Total pages in book: 176
Estimated words: 164533 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 823(@200wpm)___ 658(@250wpm)___ 548(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 164533 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 823(@200wpm)___ 658(@250wpm)___ 548(@300wpm)
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’t fair. 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.
Bringing my attention back to Charli, she seemed surprised when Padraig casually mentioned how we were going to be working in the same building. Hadn’t Nuala or Derek told her I worked at the hotel? Thinking on it, she’d seemed taken aback when I’d let myself into the house like I was some ghost from her past she hadn’t expected.
Fuck, she had no clue I was going to be turning up, had she? I’d bet she didn’t know we’d be coworkers either.
Towards the end of dinner, Charli declined dessert and said something to Jo about going for a walk on the beach. It was cold and dark out. Jo said as much to her, but she replied about needing some fresh air after being cooped up all day.
I watched her go, my eyes following the soft curves of her body wrapped in a grey wool cardigan. Her hair, the same glossy shade of dark brown, was shorter than I remembered.
“Charli had no idea I was going to be here, did she?” I spoke quietly to Derek, who was seated next to me.
He rubbed his jaw. “Oh, uh, I’m not sure. Nuala, did you tell Charli that Rhys was coming to dinner?”
His sister frowned, looking strangely guilty, and everyone else began paying attention, which I didn’t enjoy at all. “No,” Nuala replied then glanced at me. “Sorry, Rhys. I haven’t really spoken to her about you. She’s had such a rough time of it with the divorce. It’s all we’ve been talking about.”
My back stiffened, homing in on one part of what she’d said. “What do you mean ‘a rough time’?”
Nuala grew flustered. “Oh, you know how divorces are. They’re rarely easy.”
“Tell me about it,” Derek muttered under his breath.
Luckily, his kids were busy on their phones and weren’t paying attention to the conversation to hear his comment. Paloma, his ex-wife, had taken him to the cleaners when they’d broken up. He’d managed to get shared custody of the kids, but she’d been awarded a large portion of his wealth, including the four-bedroom house they’d lived in while married. Derek currently lived in an apartment with two extra rooms for when the kids came to stay with him.