LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TEN

      HELENA KEPT HER silence all the way to London.

      She felt as if she’d spoken all the words inside of her already; that if she tried for any more all that would come out would be gibberish. She had no more angry barbs to throw at Flynn, no more defences to try, no more arguments to make. And she was still too far from understanding what her father’s heart attack meant, or how she felt about it, to even begin to speak on the subject.

      So she grabbed her most important things in silence, forcing them into her carry-on bag, knowing that the villa staff would pack up and send on the rest. She dressed as comfortably and casually as she could manage, needing the sensation of soft cotton and warm cashmere against her skin, now she couldn’t rely on her husband’s touch.

      She slipped her sunglasses on, nodded goodbye to the maid at the door and climbed into the back of the car Henry had hired at the airport, ignoring the two men in the front.

      And then she headed home.

      It was dark by the time they reached the hospital. Henry had asked—not Flynn, of course; he’d barely looked at her for the last thousand miles—if she wanted to go home first, to change, to sleep, whatever. But Helena had shaken her head, and he’d asked the taxi driver to go straight to the hospital.

      Drizzle misted the windows of the cab, familiar, damp and chill. Suddenly, Helena was glad to be back home. Tuscany had felt like such an escape, such a fairy tale, until today. But she knew it could never be that for her again. And to stay another moment would only ever have reminded her of what she’d lost.

      She didn’t wait for Henry or Flynn to follow as she strode into the hospital. Flynn had called his mother from the car and Helena had heard enough to know where her father was, so she headed straight to him.

      Isabella seemed to have aged a decade in just a week. She stood, leaning against the wall outside Thomas’s room, her make-up faded and her hair no longer fixed in place. She looked up as Helena approached and her face crumpled.

      ‘Is he...?’ Her first words for a thousand miles, Helena thought, and she couldn’t even finish the sentence.

      Isabella shook her head. ‘The doctors say the surgery went well. They’ve done...’ she gulped in air and Helena realised she was trying to keep from crying; Isabella, the icy matriarch, had actual tears in her eyes ‘...something,’ she finished. ‘They’ll tell you all about it. I don’t...I don’t understand it all. Not at all.’

      It was the day for it, Helena thought. Nothing at all made sense today.

      Flynn and Henry caught up at last, Flynn wrapping his arms around his mother in a way Helena was sure she’d never done for him. Did he know, she wondered, about Isabella and Thomas’s decade-long affair? She’d never asked. One more secret between them, she supposed.

      Ignored, Helena moved to the door, pushing it open to step inside her father’s room. He looked smaller there in the bed, hooked up to machines and tucked under crisp white hospital sheets. He wouldn’t even know she was there. And if he didn’t recover, if something else happened...he might never know how her past had come back to screw up her present. That he’d been right that night eight years ago when he’d told her she’d wilfully ruined her life.

      ‘Oh, Daddy.’ Her throat thickened as the tears welled up. Clenching her fists, Helena tried to stop them, tried to keep at bay all the feelings that threatened to wash her away in their flood.

      ‘Helena?’ Henry’s cautious voice came from behind her, but she didn’t turn. ‘Are you okay? Do you need...anything?’

      No, she wasn’t okay. She might never be okay again. She hurt so deep she thought her bones might crack, and she feared that anger might be the only thing holding her together—anger at her father for almost dying, at Flynn for not understanding, at those not quite men who had almost destroyed her, and at herself for letting them.

      Henry couldn’t fix any of that. But there was one thing he might be able to do.

      ‘I need my sister,’ she told him.

      * * *

      It took an hour of persuasion to get his mother to leave the hospital and, even then, she wouldn’t go home. Instead, Isabella insisted on being taken to Thomas’s town house, saying she wouldn’t be able to sleep anywhere else.

      Flynn supposed this meant that the polite charade of ignoring the fact that his mother had been sleeping with his father’s best friend for the last ten years was over. Everybody’s secrets were being exposed today, and it left Flynn feeling as if he’d been scraped raw.

      Helena wouldn’t leave her father’s room, and Flynn had refused to even try to persuade her.

      Henry waited for him in the cab while he got his mother settled, then asked, ‘Where to now?’ as soon as he returned.

      Flynn wished he had an answer. A bar was tempting—somewhere he could drink away the memory of the last week. But when he sobered up nothing would have changed, and a hangover wouldn’t help anything at all.

      He wasn’t facing his father tonight, not while his mother was sleeping at another man’s house. So that left him with the house he’d had prepared for himself and his wife to come home to after their honeymoon. It probably wasn’t even fully furnished yet but it was his and Henry had the keys.

      ‘Let’s go to the town house. See if they’ve delivered the liquor cabinet yet.’ Because, while a night of whisky in some dive bar was off the cards, there was no way he was getting to sleep without a drink tonight.

      Henry gave the address to the driver and Flynn tipped his head back against the headrest and tried not to think until they arrived there.

      The house loomed out of the darkness like a mausoleum. Flynn forced images of how he’d imagined his life in this place from his mind as Henry fumbled with the keys, and made his way straight to the library as soon as the door swung open. Boxes of books sat unopened on the floor, surrounded by empty shelves awaiting them. His desk had been placed at the wrong angle in the corner, but next to it sat his liquor cabinet. It was empty, of course, but a short search turned up the box containing his collection of fine malts and Henry soon tracked down the tumblers in the kitchen.

      Flynn pulled the two wing chairs into position on opposite sides of the empty fireplace, ignored the mess around them and poured them each a double measure of his favourite Scotch.

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