She must have heard the note of torment in his voice because she stopped what she was doing, finally, and gave a great sigh. ‘OK, fine,’ she said, abruptly sitting on the bed and looking at him, her eyes wary and her expression cool. ‘God knows you’ve had to listen to me prattle on enough.’ Prattle? he thought with a frown. She did not prattle. ‘So if you want to talk I’ll listen.’
With a rush of relief, Finn stalked into the room and leaned against the edge of the dressing table she’d just cleared. He rubbed his hands over his face and then shoved them into the pockets of his jeans. He cleared his throat and braced himself.
‘So it turns out that I find it hard to process big things,’ he began, inwardly wincing at how pathetic he sounded. ‘Especially big emotional things. I have a tendency to lock things down.’
‘That’s understandable. Although probably not very healthy.’
‘No.’ It wasn’t healthy at all. God only knew the damage he’d caused his nervous system recently. It also smacked of hypocrisy because it had just occurred to him that by withholding the truth from her and obfuscating he’d been behaving like Jim and Alice, which did not sit well.
‘Have you always done it?’
He gave a sho
rt nod. ‘Ever since my mother—Alice—died.’
‘That’s a long time.’
‘Yes.’ Too long, with hindsight. ‘I bottled up how I felt about that for years. I was only ten. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Jim—my father—or, rather, my adopted father—did the best he could but he wasn’t one for emoting either.’
Her eyebrows lifted. ‘You didn’t talk to anyone? A counsellor? A teacher?’
He shook his head. ‘No one. Not until the lid of the pressure cooker flew off when I was a teenager.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Nothing all that dramatic. I got into a couple of fights when I was sixteen. Spent a night in jail for being drunk and disorderly.’
‘And then you had therapy?’
‘Of a kind. The officer in charge that night asked what I was thought I was doing and it all came out. She gave me some good advice. The incident turned out to be a huge wake-up call. However, it turns out that internalising things is a hard habit to break.’
‘We all have our ways of coping.’
Yes, well, unlike hers, his weren’t working out so well. ‘Jim’s diagnosis was something else I didn’t talk about,’ he said, forcing himself to keep going because she needed to know everything in order to be able to help.
‘Did no one ask?’
‘Not many knew. I told the people who did that everything was fine.’
‘So how did you find out you were adopted?’
‘I was going through Jim’s papers after he died. The certificate was in a box that had been stored in the attic of his house.’
‘That must have been devastating.’
‘It was. I was in the middle of a full-blown identity crisis when you turned up with the news about Josh.’
‘No wonder you were so insistent on rescuing him. He’s your only flesh and blood.’
‘As far as I know.’
She frowned and gave a faint nod. ‘Right.’
Unable to bear the intensity of her scrutiny or suppress the restlessness whipping around inside him any longer, Finn pushed himself off the dressing table. ‘It’s been a disorientating time,’ he said, shoving his hands through his hair as he began to pace. ‘I feel as if I’ve been manipulated. As though everything about me has to be redefined and renegotiated. I’m thirty-one. It’s been tough trying to work out how much of my life has been real and how much a lie. I can’t figure out why Jim never said anything, especially after Alice died, and it’s been driving me mad.’
Georgie gave a loud sigh of what sounded like exasperation. ‘Oh, for the love of God, will you please stop calling them that?’ she said heatedly.
Stunned at her tone, wondering where the hell the sympathy he’d been expecting was, Finn came to an abrupt halt and whipped round to stare at her. ‘What?’