Page 74 of Quiet Longing

The conversation drifted over me, and I knew Rhys was studying me from time to time as I dug into my stew. My skin prickled in awareness. Aunt Jo’s cooking was just as delicious as I remembered, especially since I hadn’t eaten a whole lot in the day and a half since I’d landed.

“It’ll be just like old times for the two of you,” Uncle Padraig said, drawing my attention.

“Pardon?” I asked, embarrassed that I’d been too wrapped up in my feelings and anxiety over seeing Rhys for the first time in so many years to listen to what was being said.

“You and Rhys,” my uncle replied, and my eyes instantly went to the man in question. He was already looking at me, his expression unreadable. “I said it’ll be like old times. Remember when you worked for me at the hotel when you came to stay thatsummer? You and Rhys were both working there in the kitchen, and now, you’ll both be at the city hotel. Rhys is my head of security. The accounting office is just across the hall from his.”

I blinked, my pulse ratcheting up a notch. So,thatwas why Derek had asked him about the hotel. Rhys Doyle, the boy, now man, who I’d lost my virginity to and whom I’d had all my formative sexual experiences with, was going to be working in the office across the hall from me.Mynew office was going to be across the hall from his, and I wasn’t prepared for it. Not at all. When I’d arranged to move to Ireland after the divorce, I hadn’t factored in getting reacquainted with Rhys.

I’d simply been eager to see the Balfes, live with my aunt and uncle, and make up for lost time. I hadn’t anticipated Rhys working for my uncle, and I certainly hadn’t expected to feel such a strange mix of attraction and anxiety in his presence.

A presence it seemed I was going to be bumping into often if we were to work in the same building. No, not merely the same building, but right across the hall.

20.

Rhys

Even though I’d been aware of Charli’s impending arrival for a while, it had somehow escaped me that she’d be landing in Dublin this week. Work had been busy, and with everything going on between my ex-fiancée, Stephanie, and me, I’d lost track of things.

My engagement to the woman I’d been seeing for the last two years had been called off—on Christmas morning, no less—so I gave myself some slack for not being completely on top of things.

As far as everyone was concerned, calling off the wedding was a mutual decision, but it hadn’t been. The decision was mine and mine alone. Since we both still worked for the Balfes and shared many colleagues and friends, to allow Steph to save face, I’d agreed to tell everyone it was mutual. That we’d realised we weren’t compatible and didn’t want the same things out of life.

This was all was true, but it wasn’t the whole reason I’d called things off. Far from it.

It had started out with an argument about the wedding day itself. I’d told Stephanie I was going to ask my cousin, Shay, to be my best man. She’d gone strangely quiet after that, and a little while later, she’d approached me, sweetly suggesting Derek might be upset by me choosing Shay over him since we’d been best friends since we were kids.

I told her Derek wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about being best man, and that after his divorce, he was cynical about marriage and weddings in general. I knew for a fact that even attending would be a pain for Derek, but Steph kept on insisting thatchoosing my cousin over my best friend was rude and could cause a rift.

She just wouldn’t let the whole thing drop until I’d grown suspicious that there was more to it. So, I’d asked her outright if she had a problem with Shay. She’d finally expressed her worry that it would ruin the speeches at the reception since Shay was mute and couldn’t give a regular speech. I’d countered that we’d hire a sign language interpreter, and it would all be fine. After this, she’d thrown a fit and yelled at me, saying I was trying to ruin her big day.

Note she saidhersand notours.

At that moment, I’d seen everything that was wrong with our engagement and how poorly matched we were. I’d realised with startling clarity that I couldn’t marry her. I couldn’t marry a woman who didn’t want my cousin—someone I was closest to in the world—to be my best man because his disability might make her wedding day less shiny and glamorous. She couldn’t bear the thought of him signing his speech, and it was abhorrent to me. It had made all the little niggling irritations I’d had about her, all the signs that deep down she was a materialistic, shallow human being come to blaring light. I’d been too blinded by her beauty and by how she’d fawned over me to see the truth.

Steph was a snob, not to mention ableist, and it made me sick to my stomach.

To be honest, I should’ve called things off when I’d heard her on the phone to one of her bridesmaids, Magda, insisting the woman have her braces removed before the wedding. She’d wanted everyone to have “pretty” smiles in the photographs. That had been her exact phrasing, too. I’d been appalled and insisted she’d call Magda back and apologise. That there was no need to have her bloody braces out. Steph had acted likeIwas the one being unreasonable.

So, that was how I currently found myself: my engagement broken and the woman I’d been hopelessly besotted with at nineteen sitting across the dining table. Charli was even more beautiful than I remembered. She’d grown into a stunning woman, but she seemed unhappy and a little withdrawn. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there were shadows in her eyes, and the way she’d flinched when I’d tried to hug her earlier twisted something raw and painful inside me. Tristan had told me she’d just gone through a divorce, so it was expected that she might not be herself, but hownot herselfshe was … it was disconcerting.

I couldn’t count the number of times I’d wanted to contact her over the years. A couple months into my recruitment with the French Foreign Legion, Mam had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The minute she’d called to tell me, my entire world had turned grey. I’d been in a state of disbelief. How could we have survived my dad, gone through it all, and come out the other side, only for the short period of relief and peace to be shattered into a thousand fractured pieces? I’d wanted to rage and break things. My fury had been terrifying even to myself, the injustice and unfairness of it all. So much threatened to fall apart, and I’d been drowning under the weight of it. I’d stopped writing to Charli. I’d been numb, and I couldn’t handle hearing about her life, missing her, when everything around me had been crumbling.

I’d had to apply for a special leave of absence so I could be with Mam while she’d gone through treatment. I’d been in such a bad state that for months, I hadn’t even told anyone I’d been home. Mam hadn’t been living in Malahide any longer, so there was little chance I’d bump into any of my friends. As far as they’d been concerned, I would still have been in France.

By the time Mam was in remission, several months had gone by, and I’d returned to base. I’d started working up the courageto get back in touch with Charli. But when I’d looked her up on social media, I’d seen a photo of her with some dark-haired bloke, both smiling into the camera as she’d presented her engagement ring.

Again, that feeling of the world turning dark had set in. It had been further confirmation that some God or fate or whoever was up there in the sky pulling the strings had had it in for me. My self-recrimination had been suffocating because maybe if I’d just dragged myself out of the dark hole I’d been in when Mam got sick and written her back, explained what had been going on, then maybe she wouldn’t have moved on to someone else. But I’d been depressed and angry, lost in my own head about the unjust cards Mam had been dealt. At long last, she’d been free of my worthless piece of shit father, then she’d gotten sick. It just wasn’tfair. Still, I couldn’t get my head around the fact Charli had moved on from me. I’d never had the courage to say it, but I’d fallen in love with her that summer. I’d thought she’d felt something similar for me, but obviously not.

And honestly, I didn’t blame her. Charli had her own shit to go through at the time, finding out her family had kept such a giant secret from her. It wasn’t my place to judge her for not waiting around for me, for finding happiness where she could.

Still, it was hard to believe sixteen years had passed. I wasn’t the same person. I’d spent five years with the French Foreign Legion. Mam’s cancer had come back just a few weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday, and the treatment hadn’t worked that time. When I lost her, a little piece of me went into the ground with her. Dad was still alive—which again just went to show how unfair the world was. At least he was too scared of me these days to ever darken my door. The last I’d heard, he was out of prison, living in a council flat somewhere in Meath, having squandered the money from the sale of our old house.

It gave me peace that Mam had gotten six years away from him before that horrible fucking illness took her.

Aunt Claire had succumbed to breast cancer, too, a few years after Mam. It seemed determined to take out all the women in that side of our family. There was a loneliness without them that could never be cured. Without my mam and Aunt Claire, my Uncle Eugene, my cousins, Shay and Ross, and I felt like a bunch of aimless blokes missing the glue that had once held us all together. Then Ross had met his wife, Dawn, and they’d begun having kids, and we’d started to mend little by little, started to become something like a family again.

But it would never quite be the same, and I’d come to terms with that.

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