It wasn’t always easy. I still had a touch of agoraphobia, and I’d never be fully comfortable leaving the house on my own, but I’d made massive progress.
Tonight was a big part of that. It was also a big fuck you to my father. His sentencing had been last week, and he’d gone down for the maximum possible time: three life sentences to be served consecutively.
Everyone in my father’s organisation was totally fucked. Cracking the code to their messaging network had been the key to a slew of evidence, the like of which the police said they’d never seen before. The stupid bastards had shared everything over that messenger: photographs of their violence to use as deterrents, details of drug deals, all their protection rackets, everything.
I’d wanted to look that bastard in the eye when he went down. Everyone tried to dissuade me, but Rafe seemed to know that it was what I needed. Direct eye contact with my father had always been risky. He often saw it as a challenge, and I’d learned to avoid it. But that day in court I stood up as he was led away, and when he turned towards the sound of my chair scraping back, I looked straight into his eyes and held his gaze. There was hatred in his expression and resentment, but also just a flicker of defeat. In the end, I won, and he knew it.
From what I heard, he wasn’t having an easy time in prison, and I gave exactly zero fucks.
Now the trial was over, I didn’t want to think about my family. Yes, I had to work through the trauma they’d caused me in therapy, but other than that, they were best forgotten. That went for my mother too. She’d only made vagueattempts to contact Zach and never pushed for him to return home. I had more patience with her than he did, and would at least visit her in that mausoleum of a house, but she was still drinking, still checked out, more so now than ever before. I offered to help, to go with her to see the GP, to help find her a therapist, but she refused that too. The final straw was when she asked me, “When do you think I can visit your dad?” I left after that, and I hadn’t contacted her since.
“Do I really look okay?” I asked Poppy, feeling nervous as I scanned her outfit. As always, she shone brighter than anyone in the room. There were film stars, politicians, all sorts of celebrities, but Poppy outshone them all easily.
“Of course you do, you numpty,” Poppy told me, and I just couldn’t help myself. I moved to her and gave her a grateful hug. Her hug in return was surprisingly fierce, and when I drew back and scanned her face, I realised that despite her normal effervescence, there was something very wrong with Poppy tonight: lines of tension around her mouth that weren’t normally there and this close up, I could see her eyes were very slightly red-rimmed as if she’d been crying. I frowned. I had a feeling I knew exactly who was to blame. That grumpy Scottish bastard!
“Pops? Is everything––?”
“You guys hugwaytoo much,” Zach said to me as he drew up alongside us. “It’s like a disease.”
“Dr Zach!” Poppy cried and he rolled his eyes. She then proved his point by giving him a firm hug as well.
“Again, Poppy, not a doctor. Not even a vet student yet,” Zach muttered as he patted Poppy on the back and disengaged himself as quickly as possible. He couldn’t manage these hugs without turning tomato red.
“Details, details. And animal doctors are just as important.Christ, you’re even taller. What’s Martha feeding you?” The height difference between them was almost comical. “And look at these muscles!” she squeezed his biceps. His cheeks darkened even more.
“Give over, Pops,” he complained, but he was clearly chuffed with the compliment. Zach had filled out in the last year. Being in a stress-free environment where he wasn’t scared to leave his room, and having three square meals a day was likely a big factor in that, as was Rafe’s home gym and the personal trainer he insisted work with Zach when Zach had asked to use it.
“Cla-Cla!” I turned sharply at Ozzie’s voice, squatting down just in time to intercept an eight-year-old-little-boy-shaped hug-seeking missile as he flew into my arms. “You’ve got pink lips!”
I laughed as I kissed the side of his head, then pulled back to look at his little face. “That I do, love.” His hair had already broken out of the hairstyle it had been brushed into earlier, sticking up in all directions, and there was a leaf on his jacket. I plucked it off and held it up in front of him, raising one eyebrow. “What have you been up to, Oscar Sterling?”
“Oh! Me and Margot found a?—”
“Ozzie!” Margot herself cut him off and we both turned towards her. “Don’t tell the adults anything,” she hissed. “Come on, before you land us in the shit.”
“Language, Margot!” I called as I straightened from my crouch, but they’d already darted off into the crowd.
“Poppy, Zach, have you seen Clara? Rory said––” Rafe’s deep voice sounded from behind me. I turned around to face him and he froze. When he showed no signs of movement, I smiled at him and took a few steps forward to closethe distance between us. “Clara?” he breathed, scanning me from head to toe. “What the fuck?”
Poppy punched him in the arm. “Incorrect response, you absolute twatwaffle.”
“Hi,” I said softly as my hands landed on his chest and I gazed up at him. “Rafe? You okay?”
“You look different,” he said in a choked voice.
“Oh my God!” Poppy cried. “Where has my smooth operator brother gone? ‘What the fuck’ and ‘you look different’ are the best you can come up with? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, Rafe,” Zach put in. “Where’s your rizz, mate?”
But Rafe just ignored them. He was too busy scanning my face. His jaw was clenched so tight that a muscle was ticking at the side. “How soon can we leave?” he asked me and I frowned.
“You want to leave already? Rafe, we only just got here, and you’re giving a speech.”
The gala tonight was to raise money for domestic violence charities and women’s refuges in London. Poppy had organized the expansion of the Sterling Foundation to support these causes over the last year under my guidance, and that of Mia Hardcastle and Lady Clare Harding, friends of the Sterling family and themselves both victims and survivors of domestic violence. Mia and Clare were giving a speech together with other survivors, but I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. Rafe would introduce them on behalf of the foundation. He’d recently been appointed as a High Court judge. So he had enough background knowledge of crimes against women to talk for hours, but he was going to keep his speech short. The main event, he said, should be the survivors and their stories.
He moved suddenly then, but I didn’t flinch. My flinching days around Rafe were over. His handshot out around my waist and the other came up to cup my face. He pulled my body flush with his and his head lowered so our lips were almost touching.
“Remind me again why I’m even here?” he muttered and I smiled.
