What was going on? She’d expected him to still be angry, but instead he looked—beaten.
Did he regret what he’d said to her?
Giving herself a mental shake, she took another deliberate step towards him. It didn’t matter; there wasn’t anything he could say to make up for the cruelty of his last statement anyway. This wasn’t the first time he’d treated her with such brutal disdain and she wasn’t going to put up with it any longer.
Forcing back her shoulders, she took one final step closer to him, feeling her legs shaking with tension.
‘This isn’t going to work, Max. I can’t live in a place where I’m constantly afraid of doing the wrong thing and making you angry. I don’t know what I did that was so bad, or what’s going on with you to make you react like that, but I’m not going to let you destroy what’s left of my confidence. I’m not going to be a victim any more.’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘So I’m leaving now. And that goes for the job, too.’
Her heart gave a lurch at the flash of contrition in his eyes, but she knew she had to be strong and walk away for her own good.
‘Goodbye, Max, and good luck.’
As she turned to go, fighting against the tears that threatened to give her away, she thought she heard the bedsprings creak as if he’d stood up, but didn’t turn round to find out.
She was halfway down the stairs when she heard Max’s voice behind her. ‘Wait, Cara!’
Spinning round, she held up a hand to stop him from coming any closer, intensely aware that, despite her anger with him, there was a small part of her that was desperate to hear him say something nice to her, to persuade her that he wasn’t the monster he seemed to be. ‘I can’t walk on eggshells around you any more, Max; I don’t think my heart will stand it.’
In any way, shape or form.
He slumped down onto the top step and put his elbows on his knees, his whole posture defeated. ‘Don’t go,’ he said quietly.
‘I have to.’
Looking up, he fixed her with a glassy stare. ‘I know I’ve been a nightmare to be around recently—’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘It’s not you, Cara—it’s one hundred per cent me. Please, at least hear me out. I need to tell you what’s going on so you don’t leave thinking any of this is your fault.’ He sighed and rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘That’s the last thing I want to happen.’
She paused. Even if she still chose to leave after hearing him out, at least she’d know why it hadn’t worked and be able to make peace with her decision to walk away.
The silence stretched to breaking point between them. ‘Okay,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Thank you.’ Getting up from the step, he gestured down the stairs. ‘Let’s go into the sitting room.’
Once there, she perched on the edge of the sofa and waited for him to take the chair opposite, but he surprised her by sitting next to her instead, sinking back into the cushions with a long guttural sigh which managed to touch every nerve-ending in her body.
‘This is going to make me sound mentally unstable.’
She turned to frown at him. ‘Oka-ay...’ she said, failing to keep her apprehension out of her voice.
‘That bed hasn’t been changed since my wife, Jemima, died a year and a half ago.’
Hot horror slid through her, her skin prickling as if she were being stabbed with a thousand needles. ‘But I thought you said—’ She shook her suddenly fuzzy head. ‘You never said—’ Words, it seemed, had totally failed her. Everything she knew about him slipped sickeningly into place: the ever-fluctuating moods, the reluctance to talk about his personal life, his anger at her meddling with things in his house.
His wife’s house.
Looking away, he stared at the wall opposite, sitting forward with clenched fists as if he was steeling himself to get it all out in the open.
‘I couldn’t bring myself to change it.’ He paused and she saw his shoulders rise then fall as he took a deep breath. ‘The bed, I mean. It still smelled faintly like her. I let her mother take all her clothes and other personal effects—what would I have done with them?—but the bed was mine. The last place we’d been together before I lost her—’ he took another breath, pushing back his hunched shoulders ‘—before she died.’
‘Oh, God, Max... I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea.’
He huffed out a dry laugh. ‘How could you? I did everything I could to avoid talking to you about it.’ He grimaced. ‘Because, to be honest, I’ve done enough talking about it to last me a lifetime. I guess, in my twisted imagination, I thought if you didn’t know, I could pretend it hadn’t happened when you were around. Outside of work, you’re the first normal, unconnected thing I’ve had in my life since I lost her and I guess I was hanging on to that.’
He turned to look at her again. ‘I should have told you, Cara, especially after you moved in, but I couldn’t find a way to bring it up without—’ He paused and swallowed hard, the look in his eyes so wretched that, without thinking, she reached out and laid a hand on his bare forearm.
He frowned down at where their bodies connected and the air seemed to crackle around them.
Disconcerted by the heat of him beneath her fingertips, she withdrew her hand and laid it back on her lap.
‘It’s kind of you to consider me normal,’ she said, flipping him a grin, hoping the levity might go some way to smoothing out the sudden weird tension between them.
He gave a gentle snort, as if to acknowledge her pathetic attempt at humour.
Why had she never recognised his behaviour as grief before? Now she knew to look for it, it was starkly discernible in the deep frown lines in his face and the haunted look in his eyes.
But she’d been so caught up in her own private universe of problems she hadn’t even considered why Max seemed so bitter all the time.
She’d thought he had everything.
How wrong she’d been.
They sat in silence for a while, the only sound in the room the soothing tick-tock of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, like a steady heartbeat in the chaos.
‘How did she die?’ Cara asked eventually. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be keen to revisit this conversation and she wanted to have all the information from this point onwards so she could avoid any future blunders.
The familiarity of the question seemed to rouse him. ‘She had a subarachnoid haemorrhage—it’s where a blood vessel in the brain bursts—’ he added, when she frowned at him in confusion. ‘On our one-year wedding anniversary. It happened totally out of the blue. I was late for our celebration dinner and I got a phone message saying she’d collapsed in the restaurant. By the time I got to the hospital she had such extensive brain damage she didn’t even recognise me. She died two weeks later. I never got to say goodbye properly.’ He snorted gently. ‘The last thing I said to her before it happened was “Stop being such a nag; I won’t be late,” when I left her in bed that morning and went to work.’
Cara had to swallow past the tightness in her throat before she could speak. ‘That’s why you didn’t want me to leave here with us on bad terms.’ She put a hand back onto his arm and gave it an ineffectual rub, feeling completely out of her depth. ‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry. What a horrible thing to happen.’
He leant back against the cushions, breaking the contact of her touch, and stared up at the ceiling. ‘I often wonder whether I would have noticed some signs if I’d paid more attention to her. If I hadn’t been so caught up with work—’
She couldn’t think of