Andrew glanced down, realigning his knife and fork with precise movements. “I wasn’t at my best, either. I was worried about Claire. Too worried, most likely.”
“She told me a little bit about why,” Rachel offered. “The stuff with her ear, all the illnesses when she was a child...”
“Yes. Well. Old habits die hard and all that.”
“So that’s why you’ve been so protective of her? Because of her ear?”
“Not just her ear. Everything. My parents, my mother especially, have always been obsessive about Claire’s health. I don’t really remember when she had the tumor all that well, only that it was an emergency. Her face was partially paralyzed, and she had to be rushed to the hospital. They thought she might die.”
“Goodness.” Anything she said felt inadequate. “That must have been scary.”
“I suppose it was. From a nine-year-old boy’s perspective, though, I was more annoyed at my father missing my football tournament.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I realized how serious it all was until later.”
“So Claire’s health issues affected you,” Rachel said slowly; it seemed obvious now. They would have affected everyone in a family. She’d seen the same kind of thing happening in her own.Yet she hadn’t expected to feel such a point of sympathy with Andrew West. “You always had to watch out for her.”
“That was my brief. That’s every big brother’s brief, like you said. But with my mother and Claire... it was a lot more intense. If Claire so much as grazed her knee at school, my mother thought it was my fault. I should have been watching her better, been more careful.” He shrugged. “Not to moan about it, but it has an effect on you over time.”
“Yes, I can understand that.”
He nodded, his gaze training uncomfortably on her. “You’ve been looking out for your sisters for a long time.”
“Since I was eleven.”
“Is that when your mother got injured?”
Rachel nodded. “Broke her back falling down some stairs while cleaning a house in Egremont. Lily was six weeks old.”
“That must have been tough.”
“It wasn’t much fun.”
“And your dad,” Andrew said quietly. “He left... ?”
“When I was eighteen.” She paused and then confessed quietly, the words drawn from her reluctantly, “I’d just started at Durham. Two weeks in and my sister Meghan called me, asking me to come home.” She shook her head, trying to stem the tide of emotion that threatened to overwhelm her. The last thing she wanted to do was cry in front of Andrew West, and especially on their first date. If this really was a date.
“Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry.” Andrew reached over and covered her hand with his own, the simple touch of another person adding to her emotional overload.
“It was a long time ago,” she managed to choke out, and then had to suffer the humiliation of dabbing her eyes with her napkin. “Seriously. I’m over it.”
Andrew removed his hand and sat back, and Rachel let out a tiny sigh of relief. This was getting way too intense. “And you’ve been cleaning houses ever since?”
“I took over my mother’s business, Campbell Cleaners. She’d had to stop it when she got hurt, and for a while we survived with whatever work my dad could get.”
“Which was?”
“Carpentry, shift work. The dole.” More than once she’d had to collect one of the orange vouchers and go to the food bank in Whitehaven for the emergency supply of milk, bread, and tinned tuna and rice pudding. Growing up she’d been entitled to free school meals, a badge of shame that everyone had known about it even though it was never spoken of. Somehow you just knew which kids were so poor they had to get free meals.
“None of that could have been easy,” Andrew said.
“No, but we managed. When Meghan turned sixteen, a year after my dad left, she quit school and started pulling pints at the pub.” She shrugged. “It worked out.”
“But that was ten years ago, and Lily’s almost finished school. What are you going to do then?”
“My mother has just had a stroke and my sister has a three-year-old I suspect she is going to off-load on me,” Rachel answered. “What do you think I’m going to do?”
Their meals came then, thankfully curtailing any more conversation, and they both kept to light topics after that. There was only so much emotional heavy lifting you could do in a single afternoon.
By the time they left the bistro it was the middle of the afternoon and the rain had cleared to a pale blue sky with wispy clouds. They walked through the city center, and Andrew pointed out every architectural and engineering feature, which, after about an hour, he finally realized was far more interesting to him than to her.
