‘Well, I doubt if many of his old golf club buddies hung around, and you said he was away with friends.’
‘After he was…arrested…’ she silently mocked herself for the small tell-tale hesitation ‘…we were toxic, but who needs friends like that, anyway?’ she countered with a shrug, thinking miserably that her father needed them, he desperately needed them, his old life, the club memberships and committees.
Leo just shrugged and, not for the first time, Amy wondered how he had become so invulnerable. Hard as steel.
‘But not you—you stood by him,’ he stated.
Amy’s glance slid from his. She remembered, all too well, wishing that she could walk away. ‘He’s my father. I know he’s not perfect.’ And she also knew how vulnerable he was.
Leo’s harsh, mocking laugh brought an angry flush to her cheeks. Partly because of the guilt she felt at not having been there, not in a way that counted, when her fatherhadneeded her. She’d been too angry with him to guess the level of his desperation.
Leo responded with an infuriating languid half smile as he walked over to the mantelpiece above the electric fire and peered at the photos that lined it.
‘So you haven’t always been afraid of horses,’ he said, picking up one of a curly-haired child sitting on top of a chunky pony, holding a rosette. ‘You used to be a lot fairer.’
Her hand went automatically to her hair, despising that she cared what she looked like in this moment.
‘No, that’s not me, and I’m not afraid of horses.’ She loved horses but the bargain had been that she was allowed to help out at the stables, but she must never get on a horse.
Having lost one daughter in a riding accident, the ban had not been that surprising. Amy had understood why her parents were overprotective, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the restrictions. Restrictions that had made her the odd one out growing up, because it hadn’t just been the horse-riding her parents had deemed dangerous; there were so many other things she’d never got to do either, no sleepovers, no camping trips. The list of things she had not been allowed to do had seemed endless.
She hadn’t told Leo about Alice back then, about why she’d felt she had to be the perfect daughter. Good enough for both herself and the child they’d lost.
But, of course, she never had been. Had Alice been perfect? Would it have been different if her sister had grown up, become a rebellious teen first? But Alice hadn’t. She’d never flunked a maths test, never had a teenage strop or an unsuitable boyfriend.
Long before she’d met Leo, Amy had stopped competing with the perfect ghost of her sibling, and stopped trying to make her parents proud, recognising it wasn’t possible.
Leo, of course, was an excellent horseman. One of the first times she’d seen him he’d been on horseback, and she’d been riveted. Watching the tall stranger, as he’d been then, on the frisky half-schooled mare.
Her stomach flipped and quivered as she recalled the shocking impact, the visceral reaction she had experienced. Sexual attraction that she had been too inexperienced to hide.
She snatched the picture from his hand and replaced it on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s not me—it’s my sister, Alice,’ she said, straightening the photo frame.
‘You have a sister?’ The furrow between his brows deepened. ‘Older, I’m assuming?’
‘She would have been.’
An alert expression slid into his eyes. ‘She died.’
It was a statement, and one she didn’t respond to.
‘You miss her?’
‘I never knew her.’ Reacting to what might have been pity in his voice—pity she didn’t want or need—she responded more sharply than she’d intended. Softening it, she added, ‘It happened ten years before I was born. My parents were no longer young when I was born; for the first six months she was pregnant with me, Mum thought she was experiencing the menopause.’
‘You never mentioned you had a sister.’
Amy felt a wave a guilt, remembering how good it had felt to be with someone who didn’t bring her dead sister into the conversation at every opportunity, who didn’t compare her with the ghost.
‘I’m sure there were things you didn’t tell me.’ There were a lot of things she hadn’t told him, and then suddenly there had been nothing to tell him.
No baby.
Nine years later and the thought of her miscarriage still came with the same pain. She ignored the tight feeling in her chest and the dull ache.
Revisiting the past wouldn’t help anyone. Least of all her.
‘You weren’t just passing, Leo, so what’s this all about?’
