LITMIR.BIZ

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not darken, neither did he flinch at the mention of his brother, he just looked at her with eyes that were open to her questions now. ‘You went to see him?’

      ‘I went to see him to find out about you. When I spoke with his new PA I could not stand it that you had left, that Nico might have fired you …’

      ‘I can go back any time,’ Charlotte said, though she doubted she actually could, for it would kill her to see Nico and not Zander; it would be agony to be close to someone just a step away from the man she truly wanted. ‘You went to see him just for that?’

      He paused and then shook his head. ‘No, I also went to find out about me, about him, about our mother.’

      ‘And did you?’

      ‘No.’ He had run from the truth, for very deep reasons, but he could not keep running any longer. The truth was waiting and he had somehow to move forward and greet it, and the only way he could do that was with her. ‘I would rather hear the truth from you,’ Zander said. ‘With you.’

      ‘She loved you,’ Charlotte said simply. ‘She still does.’ She watched as he pressed his fingers into his eyes, didn’t understand the shake of his head and his unwillingness to believe it, and she told him his story as had been relayed to her through his mother and the nun, but still he denied it, still he refused to believe. ‘She didn’t choose Nico. Zander, your father gave her no choice in anything. He completely controlled her. She did everything she could to go back for you.’

      ‘No.’ Still he was adamant; still he argued that black was white and Charlotte just did not understand. Why would he refuse the antidote to his pain.?

      ‘Why won’t you believe her, Zander? Why do you …?’ She closed her eyes in frustration, for still he would not be swayed, still he would not take the love that was all around him if only he reached out to it. ‘She’s sitting in a nursing home, clutching two plastic dolls, desperate to see her sons. It’s cruel that you …’ She halted herself for she did not want it to be so, did not want Constantine’s words to be true, did not want the father-son rule to apply. ‘Why can’t you just accept …?’

      ‘Because that’s not what I know.’ He did not shout it, but he might as well have. She felt the hairs rise on her neck, felt her body jolt as if he had roared, and Charlotte heard it so loud and so clear that it hurt. ‘He fell apart when she left. The drinking and the misery and the hell was all of her making. She did that to him.’ She watched as he stopped, as everything he knew dispersed. ‘That is what I need to believe, needed to believe to survive. The man I loved …’ He halted, for it hurt to admit it, hurt to be five years old and hear the roar of his father’s voice, hurt to recall the confusion.

      ‘You loved him?’

      ‘Of course—he was my father,’ Zander said, because to a child it was that simple. ‘And then later I felt sorry for him, thought I made things worse for him by being there, and then all I did was hate him, for not being strong enough to move on from what she had done.’ He looked at Charlotte. ‘He told me he was a good man, an honourable man, a hard-working man till she left him. And I believed him, till this very moment I believed him—I had to. All he told me was a lie, and I should have seen it. As if he was ever going to sit down and tell me the truth …’

      ‘She loved you,’ Charlotte said. ‘She always has.’

      ‘What does that make him, then?’ Zander asked. She had thought him blind, thought he had simply chosen pain, but she saw him very differently now. She saw how hard he had tried to remain loyal to the memory of the father that had raised him—a father, that despite it all, he had loved.

      ‘Maybe he was hurting too?’ Charlotte offered, but some things were very hard to forgive. ‘Perhaps you need to find out more about him.’

      And one day he would, Zander decided. One day he would, and he would try to do it without hate in his heart.

      ‘I understand now what you said …’ He saw her frown. ‘That when I hurt him I hurt you.’ Still her frown deepened. ‘That Nico is a part of me and when I hurt him, I hurt myself … which hurts you.’

      ‘Actually …’ Oh, God, should she tell him she’d just got her words mixed up, that it wasn’t some wise saying, just her mouth moving too fast?

      ‘What I meant …’ But she stopped talking and smiled instead, saw his exhaustion and wanted to extinguish it. She did not say another word but climbed into bed and closed her eyes.

      And he made dreams real, because he undressed and climbed into her single bed, and held her for a moment.

      ‘I have spent my life hating.’ He said it to her neck. ‘I cannot imagine the outcome had you not come into my life. The day that mattered the most to me, the day I had focused on for so very long, suddenly became less important than the day that came before it, the day I spent with you.’

      He kissed her neck and then he said it.

      ‘I love you, Charlotte.’

      But she closed her eyes, because it was still impossible. ‘This is me,’ Charlotte said. ‘I can’t leave Mum.’

      ‘You don’t have to.’

      ‘You say that now …’ She was scared to look to the future, scared of the shouts when any moment now her mother awoke, scared of him making a promise that reality would not let him keep. ‘When you see how hard it is …’

      ‘Why would I change you?’ Zander asked. ‘I have never had a proper family. I am told most come with good and bad?’

      ‘They do.’

      ‘I will never hurt the good,’ Zander said, ‘and I will do my best to ease the bad.’

      She could hear the rain against the window and the bus pulling up at the stop outside. His voice was in her ear, as it had been so many times, but this time there was the breath on her ear that meant he was close by.

      He had said she must never make love with him till she trusted him again, and now she handed her heart over willingly, knew it would be safe with him.

      He made love for the first time in the morning; that morning they actually made love, and it was, as Charlotte told him afterwards as she lay in her bed with him, perfect.

      ‘It would be perfect had I brought a ring,’ Zander said. ‘However, I was not exactly thinking straight on my way to you.’

      ‘You don’t give out rings, remember.’ She did not need a ring to know his love.

      ‘Not easily,’ Zander said. ‘But it is what I want for you. Mrs Kargas.’ His name did not hurt now when he said it. With Charlotte bearing it, he could say it proudly.

      For their future was together.

       EPILOGUE

      HE MADE every day a memory.

      And not just for Charlotte.

      She sat on the beach beside her mother, as she did most late afternoons, stared out at the glorious Mediterranean, and when her mother was starting to get tired, Charlotte would open up the package she had brought, toss out some food and wait for the seagulls. It never failed to make her mother smile, to laugh as she once had, and though Charlotte could not be sure if her mother was going back to earlier times or just smiling at today, every day it was more than worth it.

      ‘Is she ready to go back to the house?’ Agira asked, walking over and smiling, a genuine smile that was warm and caring, and Charlotte knew she was blessed to have Agira to nurse her mother.

      So very blessed.

      Zander had made good his word—he had made the good better and eased the bad. All her mother’s furniture had been moved to Xanos, but the night-time wanderings had stopped

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