Page 22 of The Island in Bramble Bay
‘There’s a glass of wine for you on the counter.’
She sipped the wine, watching him prepare the dinner.
‘Go and relax,’ he said, nodding to the couch. ‘I’ll just get the veg prepped and I’ll join you.’
Maggie sat on the couch, flipping through one of his tech magazines.
‘It says here that your company is up for sale?’
‘Uh-huh.’ He poured himself a glass of wine and sat down next to her. ‘It’s kind of a take-over more than a sale. So, this other company, Cumulus.com want to acquire High 5 and have made an offer which the CEO wants to accept.’
‘Does that affect you anymore?’
‘Yes, it does.’ Now seemed as good a time as any to explain. ‘I still own forty per cent of the company so they can’t do anything without me. Jared wants me to go over… I kind of have to. He’s kept it going without me for a few years so it seems only fair to go along with his decision to sell.’
‘Do you want to go back?’ Maggie looked at him, her eyes full of concern and uncertainty.
‘No, I don’t. I left under… difficult circumstances.’ Why couldn’t he just tell her? He knew by now that she wouldn’t think any less of him if she knew what had happened and he couldn’t ask her to go with him unless she knew the whole story.
‘I had a breakdown.’ He looked down at the floor, not wanting to see what she thought of his revelation. It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud to anyone and while he couldn’t shake the overwhelming embarrassment that was always there when he allowed himself to think back on what had happened, at this moment, it felt strangely freeing.
‘Oh, Charlie.’ She took his hand and squeezed it.
Remarkably he found it easy to carry on explaining. ‘It was tough, the pressure of the work, you know. I had this terrible kind of panic attack in a really important meeting and that was it, I just never went back.’ Again, he had skimmed the surface of the truth; it was too much to explain everything now. It seemed too soon for them to be talking about such intense, personal stuff. That would come in time. If Maggie could go with him, he’d make sure she knew then.
‘So it’ll be hard to go back.’
‘Yeah. I’ve been putting off making the decision but I don’t really have a choice, I have to go.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Will you go with me?’
Maggie’s face lit up. ‘I’d love to go with you! Oh my god, I’ve never been to America before.’
Charlie wrapped her in his arms. He was thrilled that she wanted to go with him. He hoped that having Maggie with him would take the edge off the anxiety he felt about going back. And he couldn’t wait to show her where he was from. San Francisco was still one of his favourite places in the world and Maggie would love it.
‘Maybe we could get this work stuff out of the way and then I can show you around.’
‘Take me to your old haunts.’
‘Well, some of them,’ he winced slightly at the thought of some of the places he and Jared had ended up in the days when High 5 had just started to take off. When they’d thought the partying was a harmless reward for all their hard work. No, Charlie was going to show Maggie where he came from before all of that had happened.
19
AMERICA! MAGGIE COULDN’T believe it. She had always wanted to go but never had a good enough reason before or anyone who wanted to go with her, which was the bigger problem. Going with Charlie would be perfect.
But the timing wasn’t great. The busy season for Bramble Island was about to start and she really shouldn’t be taking any holiday in the summer. But she desperately wanted to go; Charlie needed her. She’d been taken aback by his admission of having a breakdown and having to face the place where it happened for the first time since, well, who knew how he’d react?
When Maggie had first met him, he was so reticent, hard to connect with and now, she could understand that it was because he’d been through a massive crisis, a crisis that had led him to leave everything and start a completely different life. Hopefully, the distance would have given him perspective on what had happened but it could equally be that a new place would have made it easy for him to shut out everything that had happened instead of facing up to it. Maggie knew only too well that it was easier not to let yourself think about these things that had almost broken you. Keeping all of that somewhere else, hidden from yourself as well as from anyone else felt easier to deal with. There was probably more to Charlie’s story than ‘a breakdown’ but she would wait for him to tell her when he felt the time was right. After all, she had plenty to tell him; things that were starting to press on her because she felt he had a right to know about her past now that they were together. The holiday lodge project could come between them, she knew that. It had happened to her before. She had let a project come between her and Ben and yet somehow even that didn’t urge her to find the right time to tell Charlie.
‘That steak was amazing,’ said Maggie, dabbing at her mouth with a cloth napkin. If they’d been dining at her house it would have been a piece of kitchen roll but Charlie seemed to like to do things properly. He didn’t have much in his house but he did have what he thought were the bare essentials and apparently napkins were one of them.
‘Thanks.’ He poured some more wine for them both.
‘When do you think you’ll need to go?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I need to tell Jared and take it from there. There’s probably a lot of legal stuff that needs to happen before they need me to sign anything, so not right away.’ He took her fingers and twined them into his. ‘It means everything to me that you would come.’
‘It’s not a difficult decision, a trip to America with you. It won’t be that bad.’
‘Where do you usually go on vacation?’
