused as though considering how best to continue. ‘And I did it with relationships too, over and over again. As soon as anyone got too close, I pulled the pin on the grenade.’
‘Or caught a plane to the other side of the world,’ I said quietly.
‘To be fair, I did already have a ticket for that one.’ Finn paused, as though hearing his excuse for the first time. ‘But you’re right. I could have stayed. I could have written anywhere. I guess it was easier to tell myself Ihadto go.’
He was baring his soul to me in a way that left him vulnerable and exposed. That had to mean something, didn’t it?
‘There’s a name for this thing I do. It’s actually a recognised condition. They call it achievemephobia.’
