Runaway Wife by Rowan Coleman Page A

opened his mouth and then shut it again, turning hisback on her and staring at the white-painted brick wall behind the old ceramic sink for a moment, perhaps hoping that if he waited long enough, when he turned round she would be gone, and he’d be waking up from some fitful nightmare.
    “How have you been?” Rose asked his back, gathering herself to be strong, to keep her tone even and audible, to somehow find a path through this impossible situation. John’s shoulders remained tense and resolute, as if he could drive her out of his house with sheer force of will. Rose bit down on her bottom lip hard enough so the pinch would distract her from the tight band of anxiety that constricted her chest. He palpably wanted her to disappear from his life as quickly as she had reappeared. If hers had been a different life, if she hadn’t been cramming in a lifetime of questions in the time she had before Richard came, Rose would have turned round and left, but if hers had been a different life then perhaps she would still have had her father and her mother, and would never have married the very first man who asked her when she was only eighteen years old. Whether he knew it or not, John had started the chain of events that had brought her to his doorstep on this stormy afternoon, and now it was time to deal with the consequences.
    “Look,” John began, his tone curt and stiff, his voice a little hoarse as if he wasn’t used to talking, his gaze still fixed on the whitewashed wall. “What do we have to say to each other, really? We are strangers. And I’m sure you have feelings and anger that you want to talk about, but you see, Rose, it won’t make any difference to you or me, or the way things have been, if you do. I do not wish for either a reunion or a heart-to-heart. I have no place in my life for a long-lost daughter, and I don’t want to make one. There is simply no point, don’t you see?”
    “I didn’t come to find you, you know,” Rose said after a moment, feeling it was important he knew that, and surprised by the lack of emotion in her own voice, which came out flat and even, the tidal wave of feelings that she had feared suddenly utterly gone. “I came here, to Millthwaite, because of you, sort of. Because of this.” She held out the postcard of John’s painting, which he squinted at but did not take. “I left my husband, you see. I needed a place to go and this place was the only one I could think of. I had no idea that you were here until I arrived. And it’s taken me two days to decide to come up here to the cottage. And now I’m here, now I’m looking at you . . .” She paused, examining his aged face, looking for any trace of the man she’d once worshipped. “I agree, I don’t know you. And you certainly don’t know me. And perhaps talking wouldn’t make any difference to you, but I think I found you here for a reason, and I think it would help me . And after all is said and done, I think you owe me, don’t you, John? More than you know.”
    John looked at her for a moment, a deep furrow carved between his brows, and then he bowed his head, standing where Rose had cornered him. In the weak light it was hard to see him properly, but he seemed to be wearing the same pair of round wire-framed glasses as he had when she’d seen him last. Rose wouldn’t put it past him. He always was a man who liked objects, who kept them around him like talismans. Those glasses had once been his father’s too, her grandfather, whose knee she had once sat on, she dimly recalled from a far-removed childhood memory, in a summer garden full of flowers. Typical that her father would treasure so carefully such an object and yet cast away his family without a second thought.
    “You can’t stay here,” he said finally.
    “I don’t want to stay here,” Rose said. “And I don’t expectanything. I might have, perhaps, until I saw you. But now, not only do I know that there isn’t going to be a grand