Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 503

"Get used to it. She has already picked out the colour of your funeral flowers if you ever make me cry."

He laughed and reached across to take my hand, and he did not let go for the whole drive home.

The house felt too quiet when we walked in. That was the first thing I noticed, the silence where there should have been a television or the clatter of a kettle or Pat's voice calling something sarcastic from the kitchen. Pat had left that morning, her bags packed and her car loaded before the sun was fully up, and I had stood at the window and watched her drive away with her hand raised in a wave I had returned with a smile I did not quite feel.

I had wanted to ask her to stay. The words had been right there, waiting on my tongue. But I could not say them, because Pat had resumed work fully at Helix, and because she deserved privacy to build whatever was growing between her and Kingsley without me hovering over her like a worried hen. Pat was happy. Pat was, for the first time in months, hopeful, and I was so happy for her that it almost made up for the empty rooms.

So I let the quiet settle over the house, and I went upstairs, and I tried not to miss the sound of her voice.

That night, heading into the bathroom, I caught myself smiling at nothing and could not stop. My reflection in the mirror looked like a stranger, a woman with soft eyes and a loose, foolish curve to her mouth, and I leaned against the counter and let myself think about it.

The nightmare had brought it all back. Years of buried memory, the broken door and the blood and the silent baby, everything I had locked away so deep I had convinced myself it no longer existed. And when I had woken up crying, Dominic had not asked me to explain. He had held me, and then he had gone to the window, and in a handful of minutes he had done what no court, no lawyer, no amount of my mother's broken hope had ever managed to do.

I was still grinning at my reflection when Dominic appeared in the doorway behind me, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his tie already undone. "You have been smiling at that mirror for five minutes. I am starting to get jealous of your reflection."

"It has excellent bone structure."

"It also does not kiss you goodnight, so I would not get too attached." He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, and I let my head fall back against his shoulder and looked at the two of us in the glass, his chin resting on my hair, his hands warm. "I like seeing you like this."