No, she couldn’t talk to him, not yet. Not as they used to. It hurt too much. She looked away, pretending she’d heard a commotion. ‘Hey, the boys are fighting, I’ve got to go.’
Without giving him a chance to argue, she cut the connection, and his face faded away in an instant.
It would help a lot if her love for him would die as easily and quickly.
A couple of days later, Angus stood at his office window, watching the bustling activity on the green, grey Thames in the distance. His office afforded spectacular views of the area, but he couldn’t take it in. All he could think about was Thadie’s pale and drawn face, the misery in her eyes.
Sadness he’d put there, all because he couldn’t tell her what she most needed to hear.
What he felt. What he’d probably always felt, from the moment he’d met her in London.
The thing about love was that it was uncontrollable, that it wasn’t something he could, through sheer hard work and determination, succeed at. There were too many variables, too much that could go wrong. He knew how to be a soldier, how to run a company, and he was learning how to be a dad. How to hand his heart over, how to love? He’d never been taught or been shown that.
If he tried to love her and failed—because how could he succeed at something he’d no training for?—he’d disappoint her further.
He didn’t want to hurt her...
Correction, he didn’t want to hurt her more than he was already doing.
He was doing the right thing, Angus reassured himself, rubbing his chest, somewhere above his sluggish, aching heart. He was hurting them now to save them both some big hurt down the line. It was a small skirmish to avoid a major, bloody battle later.
The aching pain and awkwardness would fade, and his craving for her would, oh, in seventy or so years, dissipate. At some point, somewhere down the line, they’d be friends again.
He missed her with every bloody breath he took.
Angus heard the sound of an incoming Skype call and glanced at his watch. His US-based chief of operations was calling in ten minutes early but that was okay, anything was better than standing here, feeling as if misery were eating him alive.
He picked up a remote control, pushed a button and his computer screen projected onto the state-of-the-art screen on the wall opposite. He blinked and rubbed his hands acrosshis eyes but instead of his dark-skinned, burly Ving Rhames lookalike VP, he saw his youngest son on the wall.
‘Finn, hi,’ he said, confused. He’d spoken to the twins earlier, shortly after they woke up. He normally called them after their supper. Where was Thadie, and why did Finn have her phone? And how on earth did his three-year-old know how to video-call him?
Then he remembered his youngest’s big brain: he asked complex questions and Thadie suspected he could already recognise basic words when she read to them. He could do basic addition and subtraction. Finn was super-smart, and it didn’t take a genius to work out how to make a phone call.
‘Where’s Mum and Gus, Finn?’ Angus asked, resting his butt on the corner of the desk.
Finn moved the phone and Angus saw Gus sitting at the kitchen table next to his brother. His oldest looked uncharacteristically sombre. Something was up with his boys, and he was in London, a continent away. Angus pulled in a deep breath, pushing down the panic that had instantly hit him. ‘Hey, bud.’
Gus’s eyes filled with tears. ‘We miss you,’ he said.
Angus felt as though he’d been hit in the gut. ‘Me too, bud. Where is your mother?’
‘She’s in her office, Angus,’ Finn answered him, turning the camera back to him. ‘She’s drawing but she keeps ripping the pages off and throwing the paper balls at the wall,’ Finn told him, sounding bewildered. ‘And she keeps saying a lot of bad words. She looks mad but we didn’t do anything, I swear.’
‘And she’s crying,’ Gus added.
‘She’s always crying,’ Finn corrected him.
Angus pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling as if he’d been sucker-punched. Before he could think of what to say, howto console them, he heard a stream of Zulu. He looked at the screen and saw the chagrined expression of the twins’ au pair.
‘Sorry, Mr Docherty, I swear I only left them to go to the bathroom. Thadie left her phone on the dining table, but I didn’t think they knew how to make video-calls.’
‘It’s not hard,’ Finn told her, sounding a little belligerent.
Angus told the boys he’d speak to them later and sent them to their playroom. When Tumi confirmed they were out of sight, and hearing, he spoke again. ‘They seem a little flat. Are they okay?’ he asked.
She sent an uncomfortable look towards Thadie’s study. ‘Maybe you should speak to Thadie, Mr Docherty.’
‘Call me Angus, please,’ he told her. ‘Look, I appreciate your loyalty, but their well-being is all I care about. Please, talk to me.’