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“Jet.” She sucks in a breath. “I didn’t have him down as a cheater, and I’m usually a good judge of character. But I figured whatever it is, it’s his fault.”
“What makes you think the two of us even—?”
Margaret gives me a pointed look. “Nothing happens in this house without me knowing about it.”
“Oh, right.” I bite my lower lip.God, I hope she never heard us.
“Well, now that you’re back here, you can—”
“Ava?” Magnus appears, walking across the entryway with his arms wide.
I give him a big hug.
“I thought I heard your voice. Have you come straight from the hospital?”
“Yeah. I dropped Mum at the hotel, she’s checking us both in.”
“Good. My driver is yours for as long as you need him. He’ll take you from the hospital to the hotel, and anywhere else you need to go.”
“Thank you. You don’t have to. You’ve done so much already.”
A phone starts ringing from the direction of Magnus’s office.
“It’ll be work. Come through, Ava. I’ll only be a minute.
Margaret tells me she’ll fix us a drink, so I follow Magnus into his office.
My gaze tracks outside, across the gardens, to the pool house. It seems strange seeing it again. I spent so many hours writing in there, hiding away. Alone. In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago, not a few months.
I sink into a soft armchair beside his desk as I wait for him to finish his call. The frame on his desk has a picture of June inside it, and I look at him in question.
He nods encouragingly, so I lift it and study the photograph inside. She’s beautiful, her eyes glimmering, her lips parted, like she’s laughing at something the photographer is saying.
But it’s the little blue-eyed boy with dark hair in her arms that grabs my attention.
A little boy with a smile so wide and radiant that it’s almost splitting hisface in two.
“Doesn’t look like him, does it?” Magnus chuckles as he drops his phone onto the desk.
“I’ve never seen him smile,” I murmur, looking from his face to the blue wing walker plane they’re standing in front of.
“They’re rare. But they exist.” Magnus sinks into the seat at his desk and looks at the frame in my hands. “June was a spitfire. Kept me on my toes. Never a dull moment.”
“She’s beautiful. Is this the plane in your office? The one she wing-walked on?”
“That’s the one.” His eyes take on a mistiness. “She was pregnant with Jet the day she went up on it. We didn’t know. Not that it would have stopped her. She thought flying was the safest thing in the world.” He clears his throat, and I brush away the apology in his eyes.
Flying is safe most of the time. Unless you’re my father or his pilot.
“She loved to watch birds. Said she wished she had wings and could fly like them at a second’s notice. Her favorite were blue tits. Tiny little things. But she loved them. We had some nest in the gardens one summer. They have their young in June.”
“You named the plane June’s Blue.” I grin at the photograph. “I get it now.”
“Yep,” Magnus chuckles. “Her favorite giant blue bird, that one. We named it that day, after we found out she was expecting. Seemed fitting.”
“It’s perfect.” I place the frame back onto the desk carefully, angling it exactly the way I found it so that Magnus can see it as he works.
“Whatever my son did to hurt you, I’m sorry. I brought him up to be a good man… We both did.”
