Page 31 of The Lovers
“So it is.”
“I would love for you to join me. I took the liberty of booking a table. Do say you’ll come.”
Quinn tried to swallow down her irritation. She had no desire to have lunch with Rhys Morgan. In fact, she’d made plans to see her cousin Jill. Jill had turned her back on a high-powered position in an accounting firm just over a year ago and opened up a vintage clothing shop in SoHo. Quinn still hadn’t seen the place, and she’d hoped she might take Jill out to lunch to celebrate her new venture. But to refuse his offer would be churlish, so Quinn nodded in acquiescence.
“Only if you promise not to force-feed me any more cake.”
“Upon my honor,” Rhys quipped as he held his hand over his heart.
TWENTY
The restaurant Rhys took Quinn to was the type of place one would never take notice of just walking past. It was tiny and ultramodern, decorated entirely in white with abstract paintings adorning the walls. The servers all seemed awfully young—polished women and solicitous men, dressed in uniforms of pristine white. Quinn had to admit though that the food was sublime. Her swordfish served over pumpkin ravioli with feta cheese crumbles and caramelized onions was superb.
“Do you like it?” Rhys asked, eager to hear her opinion.
“Fantastic,” Quinn replied. “You really are a foodie,” she observed with a smile.
“I suppose I am. When I was a boy, my mother made the same dishes every week. She was a single, working mum, so she had no time or extra money to get too creative. I swore that when I grew up I would try something different every day.”
“You must have been a handful,” Quinn observed, trying to imagine Rhys as a precocious child.
“More than you can imagine. I had acute asthma when I was a child. Any type of strenuous activity or anxiety could set off an attack. My poor mother was always frantic with worry, imagining that I would have an attack while on my own and not have my inhaler nearby. She forbade me to participate in any afterschool activities or play with the other boys. I envied my older brother, Owain, who was always playing football and going swimming at the beach with his friends during the summer. I wasonly allowed to sit on the sand and breathe in the bracing sea air,” he mimicked with a grimace of disgust, which made Quinn laugh.
“I suppose that’s when my interest in television began. I used to read a lot, especially during the summer holidays, and I put on one-man productions of various plays for my mum. She worked as a hairdresser, but before she got pregnant with Owain and married my dad, she had aspirations of going to the university and studying medieval literature. She was a huge mythology fan, particularly anything to do with King Arthur.”
“Where did you grow up?” Quinn asked as Rhys refilled her wine glass, clearly in no rush to get back to the office.
“Pembrokeshire, Wales.”
“So, you speak Welsh?”
“Just a few words. I understand everything, but we always spoke English at home, being on the wrong side of the Landsker Line. Have you ever been to Wales?”
“Yes, many years ago while on holiday with my parents. We visited St. Govan’s Chapel in Pembrokeshire. That must have been very close to where you grew up.”
“Yes, but I’ve actually never been. My mum wouldn’t let me go because of all the steps. She was afraid I’d have an attack. What did you think of it?”
“I was just dumbstruck by it, even as a child. To me there was something utterly magical about building right into a cliff. You could hardly tell where the chapel ended and the cliff began, as if it simply grew out of the stone. My mum told me the story of St. Govan hiding from the pirates inside a crevice in the cliff face that shielded him from prying eyes. I had nightmares for days about being swallowed up by stone.”
“You were an impressionable child, weren’t you? Did you dig up your parents’ garden looking for artifacts?” Rhys asked with a teasing smile.
“No, not really. I was more interested in genealogy when I was a child.”
“Really, why is that?” Rhys looked at her with genuine interest, and suddenly something caught in Quinn’s throat. She hadn’t meant to have this conversation. He’d been so open about his own childhood that she suddenly felt as if she couldn’t lie to him. She rarely told people the truth about her origins. It was a painful subject, and not one she cared to discuss with anyone. People meant well, but the look of pity on their faces was usually enough to undo her.
“Did I say something wrong?” he asked, his eyes widening with sudden anxiety.
“No, you didn’t. It’s just that I was abandoned as a baby. When I found out that I’d been adopted, genealogy became something of an obsession.”
“Have you ever tried to find your parents?”
“I don’t know who my parents were. I was left in a church pew and found by the priest. I was turned over to the state and eventually put up for adoption. I have no desire to track down my natural parents, but I would very much like to know who they were and why they gave me up. It would fill a void that has existed inside me since I was a child, and answer questions that have been gnawing at my mind.”
“Like what?”
“Like why they couldn’t just go through the proper channels and put me up for adoption legally. I tried to tell myself that being left in a church meant something, but there were times when I thought that I’d been disposed of like rubbish. Whoever myparents were, they couldn’t be bothered with me, so they just left me.”
Quinn was surprised to see that Rhys didn’t look remotely pitying. Instead, he gazed at her with surprise, his eyebrows lifting in astonishment.
