‘Are you certain?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘You don’t make time for them.’
Why would he think such a thing? she wondered for a moment before recalling their conversation last night in the restaurant. ‘I never said that.’
‘You didn’t need to.’
‘All right,’ she admitted, faintly thrown by the fact that he’d remembered such a tiny detail too. ‘I don’t see them all that often. It’s complicated. Are yours still on the mainland?’
‘Mine died in a car crash when I was ten.’
A silence fell at that, and despite her attempts to remain coolly aloof Carla couldn’t help but be affected. God, how awful, she thought, her chest squeezing and her stomach tightening. How tragic. He’d been so young. How did something like that affect the boy and then the man? How had it changed him? She couldn’t imagine being so wholly on her own. After what had happened to her, her parents had felt so guilty and regretful that they’d gone from borderline negligent to smothering, and yes, their relationship was strained because of it but at least they were around.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with woeful inadequacy.
He gave a shrug. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Finn lost his mother at the age of ten, too.’
‘And what were you doing at the age of ten, Carla?’ he countered, neatly avoiding the point.
Trying to get her parents’ attention, mostly, she thought, remembering how she’d constantly played up at the various schools she’d attended. Figuring out how to persuade them to stay in one place long enough for her to make friends. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shifting on her stool to ease the stab of age-old pain and disappointment. ‘Listening to music and hanging out with the other kids on the communes, I guess.’
The look he gave her was disconcertingly shrewd. ‘Why do I get the feeling that isn’t all?’
‘I truly can’t imagine,’ she said before deciding to engage in a bit of conversational whiplash of her own. ‘Did you know you were adopted?’
‘It was never a secret. There was some effort to locate my birth parents after the death of my adoptive ones.’
‘But they weren’t found.’
‘No.’
‘Weren’t you ever interested in carrying on the search?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I discovered I preferred being on my own.’
‘You aren’t any more.’
He didn’t respond to that, just slid the garlic from the board into the sizzling oil in the pan, and then gave it a toss, which made her think it could be time to shake things up on the conversational front too. She had to at least try and make him see reason about the family he could have now.
‘Did you know you were born in Argentina?’ she asked, dismissing the guilty feeling she might nevertheless be crossing a line because for Georgie and Finn there never would be a line.
‘No.’
‘Then you can’t know that there are three of you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re one of three. There’s you and Finn and one other. You’re triplets. All boys.’
The only indication that what she’d said had had any impact at all was a tiny pause in his stirring of the garlic. ‘Who’s the third?’ he asked after a beat of thundering silence.