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He waves a hand. ‘It’s a beautiful morning.’
‘You don’t have work to do?’
‘Maybe we both deserve a little break from work. You’ve been working your whole life too.’
My lips twist. ‘You’ve got bigger rewards, though.’
He gazes towards the bay. ‘I don’t mind sharing with you.’
For a moment I’m speechless.
‘Thank you for helping me with Ava,’ I eventually say. ‘Thank you for this. Thank you for everything.’
His expression closes. ‘You know I don’t want your gratitude.’
‘Too bad.’ I shrug. ‘You’ll get used to it eventually.’
His mouth twists. ‘And maybe you’ll eventually get used to getting what you actually deserve.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dain
I WATCH THE flush cover her face. She doesn’t feel it, does she? Deserving. Given her parents’ abandonment and selfishness, maybe that’s not surprising. But she’s spent years making her own way, caring for her sister without any help...she should feel proud of all that. Surely she’s proved her worth to herself?
I really want her to have some fun and I’ve seen her in my pool throughout the week. It seems that, like me, she loves the water.
‘What else can we add to the list?’ I ask as I reach for a glass of fresh orange juice to ease the dryness of my throat. ‘Stand-up paddle boarding in Croatia? Jet-skiing in Dubai?’ I warm to my theme. ‘Snorkelling in the Caymans? Water-skiing in—’
‘I have been water-skiing,’ she interrupts. ‘Once.’
I’m instantly curious and lean close.
She reads my expression and laughs a little bitterly. ‘It wasn’t a good idea.’
‘No? Why not?’
She presses her lips firmly together.
After a moment she sighs. ‘I went with a girl from school,’ she mutters. ‘I thought I’d made an actual friend. She was wildly different from me—happily married parents, money, popular, pretty...perfect...’
‘No such thing as perfect,’ I mutter when she pauses too long.
‘No.’ She draws a big breath in. ‘It was a day trip with her family. I thought it went okay. But it turned out my mother was having an affair with her father and when it came out the very next day she marched up to me at the cafeteria at school in front of everyone and said she’d only invited me because she “felt sorry for me”. That I was her act of charity for the week because my clothes were ugly and I didn’t belong there and everyone had been laughing at me for weeks. They all sure laughed at me then.’
I know how words can hurt and when they’re thrown out in public they can hurt even more. And even if Talia rationalised this as merely retaliation from another hurt girl, it still stung. Shame still clung. I know it—I know that very particular burn.
‘I was happy to leave town that time,’ she adds. ‘But that was the last time Ava and I did.’
‘You stayed put in the next place until Ava went away to university.’ I watch her. ‘Why didn’t you move with her then?’
She pauses. ‘I wanted her to be free to focus on her study and not feel guilty about me.’
‘Guilty?’ I frown.
‘She struggled with me working long hours for not much pay. It was better for her not to have to see that. Plus I could earn more in Queenstown—and there was a lot of work available there.’
‘Enabling you to work three jobs at once.’
