he’d answer them.
When he arrived at the clinic the next morning, Marie was already sitting on her crate, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His crate had been left in exactly the same place it had occupied last night, in mute invitation.
Alex opened the door of the courtyard and went to sit opposite her.
‘Morning.’
She gave him a bright smile. Her cheeks were still a little red from where the sun had kissed them yesterday.
Alex nodded and sat down, reaching for an empty seed tray from the pile. He filled the tray with compost and opened one of the seed packets, letting the cool quiet of the hour before everyone else arrived for work seep into him for a while before he spoke.
‘I argued with my father and he threw me out of the house when I was eighteen.’
She looked up at him, her lip quivering. ‘That’s a hard thing to have to bear, Alex.’
He shook his head. Marie knew far more about hardship than he did. ‘Your father left when you were ten.’
‘It’s not a competition, Alex. You don’t have to keep quiet about what happened to you because you think what happened to me might have been worse—it doesn’t work that way. Anyway, my father left because of what happened between my mum and him. She told us that. It’s different.’
Alex wondered how different it really was. Marie had worked so hard to help support her brothers, and he’d always had a sense that she felt somehow responsible for her father leaving.
But this wasn’t about probing her; Marie had never made any secret of her childhood. He’d hidden his past out of a wish to leave it behind. Now, for the sake of the friendship that was so precious to him, he had to put that right.
‘What did you argue about?’ Marie had clearly been waiting for him to go on, and finally she asked the question.
‘My father was an embittered man. He had everything money could buy, but he considered that our family had been deprived of its birthright. He insisted that we live as if we were royal, but I wanted more from life than that. I wanted to make my own choices. I wanted to be a doctor. He told me that if I went to medical school he’d disinherit me, and I told him to go ahead and do it.’
A faint smile hovered at Marie’s lips. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to do anything else. Didn’t he ever see what you’d achieved and come around?’
‘No, he never accepted what I wanted to do. The money that took me through medical school was from a trust that my grandfather had set up for me. He knew what my father was like, and he locked the trust in an ironclad agreement so my father couldn’t get his hands on it.’
‘Would he have tried? It sounds as if he had enough already.’ Marie’s eyebrows shot up.
‘My father didn’t care about the money; he thought it a paltry amount. He wanted control over me. I got to do what I wanted when I was eighteen because of that trust.’
‘So being disinherited…that was a good thing in a way. Your father couldn’t force you into his mould.’
‘I felt as if I was free.’
She chuckled, picking up another seed tray. ‘Free was how you seemed then. I used to envy you for it, but I didn’t know what you’d had to go through to get your freedom. Did you never reconcile with your father?’
‘I didn’t want to. He was never a good husband; he hurt my mother very badly. I couldn’t forgive him for that.’
There was nothing like telling a story to find out which parts of it really hurt. Alex could feel his chest tightening from the pain.
‘Alex…?’
Marie was leaning forward now, concern registering on her face. Maybe she knew that this was what he really needed to say.
‘He had mistresses. Lots of them. He used to spend a couple of nights a week in London, and my mother always seemed so sad. When I was little I thought she must miss him, but by the time I was fifteen I knew what was going on. He didn’t go to much trouble to hide it.’
Marie’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Your poor mother…’
‘She just accepted it. That was the thing that hurt the most. She grew thinner and sadder every year, until finally she just seemed to fade away. She died five years ago.’
‘And you never got to see her?’
‘I used to visit her all the time. I’d call her, and she’d tell me when my father would be out of the house and I could come. It was the only thing she ever defied him over and she used to love hearing about what I was doing as a doctor. She knew that she always had a home with me, but she’d never leave him.’
‘People…they make their own decisions. Parents included.’ Marie shot him a wry smile.
‘Yeah.’
Alex had made his decision too. However much the idea of a wife and a family might appeal to him in theory, his parents’ unhappy marriage had always made him balk at the prospect of commitment. His father’s money and title were new reasons to make him wary. Alex didn’t know how he was going to cope with that yet, and the last thing he wanted to do was inflict his own struggle on anyone else.
‘I did try to speak to my father once—at my mother’s funeral. It was a very lavish affair, and after the way he’d treated her it made me feel sick. But I decided that it was what she would have wanted, and so I went up to him to shake his hand. He turned his back on me. I’ll never know why he changed his mind about leaving me his money and I wish he hadn’t.’
Marie frowned at him suddenly. ‘It sounds as if he did the right thing, for once.’
‘What? You think I’m better as a billionaire king in exile?’
‘No, I think you’re pretty rubbish at it, actually.’
The tension in his shoulders began to dissolve and Alex grinned at her. ‘That’s one of the things I like about you. That you don’t think it’s a good thing.’
‘I didn’t say it wasn’t a good thing. I said you were rubbish at it. Look around you and tell me it’s not a good thing.’
‘Point taken. So the clinic’s a good thing and I’m a rubbish king. Is that right?’
She nodded. ‘You can write your own script, Alex. If you let the money and the title define you then maybe that’s what your father wanted. But if you define it, then you can do anything. Things ordinary people only dream of.’
As usual, Marie was right. He’d been letting the money and the title define him a little too much recently, and the idea that he could become anything he wanted lifted a weight from his shoulders. And right now he wanted to be a gardener.
Marie had finished planting three seed trays and they were lined up on one side of her. He hadn’t completed any yet. Alex picked up
