CHAPTER FIVE
It was too easy, Andie thought as she observed from the shadows of Will’s room. Too easy to slip into a comfortable familiarity with this man and his son. Perhaps it was the surprise of the beautifully outfitted OT room that had knocked her off guard. Or maybe it was the unexpected intimacy of the afternoon, with both the nanny and the housekeeper off duty. Whatever the reason, her first few hours at the house had felt like a moment out of time. And that was not a good thing.
She had to remember herself and not get lost in the intimacy of her new role. Rhys seemed all too willing to treat her as if she belonged. But she knew otherwise. You’re an impostor, and don’t you forget it. She had to keep her walls up and make sure Rhys butted up against their hard contours, too. Because she was afraid of the kind of expectations that might develop if he became too comfortable with her, started to trust her in all the ways that felt only natural when an employee began to fit in like one of the family. She didn’t deserve that kind of trust. She wasn’t one of them, and she never would be.
It didn’t matter that her heart seemed to turn over as she watched Rhys hold his sleepy son against his shoulder as he readied him for bed, his large, capable hand cupped gently under Will’s head. It made no difference that the sight of Will’s serene profile and his dimpled fists, clasping handfuls of his father’s shirt, stirred her in ways she’d never experienced. Those feelings were all the more reason for her to lock her happy-families fantasy back in the lead-lined box where it belonged. She was here as a professional, and even now the clock was ticking down toward a three-month expiration date, at which point she vowed she would leave with her peace of mind intact.
Andie watched from across the room as Rhys read Will his customary three stories, letting the rhythm of his voice wash over her. She was observing their nighttime routine, learning how Rhys usually settled Will to sleep.
It quickly became apparent that Will was wired with some kind of subliminal alarm system that went off when Rhys moved more than a few inches away from his body. Will appeared lost in peaceful slumber before Rhys’s first attempt to leave the bed, his eyelids at half-mast, his arms flung out. But the minute Rhys shifted his weight to get up, the alarm tripped. Will’s eyes flew open, his fists clenched reflexively around the nearest part of his father he could grab, and the screaming started.
Bloodcurdling was a fitting description of the inhuman sounds coming from Will’s small body. Rhys shot Andie a ragged look and scooped Will up, swaying on his feet. Then, to her immense surprise, he began to sing.
The room vibrated with a rich, unearthly baritone shaping a melody that sounded almost hymnal. Strange, guttural consonants mingled with pure, elongated vowels in a language that was utterly indecipherable to Andie—except for one recurring word that sounded oddly like “saucepan.” There was love in every twist of the melody, in every mystifying phrase, and she held herself utterly still, somehow abashed to be witnessing an interlude between father and child that felt primal, transcendent.
Rhys sang on, modulating his volume as Will’s cries tapered off. Then, for a seemingly endless succession of minutes, he hugged and soothed, his gaze occasionally meeting Andie’s across the room as the darkness deepened and a strange communion bound them. Her breath seemed to synchronize with Rhys’s as time slowed. Every now and again, an aftershock racked Will’s body with a sleepy half sob, but the tears were drying on his cheeks, and his eyes finally drifted closed again.
Slowly and with infinite care, Rhys bent low and angled his upper body toward the toddler’s bed, trying to deposit Will on the mattress without breaking the spell. Andie could tell almost immediately that it wasn’t going to work. She raised her hands in warning, but it was too late. Rhys missed the signal and continued in the attempt. There was no way that kind of movement was going to avoid tripping Will’s internal alarm. Suddenly the room was filled once again with discordant sound. Rhys wiped his eyes weakly, shooting a traumatized smile Andie’s way.
“This is how it usually goes,” he said softly over the top of Will’s head. They’d already been in his room for more than an hour.
Andie regarded him sympathetically. “I have an idea,” she said. “Hold on a sec.”
Within a minute, she was back, bearing an item from her OT tool kit.
“It’s a weighted blanket,” she explained in response to Rhys’s raised eyebrows. “I think you need to start off with him lying down. He seems to respond really well to being hugged, having your arm around him. Let’s try this and see if the extra pressure helps. Then, if he drifts off, you can remove your arm, and he’ll still feel the consistent weight of the blanket.”
“At this point I’ll try anything,” Rhys sighed. Kissing Will’s head, he lay down and draped his arm around him, hugging softly and humming the same melody, as Andie lowered the blanket over Will.
The toddler offered no response to the extra weight, except to shift contentedly. Soon Rhys’s humming wound down, and he closed his eyes, encouraging Will to do the same. The only sound in the room was the gentle murmur of water sounds coming from the sound machine on the bookshelf. The calm deepened, and Andie found herself drifting into an almost meditative state.
She stretched to dispel the tension that had gathered in her shoulders in response to Will’s screams. Time took on a strange unreality as she waited, sneaking occasional peeks at the handsome matching profiles of father and son facing each other on the pillow.
Finally, when she was certain Rhys had fallen asleep, he stirred, letting one arm drift out so he could brace his hand on the floor and shift his weight from the low toddler bed with as little impact as possible. Andie held her breath as he executed the smooth roll, peeling himself off the bed in one fluid movement. Wincing in anticipation of more screaming, he looked back at the bed to see Will still sleeping peacefully.
With an exhausted thumbs-up, Rhys trod carefully to the door and waited for her to follow. He felt around the doorway for the hallway light switch on the other side and clicked the light off to avoid a shaft of brightness falling onto Will’s bed. Finally, they tumbled out into the dark corridor.
“Thank you,” he said, performing a small “I’m not worthy” homage in the shadows. She let out a tense breath and smiled at the vintage Wayne’s World reference, inclining her head in the direction of the stairs.
“Don’t talk yet,” she whispered urgently. “It’s not safe.”
They crept along to the top of the staircase, and Rhys let out a laugh of disbelief, reaching out to gently grip her shoulders. Andie had to command herself not to jump out of his grasp. His touch was so warm and his presence so large that it seemed to exert a magnetic force.
“Amazing,” he said. “It actually worked. We’re out!”
“I have to ask. What was that song you were singing?”
“Oh.” Rhys gave a sheepish smile, attractive laugh lines etched at the corners of his eyes. “That was ‘Sosban Fach.’ Little Saucepan. It’s a folk song. All Welsh children can sing it in their sleep. It was a favorite at my local rugby club, but when I slow down the tempo, it helps Will nod off.”
“Well, I think it must have magical properties. I almost went into a trance myself.”
“Not as magical as your bag of tricks. That blanket worked wonders. Now you must have dinner with me to celebrate.”
“Um . . .” Andie shifted uncomfortably, looking back toward the small kitchenette near the nanny’s room. “I was actually going to look around for a can of soup or something and get an early night.”
“After what Will and I just put you through, I’m not about to let you go to bed with nothing more in your stomach than a cup of Mrs. Hodge’s Bovril.”
“Bovril?”
“Yes, it’s a concentrated meat extract. Comes in a jar and you dilute it with water to make a broth. I happen to know Mrs. Hodge takes a cup of it now and then. Horrible stuff.”
“Any chance you have a can of chicken noodle in the kitchen downstairs? I haven’t had time to shop for anything yet—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to eat properly or I’ll feel so guilty I won’t get any sleep. Plus, it’s your first night here. You should get a welcome dinner, and I want to hear your thoughts on what else I’m getting wrong with the bedtime routine.”
Andie nodded. That she could do. “Okay, then. Thanks.”
She followed Rhys down to the kitchen, peppering him with ideas about how to calm Will before bedtime: perhaps a massage after his nightly bath, and a chart with pictures detailing every aspect of the bedtime routine, so it would always unfold with utter predictability—something kids like Will thrived on.
“Bathtime is always a three-ring circus,” Rhys confessed. “Tantrums, tears—you name it. I skipped it tonight because I couldn’t deal with it, but you’ll see.”
“Well, we’re going to have to work on that, too,” Andie said. “Probably sooner rather than later.”
Rhys gave a heavy sigh. “Sometimes I feel like all I do is force Will to go from one calamity to another.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll get better. I have plenty of tricks up my sleeve.” Andie smiled reassuringly. “You’ve been on the front lines for a while.”
They reached the cavernous great room and kitchen, and she was once again struck by the scale of the house and its empty, echoing spaces.
“So on weekends, you’re it—with Will, I mean. Just the two of you?”
“Yes. Nights, weekends. Every moment it’s possible for me to be around. Why? Does that surprise you?”
“Having seen you in action with Will, it doesn’t surprise me at all. But it wasn’t necessarily what I expected.”
“Because I stalled on the evaluation forms,” Rhys supplied, his eyes lighting with challenge. He opened the fridge and started pulling out dinner items. Some steaks in a marinade. A large bowlful of salad greens. A collection of other sides. “You expected me to be a hands-off dad.”
“I didn’t say that,” Andie protested.
“But you thought it.”
“I might have wondered. Before I met you. But even then, I wouldn’t presume to judge. I don’t have children. I can’t pretend to understand what it’s like.”
Rhys looked down at the countertop, his expression unreadable. After a beat, he glanced back up, his face open, neutral. “Do you like steak? Green beans? Mashed potatoes? Salad?”
“Let’s skip the salad,” Andie said decisively. After the evening they’d just had, she wanted her calories delivered as efficiently and indulgently as possible. Besides, on a frigid February evening, there was little that appealed less than the idea of chewing her way through a hedgerow’s worth of greenery.
Rhys nodded and lit the broiler.
“You must have thought I was a complete ass,” he mused as he busied himself with preparing the steaks and heating the side dishes. “And I don’t blame you.”
He shot her a chastened glance, spotlighted in the warm glow of the task lighting above the kitchen counter. “First I act like the big-shot CEO, refusing to return your calls, and then all of a sudden I’m bulldozing you into coming here.”
Andie watched his hands as he seasoned and stirred. They were large and bronzed, with big, square palms, and fingers that were straight and capable. She imagined them wielding the paint roller down in the OT room, preparing the space for her to work with Will, and her throat thickened with emotion.
“You’re not so bad,” she said, looking up to find him watching her. She cleared her throat, her lips forming into a wry smile. “Although the media profiles had me a little concerned. Fancy acoustic panels and such.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t read the Wired article?” He stared at her in dismay as she gave an amused nod and whisked past him to find a pair of oven mitts to liberate the mashed potatoes from the microwave.
“Perks and Quirks at Zephyrus Mogul’s Upscale Headquarters” the headline read. The journalist had gone to town with her descriptions of the amenities and upgrades Rhys had insisted on adding to the Zephyrus workspace. There had been a number of column inches devoted to a lingering meditation on the state-of-the-art, Swiss-imported curved ceiling panels he’d installed in the company’s largest meeting rooms.
“Concert-hall-quality acoustics?” Andie teased.
“It was an emergency,” Rhys explained. “I literally couldn’t lead our all-hands meetings because the din was messing with my head. The sound of all those voices at once—it was like hot pincers being individually applied to every one of my synapses.”
“That’s quite an image.” Andie regarded him quizzically, thinking how like Will he was, with his powerful sensory responses. Except that Rhys had the power to enshrine his preferences in the very architecture of the Zephyrus offices.
“And the swanky game room?”
Rhys had reportedly given up the space initially earmarked for his own office—taking a modest interior office for himself—and turned it into an all-access gamer’s paradise with sweeping harbor views.
“We’re trying to attract the best minds out there. We have to compete with Google and all the really cool start-ups. Having a place to decompress is practically mandatory, and it helps the creative process.”
“But what about your office?”
“I go inward when I’m working. Really working, I mean. I don’t need a big space or expensive views.”
According to the write-ups, Rhys eschewed traditional conference-table meetings and encouraged his staff to collaborate on the move. Rumor had it that there was an ad hoc cash bonus waiting for the employee who generated the best idea while hanging, batlike, from an inversion table in the gym. Andie stifled a smile as she reflected that, in many ways, Rhys had turned his company headquarters into a grand version of Will’s OT room.
There were also company nap rooms, with individual sleep pods like a Japanese capsule hotel, and a complimentary laundry service for those stuck at the office after hours—a particular favorite with the single, workaholic city dwellers among the ranks. And it wasn’t only about naps, video games, and free laundry. Andie had been impressed to read about the generous parental-leave policies Rhys handed down, including paid time off for parents to attend school meetings, field trips, and volunteer events. But she had to admit it was the colorful oddities that made the biggest splash.
“How about Blue Food Monday?” She couldn’t resist.
Rhys smiled sheepishly, and Andie caught a glimpse of the child he once must have been.
“Can’t a guy have a thing for blue food? I was on a creative bender that week, and I thought, Why not set the caterers a challenge?”
“Is it like the corporate equivalent of musicians demanding green M&M’s in their dressing rooms?” Andie asked, realizing that the profiles she’d read on Rhys did indeed view him with a certain puzzled awe, as if the journalists were dazzled by the rock-star magnetism he exuded. His honed features and startling blue-smoke eyes probably accounted for a good part of their fascination.
“Not really,” he laughed. “The media trots out the blue pasta, the acoustics, and the sleep pods when they want to paint me as a finicky eccentric, and maybe they’re right. But why not make the most of the things you can control?”
Andie thought she could see purplish shadows gathering in the depths of his extraordinary eyes as he thought about the things he couldn’t control. Namely, the reason why she was installed in the Griffiths household.
He plated their steaks and gestured to the array of warmed side dishes. They helped themselves, buffet-style, and carried their plates to a table bracketed by built-in banquettes. Rhys invited Andie to sit, and he retrieved a bottle of red wine and two glasses. His legs didn’t quite brush hers as he settled on the bench opposite hers, but she could sense his every movement like it was etched on her skin.
“When did you first suspect it?” she asked. “Will’s autism, I mean.”
“Probably at about six months. Will was always more . . . explosive than other infants. I mean, they all cry and hate to be put down to sleep, but he was on a hair trigger. He would go on these legendary crying jags.”
“His screams are so raw it hurts to listen to him,” Andie said.
“I know.” Rhys looked up, his tormented expression giving way to a kind of jaded humor. “Once he was crying in the background when I left a phone message, and Tom suggested patenting the recording and licensing it to the military as a weapon.”
“I guess you have to laugh, sometimes.”
“You do.”
His vivid energy enveloped her, the air crackling with warmth and electricity, as he tilted the wine bottle and the ruby-dark liquid burbled pleasantly into her glass. She watched, conflicted. This meal was taking a path that led further from the solitary cup of Bovril than she’d meant to go.
She should probably shield her glass with her hand, protesting the idea of drinking alcohol with him—essentially drinking on the job—but something about his open expression made her hold her peace. It was kind of like taking a case history, she told herself. Yeah, except case histories don’t usually involve a generous glass of Merlot and a man with a lethal, scorched-earth charisma.
“I kept finding reasons to reject the truth,” Rhys admitted. “But I knew.”
He swiped a restless hand across his brow and up through his hair in an unconscious gesture that left a clump of dark strands pointing skyward.
“By the time he turned one, he still had no interest in waving bye-bye or playing peekaboo. Sometimes when a stranger would make eye contact with him, he’d pull back like it caused him physical pain.”
Rhys gave a tormented half smile.
“I was obsessed with those developmental checklists,” he said. “I’d get e-mail updates on what Will was supposed to be able to do. I’d watch him like a hawk, and I’d fret and agonize.”
“I sometimes send those checklists out to clients,” she confessed. “With only the best intentions, of course.”
“Some of the milestones were less black-and-white,” he said. “I could fudge them a bit in my own mind, or round up. And he was doing some skills just fine.”
“But there were no words,” Andie said softly.
“No.” His voice echoed. “I thought I could fix it. I thought that just by trying harder, taking him out more, talking to him, I could unblock the words. But they still wouldn’t come. You should have seen me. I was a lunatic, carrying him around the neighborhood, frantically pointing and naming everything in sight. Performing a pantomime in front of his high chair at every meal. Grinning until my face hurt.”
Andie took a remedial gulp of her wine, shaken by the pain etched in the tense lines of his face. Here was a man who appeared to the outside world to have everything—genius, success, and a combination of physical traits that was indecent for nature to bestow on one person. But he reveled in none of it, consumed, instead, with worry for the small boy who slept upstairs.
“Out in public, I’d see other families with toddlers who were pointing and chattering,” he told her. “I’d follow them down the street, trying to figure out how old they were—why they were able to do something that was apparently so natural, and Will wasn’t. I got a few strange looks, believe me.”
Andie could imagine. Rhys was hardly inconspicuous. No doubt there would be plenty of eyebrows raised if he chose to tail a stranger’s child down the street, hair standing on end, eyes blazing.
“Did you have anyone you could talk to?”
“Tom, of course, and my techie friends from MIT and my start-up days, but none of them have kids, and it was tough for them to understand what I was going through. I could have looked elsewhere for support, but the idea didn’t appeal. I’m not much of a joiner.”
“More of a lone wolf?” Andie suggested, his frankness touching her.
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” Rhys conceded. “I’ve been called lots of things. Odd, reclusive. Just plain weird. And I came in for much worse as a kid. But, yes, I’ve always been a bit of a loner.”
“You were bullied?” Andie blinked. So much for Rhys’s charmed life.
“Kids can be vicious, and I was goofy and awkward, at least until I grew into my height. Crazy good at math and science but dismal when it came to hand-eye coordination and girls.”
Andie eyed him, unable to keep the incredulity from her face.
Rhys smiled. “Oh, I was a disaster, completely inept at reading the signals. I thought they actually wanted help with their quadratic equations. A touch of Asperger’s, I’m pretty sure.”
“Not diagnosed?”
“No, back then it wasn’t a thing, and I might have flown under the radar even if people had been looking out for it.”
“These days, it’s so common.”
“Yeah.” Rhys gave a rueful laugh. “You walk into any tech company and you can’t swing a cat without knocking over half a dozen engineers with Asperger’s. They’re my tribe, but it took me a long time to find them. And it made for some lonely years.”
Andie nodded soberly. She understood loneliness. After Gus’s death, it was almost as if her classmates could sense her parents’ rejection of her, and they shunned her, too, like starlings avoiding a chick thrown from the nest. She let a sad smile tug at her lips as a thought bubbled up, unfiltered, from the depths of her memory.
“When I was a teenager, I used to love it when it rained,” she blurted. “It was the only time I felt comfortable—knowing everyone was going about their business, separated by a wall of water. The heavier the better. That way, I wasn’t the only one alone.”
She swallowed, shocked that she’d let such an unguarded comment slip past her lips. It was as if something about Rhys’s vulnerability gave her immediate access to her own. Either that or the wine was more potent than she thought. She fought to gather herself, but dark memories and powerful sensations shimmered perilously close to the surface.
Rhys looked at her searchingly. It was a curious image: the idea of a multitude of individuals shuffling around under their umbrellas, each one a roving oasis of dry space, separated by a transparent barrier. But he got it. The difference was he didn’t feel the same unfulfilled longing she obviously did, the yearning to be a linked part of the larger whole. He might have when he was a child, confused as to why he was different. Shut out by his peers at school. But he’d made his way, thanks to the support of parents, who’d accepted his quirks, allowing his confidence to grow, along with his drive and ambition—paving the way for the friendships he’d eventually found at Vision, Inc., the start-up incubator where he and Noah, his engineering protégé from his postdoc teaching days at MIT, had worked to get Zephyrus Energy off the ground.
“I’ve always loved the rain, too,” he said. “But I have to make an exception to the theory.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Well, when you’re a parent, you automatically have someone else under your umbrella. It’s a bond that’s inviolable, rain or shine. And I can’t imagine it changes until they’re independent, out in the world. Maybe not even then.”
He was startled at the expression that came over her. It was like a windshield in an explosion, a thousand cracks and fissures expanding across its surface. It was in her eyes, the set of her mouth, and her posture as she visibly bowed inward. He watched, fascinated, drawn in by the clarity of her pain, the sheer transparency of her emotions.
And that was when the rarest of sensations struck him: the conviction that he was in the presence of someone he could read. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a person who wore no masks.
He’d been in grade school when he first learned that reading people was a necessary skill—one that had somehow been left out of his repertoire. Even now, he was sometimes so focused on the content of a person’s speech that he failed to interpret the twitch of an eyebrow or the curl of a lip that was directly at odds with the spoken message. The world was—as the saying went—a stage, and he could never know for certain whether the player opposite was expressing an innate truth or inhabiting a role, telling him who they were and what they thought, or simply what they wanted him to hear.
With Andie, though, he sensed a breathtaking transparency. Perhaps it was her close acquaintance with solitude that had deprived her of the facility to conceal her emotions. Whatever it was, he’d never been able to understand anyone like this, never been made to feel like this while simply talking to another person—not even, at first, with Tom, or with the close-knit group of techies and scientists Tom affectionately referred to as the Visionaries. The sensation was like a hit of pure oxygen.
“Not all parents feel that way,” she said, her voice strained.
Her eyes were huge, turbulent. Her cheeks flooded with deep color, making her look fifteen years old. The girl who loved the rain. He wanted to pull her under his own umbrella, shelter her from the callousness, the indifference, or whatever it was she’d faced from her own family.
It took him a few grinding seconds to go from intuiting to reacting. The psychological machinery was halting, rusty. “I’m sorry, Andie. There I go again. It’s one of my faults, to assume my experience is universal. Tom is always taking me to task. I know it makes me an insensitive clod.”
“No, it makes you a good father—that you can’t imagine it any other way,” Andie said. “It’s as it should be.”
He was still reeling, high on the sense of connection. Kind of ironic, given what they’d just been discussing. Was this what other people felt all the time? This immediate access to another’s emotional state? It was an intimate topography he’d never had the opportunity to explore. He felt like a voyeur, a vampire, drinking in the unfamiliarity, the intensity of it. And if this was what it was like to share her pain, what kind of high would it be to share her happiness? Not that he was likely to find out. Not when he’d inserted his foot so firmly in his mouth he doubted he’d be able to extract it.
“Just ignore me,” he mumbled, abashed. “I get a bit carried away sometimes.”
He was the last person who should be spouting lofty ideas about parenthood, he reflected. After all, he’d failed to give Will the one gift he most wanted to provide: a happy home with two loving parents, like he’d had growing up.
“I lucked out in the parent department,” he told her. “Which makes me privileged in ways that go beyond all of the stuff people usually think about.” He gestured around him at the grand house.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “It’s pretty clear you learned how to be a parent from people who knew how to do it right.”
Rhys was speechless for a moment, struck by the generosity of her comment. Something in him burned to find out what made her experience so different from his—why that fathomless hurt lurked in her eyes—but he could sense her withdrawing from her spontaneous revelation. And yet the startling sense of connection remained.
“Tell me about your parents,” she encouraged, her posture loosening as she ushered the conversation safely away from herself.
“Well, my dad is a bit of an oddball, like me,” Rhys said fondly. “He’s a professor in theoretical physics at Oxford.”
There was no question where Rhys had inherited his mathematical, systematizing mind. His physics-professor father was endowed with striking aptitudes but without the social instinct that made human interaction second nature. Of course, he got by. And Rhys did, too. But, like his father, he had to work at it, grasping at social cues like a child snatching prize tickets out of the air in a carnival wind tunnel, certain that—all about him—important messages were fluttering to the floor unread.
“Wow, okay,” Andie responded. “I don’t know quite what to say to that. It’s impressive.”
“He’s way out of my league,” Rhys laughed. “It’s hard to measure up to a father whose job is to understand the fundamental nature of matter. It’s one of the reasons I moved to the US, to establish my own identity in a place where he doesn’t cast such a long shadow.”
“And your mom?”
“She’s an English teacher. She’s brilliant, in a different way. It’s always been her job to run interference between my dad and the rest of the world, to act as his translator.”
In truth, his mother, Diana, had performed that role for Rhys as well. Both he and his father reveled in the abstract, able to pick complex patterns out of data, to envision sophisticated theoretical models in three dimensions. His dad, Simon, could construct algorithms from thin air but couldn’t navigate a cocktail party to save his life. His bookshelves were littered with many of the highest awards granted in his field, but he became helpless at the first whiff of department politics. Diana navigated all that for him, helped him through it, in her frank, insightful way.
“They sound like a great pair,” Andie said with a shy smile. She looked wistful, but her distress had retreated. Maybe it was the effect of the wine, but his gaze was drawn to the soft curves of her lips—the lower one full and pillowy, the upper one a classic bow. He admired the silky weight of her loose, wavy hair as it snaked over her shoulders and tumbled halfway down her back. He could imagine the cool brush of it against his fingers and how it would contrast with the hot satin of her cheek.
She was so pretty it was almost like an optical illusion. He blinked, and waited for her image to resolve itself again, the planes and angles, crests and hollows of her face resuming their ideal form beneath his gaze. Exactly as he would have designed them if his eye for form and symmetry extended beyond the realm of physics and engineering, and into the divine. He couldn’t believe she was sitting across from him, in his kitchen, digging into her mashed potatoes.
Nothing felt more important in that moment than to keep her there, smiling that tentative smile. So Rhys told her about his childhood growing up in the Teifi Valley in southwest Wales, with its emerald grass and low gray skies. About the crumbling former rectory that was his family home, a money pit his parents could never quite bear to sell, despite the necessity of their being in Oxford for much of the year. And about the gut-wrenching trips he’d taken with Will each Christmas since his birth, trying—not always with great success—to manage his outbursts on the transatlantic flight.
“It must be hard, doing it all alone,” Andie remarked.
“I can’t complain. Most of the time I’m lucky enough to have reinforcements.” Rhys shrugged. “Mrs. Hodge, for one. She might seem like a bit of a curmudgeon, but she loves Will like family.
“And, for better or worse—” He broke off for a moment, not having planned to confide in her about Karina’s return but suddenly compelled to do so. “Will’s mother has actually made a surprise reappearance.”
“Oh?”
“I heard today that she’s back in the area, and she wants to meet, and I’m not altogether sure why. She walked out when he was barely six months old, and I’m not putting him through that again.”
“What are you going to do?” Andie’s eyes were wide, her curiosity mixed with concern.
“I’m meeting with her at a café in town tomorrow morning. I can’t let her near Will until I know what she’s up to, so I’m not comfortable with her coming to the house.”
“You have full custody?”
“Yes. It was a clear-cut case of abandonment. She bailed on us without a backward glance. I tried several times to get her to come back for Will’s sake, but the most contact I’ve had with her since then is through Tom sending legal documents back and forth to California.”
“What do you think she wants?”
What, indeed? Rhys tried to douse the spark of unease in his gut with a smooth mouthful of Merlot. “I really couldn’t guess.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I’m expecting Mrs. Hodge back midmorning to look after Will while I meet with Karina, so no. But thank you.” He smiled, trying to convince both himself and Andie that he was calm in the face of whatever potential crisis his ex-wife might manufacture. “I’m not about to rope you into an impromptu babysitting gig on your first morning here. Besides, I’m sure you’ll be plenty busy setting up for Will’s OT sessions.”
“I can’t wait.”
Her smile reoriented him, drawing his focus mercifully away from the apprehension that filled him at the thought of Karina’s return.
He glanced down at his plate. He had worked his way through his side dishes as they talked, but his steak still sat there untouched. He hadn’t even been aware of eating the rest, so distracted was he by the novel experience of being the most talkative person in the room.
“What’s wrong?” Andie asked. “You don’t like your steak?” Her own plate was bare, Rhys noted approvingly. He could never understand people who picked nervously at their food, as if it was liable to jump up and throttle them.
“Something’s missing,” he said. He went to rummage in the fridge, coming back to the table with three of his favorite brands of hot sauce: one from Vietnam, another from Jamaica, and a third from Louisiana.
“Sorry, I should have put these out before,” he said. “I was distracted, I guess.”
Resuming his seat, he worked intently, dropping large dollops of all three types of sauce on his steak in a combination that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, until he was startled by a strange hiccup from Andie’s side of the table.
She was laughing, and it was as heady a sensation as he remembered from their shared mirth over the contents of her suitcase. The pitch of it zipped through his blood, and the air felt warmer, denser, as she flung her head back, exposing the creamy expanse of her throat.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, his voice tight with longing.
“You’re just like Will,” she told him, her eyes flashing gold and green. “With your bare feet and your hot-sauce habit, you’re definitely a sensory seeker.”
“A sensory seeker, huh?” he pondered, taking in the translucence of her skin, the high color in her cheeks, and the small dimple at the left side of her mouth. “Okay, you might be right about that.” More right than she could possibly know, he realized uncomfortably. It was something he was going to have to watch.