“Dear God…”
She nodded. “River and I were already sharing an apartment in London by then. I was just about to complete my nursing course and River was just about to start one in engineering. Which meant that neither of us was on the barge with them.”
“Thank God,” Declan muttered.
She shuddered. “I couldn’t have borne it if I had lost River that night too. As it was, we didn’t learn about our parents’ deaths until late the following morning, when the police finally tracked down their next of kin and came knocking on our door.” Her frown was one of remembered pain and grief.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
She nodded. “Packing up their things a few weeks later was the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do. We gave their clothes, books, and other recyclable things to a charity shop. We packed the more personal things—paperwork, journals, old birthday cards we’d made for them—into a couple of boxes. We sold the barge, obviously. That was hard, when it had been our home for so many years.” She swallowed. “We’ve never even looked in the boxes again since, but we can’t bring ourselves to get rid of them either. Maybe one day.” She gave a shaky smile.
“I really am sorry,” Declan repeated sincerely. “But shouldn’t River have finished at university now too?” From the little he had heard of the conversation between brother and sister—yes—it had sounded as if Fawn was the one who had taken responsibility for both of them after they were left parentless.
“He deferred starting the course after our parents died. The pain of losing both of them so suddenly was so acute that the two of us barely made it through that first year without them. There was a little money from selling the barge—with the boiler removed—but nothing else. Money didn’t mean anything to our parents. Then…” She broke off, shaking her head. “Long story short, River never actually started his engineering course. He mainly works shifts in bars and coffee shops.”
“A little aimless, though, isn’t it?”
“As I said, River does what he can, when he can,” she bristled. “As long as we still have each other, none of that other stuff matters. Losing our parents so suddenly was traumatic enough to last us both a lifetime.”
“I can understand that,” he confirmed bleakly.
Fawn looked at him searchingly for several long minutes. “Who did you lose suddenly?”
CHAPTER SIX
Fawn’s gazeremained on Declan as he surged to his feet and began to pace the room. His expression was as bleak as his voice had sounded seconds ago. She’d obviously touched on a raw and exposed nerve.
She sat and waited patiently until he felt in control enough to answer her.
“I left the military a couple of years ago for a very specific reason,” he finally bit out.
“Which was?”
“I need to start at the beginning.” His nostrils flared as he breathed in before speaking. “I originally joined the military at the age of twenty-one, straight out of university. I gave them twenty years and reached the rank of major in Special Forces, and then two years ago, I read a story in the newspapers that changed my life.” He looked at her with fiercely glowing blue eyes. “The article was about a man named Rufus Wynter, who had just been reunited with his daughter after having believed she was dead for the previous twenty years.”
Fawn remembered seeing the story in the newspapers. Mainly because, having only recently lost her own parents, Fawn had cried when she saw a photograph of how happy Rufus’s daughter looked to have her father at her side as he accompanied her down the aisle on her wedding day.
Was Declan now saying that the Rufus Wynter she had briefly met when the other man came to visit Declan in the hospital the previous week was thesameRufus Wynter she had seen in that newspaper article?
Fawn hadn’t recognized the man as such. But it was two years ago, and having just lost her own father, Fawn had related more to the daughter’s happiness than she had in noticing what Rufus Wynter looked like.
But neither Rufus nor Wynter was exactly a common name, so it now seemed likely they were, indeed, one and the same man.
She eyed Declan curiously. “Why did it change your life?”
“Because it gave me hope. A hope I admit has faded in the two years since,” he acknowledged heavily. “But at the time, it was monumental in my decision to finally resign from the military. I thought…” He swallowed. “I thought that if one father could be reunited with his lost child, then it was possible that another one could be too.”
Fawn swallowed. “You?”
Declan’s nod was abrupt. “I’m the cliché of a soldier who decided to marry his girlfriend of a few months before being deployed to fight in someone else’s war,” he said with a rueful smile. “I was naïve enough to think the two of us would be together forever.”
“What happened?” Fawn could see that Declan was now so lost in recalling the past that he needed little prompting from her to continue.
He drew a deep breath before speaking again. “As I said, we married quickly, and a week later, I went away on deployment. It was six months before I came home on leave for two weeks. During that leave, Bridget became pregnant. I came home again on another deployment when she was six months along. Unfortunately, I was away again fighting when our son was born.”
“That’s really sad.”
“It happens a lot to servicemen.” His expression softened at what were obviously good memories from that time. “Bridget sent me photos of our son minutes after he was born. She also told me she’d named him Connall, in honor of her father. It wasn’t what we’d agreed on, but the baby was three months old by the time I met him for the first time, and the name Connall had been firmly established by then.”
