He swallowed, as if that would bury these unwanted feelings deeper again. He knew loss just as surely as did the wasted woman sitting opposite him. Loss. Such a tiny word yet it was so big—larger and more encompassing than anything anyone could ever warn you about. And if you couldn’t deal with it, tuck it away and bury it in the back of your mind, it could take over your life.
So he’d buried it. Deep down inside him, concealing the site under a ton of concrete will. Until today. He groaned inwardly.
Oh, hell, yes, he knew loss.
‘That must have been terrible for you,’ he said.
Her eyes misted, a silent affirmation. ‘And of course that means that Philadelphia has to do it all, I’m afraid. She’s stuck with me and she knows I want to stay at home as long as possible.’
‘As long as possible?’
She put her cup down and sighed. ‘I will have to move into a hospice in a few months the doctors say—there’s nothing else for it. Philadelphia won’t be able to look after me soon and I can’t expect her to. So if you’re worried about me getting in the way of her work…? I imagine that’s why you’re here?’
She was dying. It should have been clear from the moment she opened the door—her bird-like frame, her gaunt features and pained walk. It should have been clear. But then he’d had plenty of experience in ignoring death, shoving it aside in his quest to reach the top.
She was dying and she thought he was here to find out whether Philly would still make a good employee.
‘No,’ he said, bursting out of the chair. ‘No, that’s not why I’m here.’
He paced around the small room, trying to banish the nervous tension invading his senses. But why was he here? What did he hope to achieve? Certainly something more than this sense of hopelessness and despair, this struggle for an answer to questions he couldn’t even frame—something that would answer this desperate need he couldn’t even put words to.
He stopped beside a display of photographs assembled along the mantle. The history of a family, laid out before his eyes. A wedding photograph, fading with age, showing a young Daphne and her late husband on their wedding day, smiling for the camera, happy and hopeful for the future. A photograph of the young family with two children, a boy—just a toddler—and his older sister, maybe six or seven years old, with pigtails and wearing a frilly dress.
Philly.
Just a skinny kid then, but there was no mistaking her eyes and that chin, defiant and serious even back then.
And now she was a woman. Every part a woman, as this morning’s heated passion had attested. What drove her then, to deny him? Three times she’d evaded his reach. Three times she’d slipped away from him. The Christmas party when she’d stolen away, that night at the Gold Coast when she’d pushed him from her room, and today, when he’d all but offered her luxury on a platter. Still she seemed to want no part of him.
But he would have her. He’d never failed at anything in his life. Anything he’d wanted he’d strived for and achieved. Philly would be no exception.
He dragged his eyes away to the graduation photographs, the two children all grown up and about to set the world aflame. Another wedding photograph, more recent, no doubt Monty with his new bride, smiling into each other’s eyes, totally oblivious to the camera. And the last one, another young family, a tiny baby cradled in its proud parents’ arms.
He swallowed as he continued to stare, feeling swamped by the history, the tragedy, but most of all by the sheer force of emotion contained in the photographs so lovingly arranged on the mantle. Those most wonderful moments in a family’s history recorded—disparate images of a particular moment of time—together making up a snapshot of a family’s history, a pictorial chronology.
For some reason the picture of the baby drew him, its doll-like quality, the sprinkling of downy hair on its head and its surprisingly long fingers poking out from beneath its blanket as it slept.
He didn’t know the first thing about babies. He’d never wanted to know. But now there was this overwhelming sense of fascination. A door had been opened to him and there was a whole new world to explore. Philly had opened that door.
‘That’s little Thomas,’ Daphne said, her voice soft and heavy with sorrow. ‘He would have turned two just last week. I can’t help but think what he’d be up to now if he were still alive. No doubt toddling about everywhere, getting into everything.’
He looked over his shoulder. She was so small and weak, her sadness so much a part of her. ‘You must miss them very much.’
Her nod was no more than a tilt of her head, even her gaze still fixed on the floor in front of her. ‘I do, but then there’s something so special about babies,’ she said, as he turned back to the photograph. ‘I think that’s almost what I miss most—the wonder of new life, the hope for the future. It’s too late for me to experience that again now.’