‘I’ll fight tooth and nail for him to be allowed to stay.’
‘And if you lose the fight?’
‘Then they’ll have to carry me out kicking and screaming. I shan’t go quietly, I can assure you.’
‘Well, you can count on me to help man the barricades to stop them doing that. I love a rule-breaker.’
Venetia smiled back at her. ‘How about in return for that kind gesture, you tell me what’s troubling you?’
Cassie frowned. ‘What makes you think something’s troubling me?’
‘Why else are you here on your own in the dark? Or are you communing with nature? Or maybe moon-bathing?’ She turned her gaze upwards. ‘Not that there’s any chance of any moonlight making its way through the thick canopy of leaves above us.’
A long moment passed while Cassie played with Bon-Bon’s fluffy ears. Venetia waited. She was good at that.
‘It’s nothing really,’ Cassie said at length. ‘Just me being my usual idiotic self.’
‘You don’t strike me as being idiotic.’
‘I promise you, I am. I have this infuriating habit of leaping to conclusions and usually getting it absurdly wrong.’
‘And why might that be?’
‘Because I’m an—’
‘Please don’t say it’s because you’re an idiot. I won’t countenance that.’
‘Okay then, it’s pretty simple really; I have trust issues. And the person I should be able to trust one hundred per cent, I don’t seem able to.’
Venetia let a moment pass before saying, ‘Would that person be Ben?’
Cassie sighed deeply. ‘Yes. And don’t jump to any conclusions yourself about him, you mustn’t do that. Ben’s never given me any cause not to trust him.’
‘What’s the problem, then?’
‘Long story short, it’s my inability to believe Ben won’t treat me the way my ex-husband did. He was a serial cheater and dumped me when our daughter, Emily, was born.’
‘Ah,’ said Venetia, ‘that would understandably have a destructive effect on you. So how long have you and Ben been together?’
‘Ten years. Time enough for me to have shrugged off the doubts, you’re probably thinking, aren’t you?’
Venetia shook her head. ‘Not at all. Something like that would never really leave a person. Trust is such an integral part of a relationship, perhaps the most fundamental part. So what’s happened to cause you to have a momentary wobble, if I can put it that way?’
Cassie ran a hand the length of Bon-Bon’s body, then repeated the movement before saying, ‘I overhead Ben talking to someone on the phone earlier and it was a conversation I plainly wasn’t meant to hear, and though I’m sure it was perfectly innocent, no more than him organising a surprise for my birthday, it caught me off guard. It was a reminder of all those times I’d caught my ex cheating on me.’
‘And the memory caused a bit of you to leap to the conclusion that Ben was doing the same?’
Cassie nodded. ‘It all sounds so pathetic, doesn’t it?’
‘Far from it. Does Ben know how you feel?’
‘Yes. Although perhaps not the full extent. I know it annoys him intensely that I can’t let go of the past and trust him completely, so I try to hide my true feelings. I once accused him of having an affair. We’d only been together for a couple of years, and I’d somehow convinced myself that he was being unfaithful and sneaking off to see an ex-girlfriend of his. It drove me crazy imagining him with her. He was doing nothing wrong, of course, the ex had merely contacted him to ask if he had the phone number of a mutual friend as she’d lost her mobile. The mess I made of things could so easily have ended our relationship.’
‘But it didn’t,’ said Venetia, with what she hoped sounded like gentle but no-nonsense firmness, at the same time thinking that Cassie was clearly a lot more insecure than at first she appeared,or how she liked to portray herself. But then wasn’t that often the way? We each have our Achilles heel, and for Cassie it was obviously how she’d been made to feel all those years ago. Some things stayed with you forever, you simply had to learn to live with whatever had left its mark on you.
‘If I could give you one piece of advice,’ Venetia said, ‘it would be this; don’t ever let the past get in the way of your future.’
Seemingly lost in thought while absently stroking Bon-Bon’s head, Cassie eventually turned to face Venetia. ‘You’ve been very kind, listening to me babbling on. I’ve probably shared way too much with you. Another crime I’m guilty of. You won’t tell anyone what I’ve told you, will you?’
