Charlie bowed his head miserably. ‘I know how it sounds, Molly, but it doesn’t change a single iota of how I feel about you.’
Molly’s chest heaved with the effort of holding down her emotion, of not getting upset in the middle of a restaurant. She had believed that he might love her, that he might be unhappy in his marriage as she was recognizing herself to be, but this told a different story. He was still having relations with Muriel. He was a family man, with people relying on him. He had a young wife, young children, a baby about to come into the world …
She stood quickly, scraping back her chair. ‘I have to go.’
‘But your food …’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said, unable to disguise her bitterness.
She left the café abruptly, hearing Charlie call her name and run after her. In the parking lot, he caught up with her.
‘I’m so sorry, Molly. I didn’t want to upset you. But I mean it – it doesn’t change how I feel about you.’
Molly shook her head. ‘But it changes how I feel about you.’
‘No, please don’t tell me that,’ he said, trying to pull her toward him.
She shook herself out of his embrace. ‘Please take me back to the factory,’ she said stiffly. ‘And once we’re there, I think it will be better if we don’t see each other again.’
They drove back in silence, Charlie’s jaw set in a grim right angle as Molly tried to drown out the sound of her own heart splitting into little pieces. It was not to be. It could never have been. What had she been thinking?
Chapter 14
* * *
Never a Gambling Man
* * *
You have got to help me keep a level head. I love you so much, but I know I have a responsibility and you have a greater one than I … Honey, you have got to stay and raise those children up or until they are
old enough to understand what we have.
Molly’s letter to Charlie
Charlie was devastated that his honesty had put Molly off so completely. He’d known that he had to tell her the truth, or he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, but he hadn’t anticipated her reaction.
For days, he didn’t see her, and she refused to respond to any requests to see him, via note or Annette and any other way he could think of. However, he knew she would have to come to the store room at some point, so he wrote his next note in advance of her arrival, and placed it under a pad on his workstation ready to slide across to her.
Sure enough, one day she turned up at the store room door, trying not to catch his eye. Danny stood up to deal with her request, and Molly looked almost grateful that she wouldn’t have to talk to Charlie.
She was just about to depart, her arms loaded with goods, when Charlie slipped across to her. On top of her pile of stationery, he added a book of order forms with his note cushioned between its pages. ‘I think you forgot this,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, sorry – did I leave something off your list?’ Danny was about to walk over and inspect the order form again.
‘No, that’s fine,’ said Molly, retreating quickly into the corridor.
Charlie’s heart leapt. She wasn’t rejecting his note – not at this point, anyway. ‘It’s just that thing I forgot last time,’ he said with a smile, trying to look business-like.
‘Of course.’
She was gone again before Charlie could say any more.
Danny had watched the exchange with a raised eyebrow. Now he just nodded to Charlie, hiding a faint smile, and tucked his pencil back behind his ear. ‘Just a friend, huh?’
‘Maybe not even that,’ Charlie replied. ‘But maybe more. Much more.’
The note that Molly was (hopefully) about to read was full of apologies for upsetting her, and then went on to suggest that Molly and her husband, George, came to his home on Saturday to play cards with himself and Muriel.
“If I can’t have you to myself,’ the note explained, ‘then I have to find some way to be with you as friends. There is something special between us, Molly, and even if that is just friendship, then I’d like to preserve that. It will just be two old married couples, doing what old married couples do.’
To his great relief and excitement, Molly agreed, and so that Saturday Molly arrived with her husband at his home.
Charlie shook George’s hand with a feeling of trepidation. This was the husband of the woman he loved, coming into his home to play cards with Charlie and the woman he was meant to be in love with. It didn’t make sense, but somehow Charlie really liked George. He was older than Molly, more fatherly than he’d expected. Molly was greeting Muriel with equal pleasantness, and he could see that she, too, was startled to be confronted with the age difference between himself and Muriel.