“What?” Zac sat up in bed, watching her.

It wasn’t Christy.

The thud of disappointment was physical.

“Nothing.” Her throat felt clogged with emotion, and she started to type a message to Christy, but then she stopped. What would she even say? And what if Christy didn’t want to hear it? She deleted what she’d typed, switched her phone off and dropped it back on the floor. She wasn’t going to cry again. No way.

“Talk to me, Alix. Who was the message from?”

“Oh. My father.”

“And?” His gaze was fixed on her face. “Judging from your reaction, he didn’t say anything you wanted to hear.”

“It wasn’t a personal message.” She’d so badly wanted it to be Christy, and the sense of disappointment was huge. “It’s fine. He does it every year. He sends the same Festive greetings and best wishes for the New Year message to everyone in his contacts. It used to upset me, obviously, but it doesn’t now.” She could see by the look on his face that he didn’t believe her. “I don’t expect you to understand. You have a normal family. A loving family. Mine isn’t like that and never has been, so when I see a text from my father I have no expectations at all. You’re probably feeling sad for me because I don’t really have a family, but I do, you see.” Suddenly it seemed important to make him understand. “Christy is my family.” And a message from her would have meant so much more than a message from her father.

He was silent for a moment and then held out his hand. “Come back to bed.”

“I’m fine, really. I—”

“I’m not. Come back to bed.”

She hesitated and then did exactly that.

He grabbed her and hauled her close, warming her with his body. “Who were you hoping to hear from? You leaped out of bed as if the cabin was on fire.”

She leaned back against the pillows he’d piled behind them. “Christy.”

“Christy is the reason you’re upset?”

Should she tell him? Why not? She had to talk to someone, and Christy wasn’t an option.

“We had a...conversation.”

“Not a good one, I assume from the fact that you drank my wine.”

“It was more of a fight than a conversation. She’d obviously stored up a lot of feelings and...she said I ruined her wedding.” The guilt of it tore at her, and she turned her head to look at him, expecting to see judgment. Instead, she saw confusion.

“What?”

“I ruined her wedding. And I can never undo that, which makes me feel terrible...” It was a struggle not to cry again. “The whole thing makes me feel terrible. She’s been my closest friend for my whole life—well, it feels like my whole life—and it turns out she was thinking all these things, and bottling things up, and she doesn’t talk to me about the big stuff anymore. Because of the things I said that day, she’s wary around me, and that’s awful. How can we ever fix that? And the thing that really hurts me is that—” Stop talking, Alix! Stop talking.