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‘Are you okay?’
Carrie glanced at him and then quickly looked away, scared that everything she was feeling, every ounce of her fragility, would be visible in her expression.
‘What did my mother tell you?’
‘That you suffer from panic attacks.’
Carrie stiffened. ‘It’s one of those things that sounds worse than it is,’ she asserted, with a defensiveness she couldn’t help. ‘It’s not a constant thing. I just have flare-ups in certain situations.’
‘I’m not judging you, Carrie,’ he said. ‘I brought it up just to see if you were okay, so you could tell me if you’re...struggling. So I can help.’
‘I’ve been worse.’
‘But you’ve also been better,’ he stated, reading what she hadn’t said. ‘When did you start having the panic attacks?’
Crossing her arms, she directed her stare straight ahead, resenting that she had been thrust into a situation that demanded she share any of this with him. The last thing she wanted to do was open herself up to him. Secrets and scars were meant to be shared with those who loved you, and that definitely wasn’t Damon. He’d made that clear the night before, and Carrie had spent the past twelve hours drilling it into herself how important it was that she guarded herself from him emotionally.
He was the father of her child, nothing more. They needed to be amicable, nothing more. Yet she could tell by the expectant silence that he would wait as long as necessary to get an answer.
‘When I was eight,’ she relented eventually.
‘Eight?’he repeated, astonished colour darkening the line of his cheekbones. ‘What could have possibly happened when you were that young to—?’
He broke off as his mind completed the calculation and came to the obvious conclusion. To the one thing their relationship always came back to.
‘The scandal.’
Carrie watched his knuckles glow white as his hands tensed around the steering wheel.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Life went crazy. Everyone wanted a piece of my father...our family. Every time we set foot outside, the press swarmed. Basic trips to school and the shops became an ordeal. We were followed, photographed incessantly, screamed at on a daily basis. It was horrific.’
Even speaking about it brought it too close, and she momentarily closed her eyes to block out the memories.
‘For me it became debilitating—our faces all over the papers, everybody watching us and talking about us. That’s when the panic attacks started. I was too frightened to leave the house. I stopped going to school. It was the main reason my mom moved us back to California during the divorce.’
She suppressed a shiver, the memory leaving her chilled to the bone.
‘I never want to go through that kind of insanity again.’
Inhaling deeply, and reminding herself that in this moment she was safe, she tried to focus on the landscape flying past the window. It was only then that Carrie realised she had no idea where Damon was taking her.
‘Where are we going?’ she demanded, with a turn of her head.
‘Ojai. It’s about an hour outside of LA.’
‘Why there?’
‘I have a home there,’ he answered crisply. ‘I lived there for some of my childhood.’
Carrie kept her expression neutral even as her pulse jerked. He was taking her tohis house? She wasn’t so sure she liked the sound of that. She needed to be somewhere she could feel safe and calm—and he made her feel neither of those things.
And then an even more unpleasant thought occurred. ‘Does your mother still live in Ojai?’
‘No,’ he responded after a brief hesitation. ‘My mother never lived there.’
Carrie chewed on her lip in confusion. ‘But you...you said you lived there for some of your childhood...’
