Page 26 of Modern Romance October 2025 5-8

‘Elodie and I got on well,’ she said. Elodie had taken one look at her and taken her under her wing. ‘She gave me a permanent position. I noticed some of the props were damaged and quietly fixed them. Elodie asked if I could make some from scratch and soon I wasn’t cleaning any more but was full-time making props and helping create whole rooms.’

She’d loved the creative challenge and the more she’d done, the more her creativity had fired.

‘Through Elodie, I met Phoebe. She needed a flatmate and I needed a more permanent place to stay. They’re good friends.’

They were loyal and supportive and respectful of the boundaries Bethan had needed—the slightest of distances to keep her shredded heart safe.

‘I’m glad you found them,’ he said huskily. ‘But you didn’t just suddenly acquire all those skills. I know your grandmother taught you some, but you work with ceramics, you solder, you make complex mechanisms for secret boxes to hide clues. You can make magical things out of almost nothing. How did you learn it all?’

She studied the bangle she’d been absently opening and closing for the last ten minutes. ‘This was my mother’s. It’s one of the few things I have of hers. She and my dad met when he went into the cafe she was working at.’

‘You said he was a navy man.’ He nodded.

‘Right. A maritime engineer. It was pretty quick. They were really happy. I’ve seen the photos. My grandmother told me the story of how they met so many times.’

They’d had aonce in a lifetimelove. Her grandmother had experienced one of those too. So Bethan had assumed such miracles were normal.

‘Anyway, when I was a toddler Dad was away on an exercise for a couple of months. Mum was pregnant again—almost at term and she was really tired. My dad’s mother came and took me up to her place in Scotland to give her a break. But that night my mother left an element on by accident. She and the baby didn’t survive the fire.’

‘Bethan—’

‘I know,’ she nodded, appreciating the horror in his eyes. ‘It was terrible for my father but he had to work and that took him away a lot. So I never left Scotland. Dad sold our house in Wales and moved back in with his mother and me. My grandmother had been widowed too—lost the love of her life ten years earlier, so she understood Dad’s grief. Honestly, after that my childhood was idyllic. It was a small, lovely village and our cottage was cosy. It was filled with photos and trinkets—so many fond memories of my mother and my grandfather. Never a day passed without mention of them, the stories of how my mum and dad met. They were lost but never gone, you know? Dad adored me and I loved him and when he was home on leave, we’d work in his father’s shed. He’d teach me so many things like—’

‘Soldering mechanisms.’ Ares nodded.

‘Yes, and all the rope knots.’

‘But something wasn’t right.’ Ares frowned.

Yeah, he was astute. ‘There was an exclusive boarding school down the road that cost a lot of money. Dad worked so hard to send me there as a day student so I didn’t have to leave home and I never wanted him to think I was ungrateful.’

‘You were unhappy there.’

Desperately so. ‘They were real rich bitch types, you know? I wasn’t from wealth like that.’

‘They made you feel inferior?’

‘I didn’t fit in and we all knew it. I stayed in the library at lunchtime, stayed offline, tried to stay invisible.’

‘You could never be invisible.’

‘Yeah. I guess so because they still got to me.’

His jaw tightened.

‘Not physically or anything really bad. Just endless cutting comments,’ she said quietly. ‘They mocked my lack of properties—that there were no holidays abroad. They had no idea that I loved going out in a skiff with Dad and just being home with him. They teased my big body, my uncool clothes. My old-fashioned hobbies. Apparently I was like a grandma, which wasn’t an insult to me at all. And when my grandmother got sick in my last year, I dropped out.’ She’d been happy to.

‘Your dad didn’t come back when she got sick?’

‘At first. But she was sick for a while and we needed money and he had to go back. I was there, I didn’t need anyone else to help when she’d done so much for me.’

‘And by being busy with her, you could avoid living your life. Avoid interacting with people your own age who’d been horrible,’ he suggested softly. ‘It was safe.’

‘I loved her. Iwantedto be the one to take care of her.’ Anger rippled.Shewasn’t the one who avoided people.

‘I know. But still...’ He angled his head and challenged her with those all-seeing eyes. ‘Sometimes there can be more than one reason why we do things, no? We tell ourselves we’re doing something for someone else’s benefit but also...really...it sometimes has selfish elements.’

‘You’re saying our choices can be multilayered. Because life is complicated.’ She knew what he was getting at really.