The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

coffee. He felt the weight of her decision making. Decide the right way. Please.

“He has long arms, deep pockets,” she told the pot of sugar sachets, turning it half anti clockwise, back clockwise. “If I’m doing the same old routine, living at my apartment, going to work as always, how can I be a threat?”

“Tony, Hunter, Duncan, wasn’t that what they were doing?”

“We don’t know their deaths are linked.”

“We don’t know they aren’t.”

“You’re not thinking about your wife.” Nancy’s emphasis on the word was no more than he deserved. “What about your daughter?”

Of all the grey areas, this was the one he’d wrestled with the most. And he still had no answer. If he offered Lily the choice, she’d choose her mother. Knowing that didn’t make it easier, make him not wish it were otherwise.

“He’s made us all targets, Nancy. It’s better if we just disappear.”

“If I were to say yes, Charles, how could I trust you wouldn’t leave again?”

He hesitated. Said out loud the justification for what he did to Nancy, what he would do to Eva, and by extension to Lily, it sounded cold, heartless even. In his head, in his heart though, it was all too tangled up with emotion. His motives were pure. Had always had Nancy behind them. Leaving Eva for Nancy had been the choice of his heart, leaving Nancy for Eva had been a duty for his and her future together.

He was repeating his own history by going back to her in a strange symmetry, an ever decreasing circle of their two lives until there was just him and her, joined by the tiniest symbol, the largest illustration of trust, a wedding ring. And he’d thought he was a pure scientist, no poetry in his blood. Nancy brought out the best in him.

He placed his hand over hers. This time she didn’t draw away.

“I’m a cliché. Everything I’ve achieved has been for you, for us, leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He nodded at her raised eyebrows. “You know me, all of me, deeds and misdeeds. Bigger than everything else was the pain of walking away from you. To do it again would break me.”

He’d said it, laid his heart out on the table. Would she trample it or lift it up? He could scarcely breathe. His fingers on hers felt the lightest tether to his dreamt of future.

“I want to believe you,” she said, “but I need time.”

Time, it was perhaps more than he deserved, but it was the one thing they didn’t have.

Nancy murmured her truth. “You broke my heart, it never mended right. I don’t know how to trust you again.” He held his silence, needing her to fill it. “Give me twenty-four hours. You have a number where I can reach you?”

Inside, Charles soared. “I’ll call you, if that’s all right?”

She smiled. What that did to him. How he’d missed it. “It’s okay. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” She put her coat and hat on. “Maybe not the middle of the night again. Try a civilised hour, around nine.”

“I’ll walk you home.” Charles’ feet tangled themselves up in his chair, the one next to him, the table leg, while he watched her, not willing to let her out of his sight.

She held a hand out to him and he grasped it, a drowning man hanging on to a lifebuoy. He was grinning as though he had won the Nobel. Hell, no, this was better than that. This was all his dreams coming true. And when his royalties started flowing, any day now, he could buy the security that would have come with the high media profile of the prize-winner.

“It’s okay, you’re a bit of a liability. Besides, you need to sort out Rajiv.”

Their fingertips lingered together a long moment before breaking apart as Nancy left.

“My man, respect.” Rajiv’s reaction was so surprising, Charles fist bumped the hand he held out. “Made me totes emosh, worth doing the night shift for that right there, yeah.”

So much for being inconspicuous, under the radar. But right then Charles didn’t care.

28

The second mug deposited on Charles’ table by the young guy manning the all-night café stopped Eva dead. She’d been so careful, but Charles had noticed her anyway? Was he calling her bluff? She traced the handlebar grip on Lily’s bike with her gloved fingertip. He didn’t play games.

Eva moved further into the freezing shadows behind a parked car on the opposite side of the road, jabbing her calf with the pedal. Lily was safe at Hugo’s. His scribbled note through the door that he’d put her to bed, so they’d see Eva in the morning, a lifesaver.

She recited the reassurance over and over, trying to ignore the concrete cold leaching from the pavement up through her boots, a way to justify watching her husband.

It had to be for her, the drink, because it had to be cold by now. Clearly no one else was coming. Should she show herself, let him know he’d—As the woman entered the spotlight of the cafe’s lighting, Eva knew she was who Charles waited for. She propped Lily’s bike against the shop front behind her and stepped out from the camouflage of the parked car to see his face better.

Oh, Charles.

His expression, his hand hovering between him and the woman. How could he? Weren’t they everything to each other?

The weight in her chest, the crushing of her heart, not felt since he walked out of her life twelve years ago, told her otherwise. The frigid air gnawed at Eva’s hand, telling her to put it back in her pocket, that her heart wasn’t going to shatter, didn’t need her to hold it in place.

Charles, what are you doing? You can’t. . .Eva could scarcely bear to watch his apparent truth in the way the woman and he held fingertips, drew apart.

The tinkle of the café bell rang loud in the silent night as the door opened on the woman leaving, the night moving