you think?” Lacey directed the question to Rachel. She knew what Anna thought. Anna thought she should jump on a plane to London and throw herself at Victor and let the chips fall as they may. Anna would buy the ticket herself if she wasn’t broke.
“What I think isn’t important. The question is, what do you want?”
“I want my promotion.” She could make Langham a better company, a safer one. She knew it. In the long run, that was far more important than an almost definitely doomed to fail relationship. No matter how much her fickle emotions tried to convince her otherwise. Her own family was enough evidence of what happened when you let your heart rule over your head.
Rachel tilted her head. “You’re allowed to want both. It doesn’t have to be an either-or.”
“Except I can’t have both. And I’ve never believed in wasting time wishing for things you can’t have.”
Victor hadn’t wanted a drink as much since he’d gotten sober as he had in the last week.
He’d done a meeting every day. Some days both morning and night. At least he was back into Don’s good books. The nod of approval across the room meant more than he’d realized.
Hi, I’m Victor, and I’m an alcoholic. It’s been almost four years since my last drink. That part was easy. But so far, he hadn’t found the courage to say the next part.
Maybe tonight. Maybe tonight he’d find a way to say that he’d met a woman he wanted more than he’d ever wanted anything. But it was never going to happen because she was too good for him, and he could never be enough. And so, in the absence of any hope with her, he might need to pick up smoking to do something with his hands, hands that were desperate to wrap themselves around a squat whisky glass. A throat that was parched for the warm burn of strong liquor. A body that hungered for the buzz it brought.
Maybe tonight he’d sit in the drafty hall, and his desperate desire for a drink would fade in the face of the stories of the addicts who had it so much worse than him, who had lost so much more.
Maybe tonight, God would hear his prayers for clarity. Or at least his prayer to get through a day without thinking about the feel of Lacey’s hair in his hands or the light touch of her finger as it traveled his scar.
Or maybe none of those things would happen. Maybe he’d just cling to sobriety the way a drowning man clings to a life preserver.
Victor blew out a breath as he scanned up and down the block. The church was in a less-than-salubrious area of London, so he loitered outside the entrance to the hall, keeping an eye out for trouble, nodding to the other regulars as they arrived. Some shuffled in with the smell of their last drink still on their breath, others furtively checked to make sure no one they knew was nearby. Women gripped their handbags, some with keys or pepper spray clutched in their hands.
He’d never been threatened. A combination of sheer size and the fact that when people looked at him, they didn’t know if he’d been the victim of a knife fight … or the instigator.
His phone buzzed, and once again, he wasn’t fast enough to quash the momentary hope that Lacey would be the name on the screen.
Peter. They’d made a tentative truce before he’d left Oxford, Peter appearing just conciliatory enough to suggest that either Emelia or their mother had had a word while he was with Lacey.
He looked at the screen as it buzzed again. It wasn’t that it didn’t have time to take the call—the meeting didn’t start for another ten minutes. But there was every chance that a conversation with Peter would heighten his desire to find the closest bar, not dampen it.
He sent his brother to voice mail and put his phone back in his pocket. It scrunched against the envelope it had been sharing space with. The envelope that had spent the last three years stashed at the back of his sock drawer.
Lacey and her insistence that he deserved a second chance had given him the courage to retrieve the last letter he’d written in rehab, the only letter he’d never sent. It was the hardest thing he’d ever written. Harder even than the letters he’d written to his parents and Peter.
Years later, the shame still pressed down