Page 143 of The Bad Wedding Date

“What I am going to do is ask you not to drown in whatever this is,” Jean said quietly, that sympathetic smile rising again. “Do yourself a favour and push against those feelings of sadness. I’ve seen far too many women, young and old, losing themselves to the heartache they suffer.” With a squeeze of my arms, she let me go and went back to collect her clipboard before she moved to the staffroom door and glanced back at me. “The last thing you want is to waste a single day being one of those women who stare out of the window at nothing, thinking about everything they didn’t do to save themselves along the way.”

When Jean walked away as though nothing else mattered, an image of one woman came to the forefront of my mind, turning my stomach over and making the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

Keira.

Fraser’s mother.

The woman whose life had changed because of one man.

And I wondered… was she still staring out of that same old window looking out at the ocean, trying to find a solution to her pain amongst the waves?

I didn’t stop thinking about her for the rest of my shift, or the one after that, either.

* * *

“Dad?”

“Everything okay, Charlotte?” he asked. I could hear the slight worry from the other end of the phone.

I didn’t call my father. Not usually. Although I had made a couple of calls to him in the last two months when we’d agreed to meet for coffee in central London, and I’d been running a few minutes late.

He always pleaded with me to let him send a car to pick me up, but in my usual stubborn way, I told him I preferred using public transport. I didn’t want to admit that I was too scared to dip my toe in the lavish way of his and my mother’s lives for fear of becoming used to it again. After all, I’d only spent two weeks with Fraser, and I found myself missing food service, and clean sheets every morning, not to mention the swimming pools and other facilities those nice places had to offer.

Although, I think I knew full well it wasn’t those things I missed.

Just the person I shared them with.

“I’m fine,” I said to Dad, shaking Fraser out of my thoughts once again. “Are you on your own?”

“I’m in my office, yes. Your mother has gone to brunch with Aunt Fern. Why do you ask?”

“I…” I fiddled with an invisible piece of lint on my pink pyjama bottoms as I sat cross-legged on top of my bed. “I have something I need to talk to someone about, and I think you’re the only person who I can be honest with.”

“Me?” The surprise in his voice ate me up inside, and he sighed softly, as though relieved. “I’m listening.”

“Do you remember a while back when I asked you whether Matteo Vega was a good man or not?”

“Lord, Jesus Christ,” he whispered roughly. “What did he do to you?”

I scowled at my legs. “Nothing. He did nothing to me. But… he did do something to someone I knew once.”

Dad’s silence lingered on the line, and I tried so hard to imagine the expression he would be wearing, but up until recently, most expressions on Dad’s face had always seemed as false to me as my mother’s lips. It had only been since we started reconnecting—if that’s what it could even be called—that I felt like I was finally seeing the real him for the very first time.

“You know what kind of man he is, don’t you?” I dared myself to ask.

“There have been… rumours over the years.”

“About?”

“I think you know, Charlotte.”

Closing my eyes, I let that information wash over me, drowning me in shame for having come from that world where people happily turned a blind eye to anything that didn’t concern them directly. “How could you stand by and not do anything about it?”

I heard the creak of his leather chair, and I imagined him now, leaning back into it as his breath streamed out in one long outburst before he made a noise that sounded like frustration mixed with his own shame.

“I had no evidence of it being the truth.”

“But the rumours came from somewhere. You could have tracked them down.”

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