Chapter 36

She was also quick to laugh, quick to apologize, and had a huge amount of empathy. He suspected that she was a woman of deep emotions and perhaps her father hadn’t appreciated exactly how deep. And he knew himself what it felt like to be unappreciated. To be dismissed and rejected. His entire childhood had been that.

“You find that funny?” he asked quietly. “That your father never wanted you around?”

Her eyes opened and she gazed at him, an expression he couldn’t read in her eyes. “No, it’s not funny. But I wasn’t what my father wanted. It was my mother who wanted a baby, but she died in a car accident a couple of months after I was born. Dad had to bring me up himself. He was a surgeon and, though he hired lots of nannies to look after me, they all left one after the other because I was a ‘handful’. Anyway, Dad had to look after me himself in the end, and his career was severely impacted. I…” She hesitated. “I ruined his career in a lot of ways.”

There was a note