She nodded. ‘It was a plane crash. We were coming back from a holiday in France. My dad was flying the plane.’ Her mouth trembled. ‘He loved medicine but flying was his passion.’
‘Do you know what happened?’
He felt her shiver.
‘Not really. At the inquest they said he’d fallen asleep. I’d taken a travel sickness pill. The first thing I remember is waking up to this enormous headache.’
Arlo nodded mechanically, but inside his head he was visualising the scene. The wreckage. The bodies. The silence. His chest squeezed tight.
‘Does Johnny know?’ He hadn’t consciously intended to ask that question, but for some reason he cared enormously about the answer.
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t really told anyone. I did a couple of sessions with a therapist, but I don’t know how to tell people. It’s stupid, really. I did try a few times, but they were always so horrified, and then I just ended up trying to make them feel better.’
It wasn’t stupid. After his mother’s death people had wanted to be kind, but mostly he’d found himself having to manage their reaction. The idea of Frankie trying to cope with that as well as everything else made the muscles in his arms tighten painfully.
Her eyes found his. ‘You’re a good listener,’ she said quietly, sifting a layer of sand between her toes.
He pulled her closer and kissed her. Holding her, feeling her soft body against his, made his heart contract.
But he ignored it.
This wasn’t about him. It was about Frankie. And she needed more than a few days off. She needed someone to fill the family-sized gap in her life. She needed someone to love her and look out for her.
He couldn’t do any of those things but he could, and would, take care of her, for now, until it was time for her to leave.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HANDS TIGHTENING AGAINST the ship’s wheel, Frankie squinted through the sunlight at the sea, her heartbeat leapfrogging in time to the waves.
She had not been prepared for this. For any of it.
For the patches of shining brightness or the dazzle of spray hitting the bow of the boat. But most of all for where the pursuit of her unfinished connection with Arlo Milburn had taken her.
They were on board his yacht, The Aeolus, and she couldn’t quite believe that she was here with him.
Remembering her stumbling confession out on the beach, she felt her chest tighten. She still didn’t really understand how she had ended up telling Arlo about the accident. She hadn’t planned on telling him anything.
Why would she?
They’d promised one another nothing.
But Arlo had been so calm, unfazed—and in a way that wasn’t surprising, given how he lived. He must have had to deal with far more terrifying things in Antarctica.
What she hadn’t expected was for him to show compassion. Had she thought about it, she would have assumed he would be brisk, practical, detached. Instead, his gentleness had caught her off-guard, and she had been telling the truth when she’d said he was a good listener. He was the first person who had given her space to find the right words. Or maybe to realise that there were no right words.
He hadn’t just rushed in and tried to fill the void with his pity and shock, and crucially he hadn’t made it about him. And that was the most incredible part, given that he had lost both his parents too.
He had understood that in that moment there had been no room for his experiences, even though they were relevant. He was the first person who had seemed to know that she was in a dark place and that what she needed most of all was for him just to join her there.
So instead of telling her that he knew how she was feeling, or giving her advice, or trying to be positive, he had let her talk. He had listened—really listened—so that it had been easy to tell him the truth.
Her stomach muscles tightened. Not all of it—not the fact that she had caused the accident...that it was her fault that her family had died.
Just for a moment or two she had thought about it. A part of her had wanted to tell him. But she had tried telling the truth before in France, first at the hospital, with the gendarmes, and then again at the inquest, but both times it had made no difference.
She allowed herself a brief glance at the man with the intense focus and formidable craggy profile at the other end of the boat.
At the hospital she’d thought it was because she was speaking English and that something had got lost in translation. But at the inquest there had been a translator, and it was then that she’d realised it wouldn’t matter what language she was speaking, because telling the truth couldn’t change what had happened.