‘What’s this? Romance blossoming?’ said Angela, walking in with a cup of tea and a Bounty bar and catching Logan’s gesture.
‘Yes, actually,’ said Logan, smiling back at her mother for once. She’d been terribly moody recently, no doubt picking up on the tension between her parents. ‘I think it might be. I’m wiped out though, Mum, it’s been such a long day.’ Relieving Angela of the tea and the chocolate, she slipped the phone into her pocket and kissed her mother on the cheek. ‘I think I’ll go up to my room.’
She wants to text Seb Harwich without me looking over her shoulder, thought Angela happily. I must take Penny up on that lunch offer. See how Seb’s feeling about everything.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Logan read Gabe’s texts another twenty times.
He trusts me! He trusts me to take care of his house, to stay under his roof.
He’s starting to see me as an adult.
A friend.
It wasn’t enough. But it was a start. More than that, it meant she’d be able to sleep in Gabe’s bed, to wash in his shower, to smell the scent of his skin on the sheets. She would open his drawers and read his letters and uncover his secrets.
How on earth was she going to be able to wait another week?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jason Cranley sat on the therapist’s couch, staring at the botanical prints on the wall. He didn’t want to be here. But he’d promised Tatiana he would go. And the truth was, he had nowhere else to be this afternoon. Or any afternoon, for that matter.
‘What have you got to lose, darling?’ Tati had asked, in her usual confident, breezy, can-do voice as she rushed out of the door to work. It was the voice of someone who’d never been depressed, who’d never faced a challenge that she couldn’t overcome. ‘I mean, you’re not happy. Are you?’
‘No,’ Jason agreed.
He wasn’t happy.
‘And the pills alone aren’t working?’
‘No.’
‘So why not try something else?’
Because it won’t work. Because I’m tired. Because I can’t explain to a stranger how I feel when I don’t know myself.
‘I guess.’
‘Give it a whirl.’ The forced cheerfulness in Tati’s voice was the aural equivalent of having blinding light shone directly in your eyes. Jason winced.
‘You have to take responsibility for your own life you know, darling. Let me know how it goes.’ And with a slam of the door, she was gone.
So now Jason was here, on a stranger’s couch.
The therapist looked at him kindly. ‘Where would you like to start?’
She was in her fifties, slim and blonde and attractive, with an open, compassionate face that reminded him of his mother. Instantly, embarrassingly, Jason felt his eyes welling up with tears. He pressed his fingers against his eyelids to stop them from flowing.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ she said, confidently but with none of Tatiana’s briskness. ‘Perhaps we should start with your childhood? Family history, that sort of thing. Where did you grow up?’
‘Australia,’ said Jason. About as far away from here as it’s possible to be. Sometimes he wished he could blame his current malaise on homesickness. He did feel it sometimes, that primal longing for sunshine and blue skies and the open, outdoorsy life he remembered from his childhood in Sydney. London could be so relentlessly rainy and grey. But then he reminded himself that he’d brought his sadness with him when his family relocated to England. Whatever was wrong with him had been wrong with him for a long, long time.
The truth was – and this was one of the hardest parts to understand – that his life now, with Tatiana, was everything he’d always wanted. At least on paper. Jason and Tati lived in a beautiful townhouse just off Eaton Gate, which Jason had renovated and decorated exactly as he pleased, with no arguments from his wife. Tatiana was too busy building up her business: a prep school called Hamilton Hall that had become an overnight success, both academically and as a money-making machine.