This wasn’t going to be easy. The slight tilt of her head told him Freya knew he was there, but that she’d no intention of meeting him halfway.
And why should she? He thrust his right hand deep in his jeans pocket. ‘I owe you an apology.’
Freya looked up momentarily from the bubble-wrap she was cutting. ‘Yes, you do.’ She reached for the top saucer from a pile to her left and placed it carefully in the centre of the bubble-wrap.
‘What I said to you…’
One perfectly shaped eyebrow flicked upwards.
‘…was…was out of line, and I apologise. I was unfair…and…’
‘Rude?’ she offered, her voice like a shiver.
Yes, damn it! He’d been rude. Completely unreasonable. Daniel pulled his hand out of his pocket and thrust it through his hair. ‘I took my anger out on you and I’m sorry. I had no right to do that.’
He’d done it. Made his apology. The best he could do without going into his relationship with his daughter.
‘No.’
His mind stuttered. No, his apology wasn’t accepted? Or no—
‘No right,’ she clarified, her fingers moving for a second saucer. ‘Would you pass me the sticky tape, please?’
Daniel walked further into the room and picked it up from the far end of the dining table. Stepping closer to her, he caught the waft of her perfume, light and citrus. Saw the pulse beating at the base of her neck…
And suddenly it mattered, really mattered, that she should believe him. He’d hurt her, and he had the uncanny sense that far too many people had done that.
He kept hold of the sticky tape as she reached for it and forced her to look up at him. ‘I’d like to have shouted at Mia, and since I couldn’t I took out my anger on you. Made you my whipping boy, if you like.’ His mouth twisted into a wry smile as he saw the flicker of understanding. ‘I really am sorry for the way I spoke to you.’
There was a moment’s hesitation, then, ‘I know that.’
Just three words, but her voice had lost its hard edge, and the underlying huskiness of it seemed to hold him frozen. A small tug on the roll of sticky tape pulled him back to the present. He swallowed, watching as she ripped off a few centimetres and taped it across the top of the pile.
‘I can understand why you were angry. I just don’t think I deserved—’
‘No, you didn’t.’ She really didn’t.
She moistened her lips. ‘What happened to…Mia? Did you get her back to school?’
Freya’s concern merely added to his confusion about her. People asked about his daughter all the time, but none of them managed to imbue it with real concern. Why would she care? By all accounts empathy wasn’t one of her strong suits, and she’d not been anywhere near Margaret all the time he’d lived in Fellingham. She had to know her grandmother had desperately wanted her to.
‘Do you mind my asking?’
‘No. No, not at all. I drove her straight there.’ Daniel watched as Freya carefully folded over the end of the Sellotape and replaced it on the dining table.
He’d love to know what had made Freya visit now. She didn’t look like someone who’d want to spend days on end packing up someone else’s possessions. Maybe Sophy was right in thinking she had nowhere else to go?
Her hands moved to cocoon another teacup in bubble-wrap. She made even that mundane task seem faintly exotic. As was her dress ring. Whilst the thumb ring she wore was more bohemian. And she had tiny wrists that reminded him of Anna’s.
But that was where the similarities stopped. He looked up at Freya’s oval face, with her perfectly shaped eyebrows and carefully accentuated lip colour. The two women couldn’t have been more different.
His Anna had been a woman without artifice, whereas Freya couldn’t have exerted more care over her appearance. She was beautiful, but he fancied she’d look more beautiful first thing in the morning—before she’d hidden herself away behind her make-up.
He stopped. Maybe she was hiding. Maybe that was exactly what she was doing. Maybe Freya Anthony was less spoiled and more scared.
God only knew why that bothered him so much. She was nothing to him. But…
There’d been something unpleasant about the gossip swirling around the village over the last few days. Something in it he didn’t like.
‘The school picked up on her absence very quickly,’ Freya remarked, placing the saucers into a cardboard box by the wall. ‘That was good.’
Daniel put his hands deep in his jeans pockets and determinedly focused on her question. ‘They register her at the start of each lesson.’ She glanced up at him and he added, ‘Unusual, I know, but Mia skips off so often we’ve got a fairly established routine going now.’
‘Is she being bullied?’
‘Nothing like that.’ If only it were that simple. ‘There’s no real reason. At least not one she’s prepared to tell us about. We’ve got an excellent Educational Welfare Officer assigned to us now, but nothing anyone says to Mia seems to make any difference. She can’t see the point of school and that’s that.’
‘Tea?’ Margaret said, coming in behind him with a tray.
Daniel turned to take the tray from her, and she sat herself down in the nearest chair with something like a sigh. ‘My hip…The sooner I get that operation the better.’
‘If you’d go private,’ Freya said, rolling the bubble-wrap back on the roll and standing it in the corner, ‘you wouldn’t have to wait. I keep telling you that.’
‘I’m not paying.’
‘You wouldn’t have to. I would.’
Daniel set the tray on the table as another preconception bit the dust. From everything he’d heard he hadn’t expected there to be any kind of emotional connection between Margaret and her granddaughter…but there undoubtedly was.
How come? Freya Anthony had shaken the Fellingham dust from her shoes a long time ago, and hadn’t looked back. Before that she’d been nothing but trouble. But what he was watching wasn’t a new reconciliation. There was familiarity in the way they talked to each other. Love.
‘I’ve paid into the National Health Service for nearly fifty years, and I don’t see why I should have to pay extra now.’
Freya sat down opposite Margaret, but her blue eyes flicked over in his direction as she picked up the milk jug. ‘I assume you take milk?’
‘I do. Thank you.’
She poured some in the bone china teacup, and then lifted the matching teapot, steadying the lid with her finger. ‘We’ve been arguing about this for months, and I don’t think we’re ever going to agree.’
‘No,
