Quiet Longing (Quiet Love #2)

20.

Rhys

Even though I’d been aware of Charli’s impending arrival for a while, it had somehow escaped me that she’d be landing in Dublin this week. Work had been busy, and with everything going on between my ex-fiancée, Stephanie, and me, I’d lost track of things.

My engagement to the woman I’d been seeing for the last two years had been called off—on Christmas morning, no less—so I gave myself some slack for not being completely on top of things.

As far as everyone was concerned, calling off the wedding was a mutual decision, but it hadn’t been. The decision was mine and mine alone. Since we both still worked for the Balfes and shared many colleagues and friends, to allow Steph to save face, I’d agreed to tell everyone it was mutual. That we’d realised we weren’t compatible and didn’t want the same things out of life.

This was all was true, but it wasn’t the whole reason I’d called things off. Far from it.

It had started out with an argument about the wedding day itself. I’d told Stephanie I was going to ask my cousin, Shay, to be my best man. She’d gone strangely quiet after that, and a little while later, she’d approached me, sweetly suggesting Derek might be upset by me choosing Shay over him since we’d been best friends since we were kids.

I told her Derek wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about being best man, and that after his divorce, he was cynical about marriage and weddings in general. I knew for a fact that even attending would be a pain for Derek, but Steph kept on insisting that choosing my cousin over my best friend was rude and could cause a rift.

She just wouldn’t let the whole thing drop until I’d grown suspicious that there was more to it. So, I’d asked her outright if she had a problem with Shay. She’d finally expressed her worry that it would ruin the speeches at the reception since Shay was mute and couldn’t give a regular speech. I’d countered that we’d hire a sign language interpreter, and it would all be fine. After this, she’d thrown a fit and yelled at me, saying I was trying to ruin her big day.

Note she said hers and not ours .

At that moment, I’d seen everything that was wrong with our engagement and how poorly matched we were. I’d realised with startling clarity that I couldn’t marry her. I couldn’t marry a woman who didn’t want my cousin—someone I was closest to in the world—to be my best man because his disability might make her wedding day less shiny and glamorous. She couldn’t bear the thought of him signing his speech, and it was abhorrent to me. It had made all the little niggling irritations I’d had about her, all the signs that deep down she was a materialistic, shallow human being come to blaring light. I’d been too blinded by her beauty and by how she’d fawned over me to see the truth.

Steph was a snob, not to mention ableist, and it made me sick to my stomach.

To be honest, I should’ve called things off when I’d heard her on the phone to one of her bridesmaids, Magda, insisting the woman have her braces removed before the wedding. She’d wanted everyone to have “pretty” smiles in the photographs. That had been her exact phrasing, too. I’d been appalled and insisted she’d call Magda back and apologise. That there was no need to have her bloody braces out. Steph had acted like I was the one being unreasonable.

So, that was how I currently found myself: my engagement broken and the woman I’d been hopelessly besotted with at nineteen sitting across the dining table. Charli was even more beautiful than I remembered. She’d grown into a stunning woman, but she seemed unhappy and a little withdrawn. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but there were shadows in her eyes, and the way she’d flinched when I’d tried to hug her earlier twisted something raw and painful inside me. Tristan had told me she’d just gone through a divorce, so it was expected that she might not be herself, but how not herself she was … it was disconcerting.

I couldn’t count the number of times I’d wanted to contact her over the years. A couple months into my recruitment with the French Foreign Legion, Mam had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The minute she’d called to tell me, my entire world had turned grey. I’d been in a state of disbelief. How could we have survived my dad, gone through it all, and come out the other side, only for the short period of relief and peace to be shattered into a thousand fractured pieces? I’d wanted to rage and break things. My fury had been terrifying even to myself, the injustice and unfairness of it all. So much threatened to fall apart, and I’d been drowning under the weight of it. I’d stopped writing to Charli. I’d been numb, and I couldn’t handle hearing about her life, missing her, when everything around me had been crumbling.

I’d had to apply for a special leave of absence so I could be with Mam while she’d gone through treatment. I’d been in such a bad state that for months, I hadn’t even told anyone I’d been home. Mam hadn’t been living in Malahide any longer, so there was little chance I’d bump into any of my friends. As far as they’d been concerned, I would still have been in France.

By the time Mam was in remission, several months had gone by, and I’d returned to base. I’d started working up the courage to get back in touch with Charli. But when I’d looked her up on social media, I’d seen a photo of her with some dark-haired bloke, both smiling into the camera as she’d presented her engagement ring.

Again, that feeling of the world turning dark had set in. It had been further confirmation that some God or fate or whoever was up there in the sky pulling the strings had had it in for me. My self-recrimination had been suffocating because maybe if I’d just dragged myself out of the dark hole I’d been in when Mam got sick and written her back, explained what had been going on, then maybe she wouldn’t have moved on to someone else. But I’d been depressed and angry, lost in my own head about the unjust cards Mam had been dealt. At long last, she’d been free of my worthless piece of shit father, then she’d gotten sick. It just wasn’t fair . Still, I couldn’t get my head around the fact Charli had moved on from me. I’d never had the courage to say it, but I’d fallen in love with her that summer. I’d thought she’d felt something similar for me, but obviously not.

And honestly, I didn’t blame her. Charli had her own shit to go through at the time, finding out her family had kept such a giant secret from her. It wasn’t my place to judge her for not waiting around for me, for finding happiness where she could.

Still, it was hard to believe sixteen years had passed. I wasn’t the same person. I’d spent five years with the French Foreign Legion. Mam’s cancer had come back just a few weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday, and the treatment hadn’t worked that time. When I lost her, a little piece of me went into the ground with her. Dad was still alive—which again just went to show how unfair the world was. At least he was too scared of me these days to ever darken my door. The last I’d heard, he was out of prison, living in a council flat somewhere in Meath, having squandered the money from the sale of our old house.

It gave me peace that Mam had gotten six years away from him before that horrible fucking illness took her.

Aunt Claire had succumbed to breast cancer, too, a few years after Mam. It seemed determined to take out all the women in that side of our family. There was a loneliness without them that could never be cured. Without my mam and Aunt Claire, my Uncle Eugene, my cousins, Shay and Ross, and I felt like a bunch of aimless blokes missing the glue that had once held us all together. Then Ross had met his wife, Dawn, and they’d begun having kids, and we’d started to mend little by little, started to become something like a family again.

But it would never quite be the same, and I’d come to terms with that.

Bringing my attention back to Charli, she seemed surprised when Padraig casually mentioned how we were going to be working in the same building. Hadn’t Nuala or Derek told her I worked at the hotel? Thinking on it, she’d seemed taken aback when I’d let myself into the house like I was some ghost from her past she hadn’t expected.

Fuck, she had no clue I was going to be turning up, had she? I’d bet she didn’t know we’d be coworkers either.

Towards the end of dinner, Charli declined dessert and said something to Jo about going for a walk on the beach. It was cold and dark out. Jo said as much to her, but she replied about needing some fresh air after being cooped up all day.

I watched her go, my eyes following the soft curves of her body wrapped in a grey wool cardigan. Her hair, the same glossy shade of dark brown, was shorter than I remembered.

“Charli had no idea I was going to be here, did she?” I spoke quietly to Derek, who was seated next to me.

He rubbed his jaw. “Oh, uh, I’m not sure. Nuala, did you tell Charli that Rhys was coming to dinner?”

His sister frowned, looking strangely guilty, and everyone else began paying attention, which I didn’t enjoy at all. “No,” Nuala replied then glanced at me. “Sorry, Rhys. I haven’t really spoken to her about you. She’s had such a rough time of it with the divorce. It’s all we’ve been talking about.”

My back stiffened, homing in on one part of what she’d said. “What do you mean ‘a rough time’?”

Nuala grew flustered. “Oh, you know how divorces are. They’re rarely easy.”

“Tell me about it,” Derek muttered under his breath.

Luckily, his kids were busy on their phones and weren’t paying attention to the conversation to hear his comment. Paloma, his ex-wife, had taken him to the cleaners when they’d broken up. He’d managed to get shared custody of the kids, but she’d been awarded a large portion of his wealth, including the four-bedroom house they’d lived in while married. Derek currently lived in an apartment with two extra rooms for when the kids came to stay with him.

Something about Nuala’s expression when I’d asked about Charli’s divorce aroused my concern. It seemed like there was stuff she wasn’t saying.

“We’re just so glad to have her here,” Jo put in. “It’s been far too long since we’ve gotten to see Charli. That ex-husband of hers—” She paused mid-sentence as though thinking better of what she’d been about to say.

“What about her ex-husband?” Derek asked, frowning.

Jo glanced at Padraig, seeming torn, before she returned her attention to her son. “He didn’t get on well with her mother. Louise confided in me that Jesse influenced Charli against her, convinced her to spend less time with family.”

Hearing this, I tensed, my stomach twisting. Exactly what kind of arsehole convinces his wife not to see her family?

“I thought she just got busy in her career, and that’s why she didn’t come to visit anymore?” Tristan said.

And yeah, that was what I’d thought, too. I’d imagined Charli off living her life, married to that smiling bloke from the picture who, of course, I’d despised, building a future. The thought of her absence being down to some kind of coercive control situation disturbed me greatly. A swift pang of nausea seized my gut.

“No,” Nuala put in, her lips forming a flat, unhappy line. “It’s what we all thought at first, but it quickly became apparent Jesse wasn’t a very nice guy.”

Wasn’t a very nice guy? Just what the fuck did that mean exactly? I gripped my glass, bringing it to my mouth as I took a harsh gulp and struggled to contain my fury that Charli had ended up with someone who—if Nuala’s expression and tone was anything to go by—had mistreated her in some way. Again, I remembered the girl I’d met that summer, the one with bright eyes and a smile that could lift your soul. I contrasted her with the tetchy, anxious, quiet woman who’d sat across the table from me at dinner and found few similarities. Heartburn scorched my stomach.

“Why didn’t anyone say something?” I asked, unable to hide the frustration in my voice, and everyone’s attention came to me once again. Jo and Padraig knew that Charli and I had been friends that summer, but they didn’t know about the romantic side of our relationship. Derek, Tristan, and Nuala, however, did know. Although it appeared the brothers had been in the dark about Charli’s husband being a dick, but Nuala had known something wasn’t right.

“It was a long time ago, Rhys,” she replied. “When I first had my suspicions about Jesse, you were away in France. By the time you came home, I’d lost touch with Charli altogether. I didn’t have her number anymore, not even an email address.”

My jaw tightened as I swallowed down my irritation. It wasn’t Nuala’s responsibility to keep me informed of her cousin’s life, and besides, it wasn’t like I’d gone out of my way to check on Charli. As soon as I’d found out she was engaged, I’d forced myself to move on, even if our summer together had formed some of my fondest memories.

“Look, us blaming ourselves for not trying harder to keep in touch will get us nowhere,” Jo said. “All we can do is make things as normal as possible for Charli now that she’s here. Get her settled in and help her build her life back up.”

There were noises of agreement from around the table. I had to admit, the idea of Charli living in Ireland permanently gave me an unexpected feeling of relief. Not because I was looking to pick up where we’d left off. After my breakup with Steph I was nowhere near ready for a new relationship, but I did like the idea of Charli being somewhere I could look out for her. Help her find her feet.

Fucking hell, she deserved it after I’d ghosted her all those years ago. Once again, I reprimanded myself for not pushing through the darkness and reaching out, telling her about Mam and how her sickness had made me feel like the world was ending. But I hadn’t. I’d done what I’d always done and kept it to myself. Carried the burden alone. And no amount of wishing could change my past actions.

After dessert, I said my goodbyes and headed out. I was halfway to my car when I spotted Charli returning from her walk. She wore a long, padded coat and a woolly hat, the tip of her nose red against the cold. It was cute, and a certain warmth spread through me as I took her in.

“I’d say that was a bracing walk,” I called to her as she neared, her eyes wary as she approached, though my comment lured out a faint smile.

“Philly winters are pretty cold. I’m used to it,” she replied, piquing my interest.

“Philly? Not Boston?” I asked curiously, and she nodded.

“I moved there after college. Got an entry level position at an accounting firm. Well, it was also where Jesse grew up, and he wanted to move back once he’d graduated.”

Even hearing her ex-husband’s name irritated me. All I knew about him was that he’d kept her away from her family and that Nuala—the ray of sunshine who tried to see the best in everyone—considered him “not a very nice guy.” Those alone were good enough reasons to hate him.

“I see. You liked it there?”

“Sure.” She pressed her lips together, and somehow, I suspected that wasn’t the whole truth.

I arched an eyebrow. “Even though the weather was just as desperate as it is here?”

Charli laughed softly, and I savoured the sound. It was a relief to hear some joy in her when she seemed so down. “Hey, Boston girl, remember? I grew up shovelling snow.”

“Right,” I replied fondly, my eyes tracing her features. “How could I forget?”

A small moment of quiet passed before Charli stepped by me. “I better be getting inside before Aunt Jo starts worrying.”

“Yeah, go ahead. I’ll see you around.”

Charli paused a moment, looking back. “Are you living nearby?”

“Nah, I’m in the city now. It’s closer to work. I only drive out here when I need to check in at the coastal hotel. Well, and on Fridays for dinner.”

“Ah, right.” Her eyes went to my hands for a moment. Was she … was she checking for a wedding ring? Something hot filled my chest at the notion. “I guess I’ll be seeing you at work then,” she went on.

“When do you start?” I asked, unable to disguise the eager curiosity in my voice.

“On Monday. I’m taking the weekend to unpack and settle in.”

“Sounds like the right idea.”

Charli bobbed her head, and I couldn’t help being a little mesmerised by her beauty. Despite the sadness that seemed to permeate her, the features I’d adored so many years ago were stunningly gorgeous and matured. “Anyway, I’ll let you go,” she murmured, heading inside. I watched her disappear into the house then clicked the button on my car keys.

The entire journey to my house I couldn’t stop thinking about her, how the attraction was still there. The years hadn’t dulled it at all. In fact, it felt stronger somehow. I had to remind myself that Charli was newly divorced, and I was newly broken up with Stephanie. Neither one of us was in any kind of headspace to revisit the feelings we’d left behind as teenagers. But I could be a friend to her, look out for her wellbeing.

If the shadows in her eyes were anything to go by, a friend was something she could surely use while she started over, and I was more than prepared to be that person for her.