No, he’d spent the night fixated on Gretchen. Her touch, her smile, her understanding. She’d awoken hope and lust in him, and it disturbed him. He couldn’t start any kind of relationship until he’d fixed the ones he’d broken.
After hours of deliberation, staring at the dark, he’d come to one conclusion. He had to speak to Amy.
He’d already left it too long and the longer he left it, the harder it would become. It was already difficult enough. He waved to Jordan and Cody as they rode off and wandered inside, where Amy was wiping down the kitchen table and Brandon was drying the last of the dishes.
“Good timing,” Brandon said.
Arthur grimaced. “I was helping the kids saddle the horses.”
“No judgement,” Brandon replied, hanging up his tea towel. “Georgie won’t be back for a while, so you can hang here.”
Arthur shuffled his feet. “Actually, I was hoping to talk to Amy.” He glanced at his friend. “Alone.”
Brandon pressed his lips together. “Ames, you OK with that?”
Amy straightened and nodded. “Why don’t we go for a walk?” She hesitated. “If it’s not too painful for you.”
She shouldn’t be worrying about his pain. “It’s fine.” He followed her out of the house and east towards the red sand dunes. They walked in silence while Arthur tried to figure out the right words. Finally, when it stretched unbearably long, he blurted, “I’m sorry.”
She looked at him. “For what?”
He sighed. “For everything.” He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair, still not used to the length. “For not being there when Mum died, for not realising what you were going through, for not searching for you hard enough when you went missing, for not coming to your wedding, for not telling you about the accident.” He sighed. “Basically, for everything I’ve not done for you since I turned eighteen.”
She was silent for a long moment as they continued to walk. Finally, in a small voice, she said, “I don’t want your apology, I want to know why. Why did you desert me?”
God, she might as well have shot him in the chest for the pain ripping through him. “I…” He had no excuses. “At eighteen, the only thing I wanted was Dad’s approval,” he said. “Just one word of praise.”
Amy snorted. “You might as well have wished for the moon and the stars.”
He nodded. He understood that now. “When Mum had her accident, I left training early to visit her. Dad found out and made me do five hundred push-ups and then do guard duty in the rain with no weatherproof gear.”
Amy didn’t seem surprised. “Sounds like Dad.”
“I asked my commanding officer for permission to attend her funeral. The only reason I got the couple of days I did was because Dad didn’t want to look bad in front of his peers. He was just shipping out.”
“I begged for your help before that, Arthur. When she was addicted and not getting out of bed.”
Arthur frowned. “I didn’t get any calls from you.”
“I emailed you,” she said. “Almost every day.”
He shook his head. That couldn’t be right. He’d received nothing. “To what address?”
“The one you always had. The cloud-based one.”
His jaw dropped. “Dad caught me using it one day and changed the password. He said the mail I was receiving was junk, and I didn’t need to fill my head with it. The only email I had was my army one.” No wonder Amy hated him. He’d never responded to her pleas. “I didn’t even know you’d run away until after I got back from my six months overseas. I called the boarding school Dad said you were at, and they said you weren’t a student there. When I confronted Dad, he said you were being childish and had run away, but you’d be back.”
“He always thought he knew best,” Amy said. “I never understood why Mum stayed with him.”
Six months ago, Arthur would have jumped to their father’s defence, but now he nodded. “I didn’t know how to search for you. I checked social media, I called some of your friends, but I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
Amy rolled her shoulders. “I didn’t have a computer for almost a year,” she said. “My phone was the cheapest I could buy, so it wasn’t a smart phone. I lived as cheaply as I could.”
He should have looked harder. Should have hired a private investigator or reported her as a missing person to the police. He shuddered. His father would have been furious. “Where did you go?”
“Kalgoorlie at first. Spent a year working in a motel as a maid. No one looked too closely at my ID as they were desperate for staff. Then they had a change of management and I had to move on.”
At fifteen. Arthur shook his head. “You’re amazing.”
