Page 181 of The Grand Duel
“You’re worried it’s your dream and not hers.”
I snap my head up, my eyes stinging.
How did he…
“Because she’s let them back in when you’re not ready to.”
My shoulders sag. “I feel really selfish. Like I’m hurt and angry, feeling all betrayed by Jovie when she’s just doing what I can’t—what I don’t want to. I don’t want her near them, but how do I say that?”
“You don’t.”
My heart sinks. “I know.” I stare across the ice cream shop, not seeing a way in which I’ll ever be able to sit and listen to Jovie tell me all about them. “I think the hardest part is the fact I know they’re trying. They don’t have the business anymore, andthey want to spend time with us…” I purse my lips. “Why did it have to take so long for them to want that?”
“Sometimes in life we don’t realise what’s important until it’s gone.”
We sit in comfortable silence for a minute as we both seem to reflect.
I know that Jovie hasn’t done this to hurt me, but it has. And that’s not on her. That’s on them and the decisions they made.
“Can I tell you about my sister, Lissie?”
I twist in the seat to face him, my brows gathered. “Of course you can.”
He sits back and looks down at his bowl of ice cream. “She was by far the greatest human I ever knew.”
I smile, a lump catching in my throat. “What was her name?”
“Phoebe,” he tells me. “Phoebe Liliana Aldridge. She was shooting for a full scholarship to Oxford University to study electrical engineering.”
“She was smart,” I murmur, leaning my head against the padded seat as I listen. “Like her brother.”
“She was incredible. Had so much ahead of her,” he says, as if still not comprehending the fact she isn’t here. “I remember my mum calling me on the night she passed away and just…knowing. The second I answered I just knew she was gone.” He sighs, glancing up at me before dropping his eyes again. “She was sexually assaulted around two years before that night. She told me about it three months before she took her own life.”
My chest tightens, my heart growing heavy as my eyes well. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”
He shakes his head. “I miss her. Like crazy. But I don’t talk about it often.”
I nod, swallowing down the lump in my throat.
“I struggled for a while to get my head around it. Around the who and the why. It made me look at myself differently. I wasa twenty-four-year-old lad at university, having sex with women who could barely walk straight most nights.” His jaw flexes. He still doesn’t look at me. “To see someone you love, go through something like that…”
I reach out and take his hand, a tear slipping down my cheek.
His sad, broken eyes lift to mine. And it’s as if a veil has been lifted from between us. “I joined the club because of the consent, Lis. The drink limit and long list of rules that kept the women I slept with safe. I know it probably sounds fucked up, but I was a mess. Young. Confused. And in my head, it meant there was absolutely no possibility of making someone feel the way my sister did for that year and a half before she thought the only way out of her pain was to take her own life. I couldn’t be responsible for someone in that way twice over.”
I frown at his choice of words, but then he continues.
“I didn’t think it would be a forever thing—I wasn’t thinking at all, really—but then years passed, and it worked too well for me.” His eyes spark as they pin me. “For the most part.”
Me.
“I talked myself into the fact that not telling you about that night was for you, but deep down, especially now, I know it was because I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that my fool-proof plan failed.”
I frown, my eyes filled with tears that threaten to spill over.
“I hurt you.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Don’t say that. You didn’t fail anything, Charlie.”