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Two other men, barely more than boys, that same look in their eyes. The look that told her she didn’t matter to them, that what she wanted, the decisions she made, didn’t matter at all. She meant nothing.
She had put herself there in that room with them. She’d made her choice and now she would pay for it.
‘You can’t tell me you thought you were giving her a better life,’ Flynn went on, and Helena flinched at just the accusation in his voice. ‘You come from one of the richest families in the country. You could have given that child everything it ever needed and you chose not to.’
‘No.’ It wasn’t loud, but Helena put every bit of feeling she had behind the word. ‘No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t give her what she needed most.’
‘And what was that?’ Flynn asked, a bitter mocking tone in his voice.
‘Love.’ She looked up and met his eyes then, took every glimmer of hatred and disgust he had to give. ‘I couldn’t have loved her the way she needed, the way she deserved. And so I agreed when they told me I had to give her away.’
‘You couldn’t...’ Flynn shook his head in disbelief. ‘You really are a piece of work, aren’t you? Have you honestly convinced yourself that you did what was best for that child?’
‘You tell me.’ Helena got up from the bed. She needed to be equal with him for this, couldn’t let him glare down at her any more. He still had almost a foot of height on her, but at least she didn’t feel quite so helpless. She fisted her hands at her hips and stared him down. ‘You grew up in a family like mine—our families were practically one and the same for years. You tell me, how did it feel to grow up there without being wanted or loved? Because if it felt anything like my childhood did after my mother died, you wouldn’t wish it on anyone.’
For a moment he looked stunned, and she wondered if this was her opportunity. Her one chance to make him truly understand what had happened that night and how it had changed her. How knowing it was all her own fault had only made everything that followed a thousand times harder.
Could she make him understand the depths of despair she’d hit? How it had felt as if her soul had been torn apart the moment she’d realised she could never look at or think of her own child without remembering the night that she had been conceived? Without feeling that same pain over and over again?
But then his expression changed and the repulsion in his eyes grew greater than ever.
‘If that’s truly how you feel, Helena, perhaps you should ask yourself something. How are you any different from your father or, worse, mine? And what kind of monster can’t love their own child?’
Monster.
The word hit her in the gut and she wrapped her arms around herself as she doubled over, as if he’d hit her with bullets not insults. He was right. He didn’t understand and he wouldn’t listen, but he was still right.
But if he thought she could ever forgive herself for the decisions she’d made, then he hadn’t got a clue about her.
‘Do you think I don’t live with that knowledge every day?’ she asked. ‘Why do you think I held out against the agreement? I know you want kids and I know I can’t have them. We could have adopted, perhaps, but the thought of carrying another child...I couldn’t do it. Even for you.’
‘Do you think I’d want you to, now? Do you think I can even imagine touching you?’ Revulsion shadowed his face. ‘You say you live with it every day. Well, so will I, now. Because you talked me into marrying you, into sleeping with you, and now we’re stuck with each other.’
‘You want a divorce?’ Helena asked. ‘I’ll give you one, and gladly. We can both be free. You can find another way to find that legitimacy you crave. Except there isn’t one, is there? You’ve run out of Morrison sisters now. It’s me and my sordid past or nothing at all. Entirely up to you.’
Hatred burned from Flynn’s eyes, and Helena realised that they could be making each other unhappy for the rest of their lives. That knowing how happy they could have been would only make their misery more bitter.
Maybe this was her punishment, at last. Or her atonement.
Either way, she thanked God no children would have to live through it with them.
The air between them crackled with anger, frustration and helplessness, and Helena couldn’t look away from him if she tried. She needed to know. Would he choose this hell of a relationship, just to keep the company? Or would he walk away with his integrity intact?
But she didn’t find out. Because, just then, Henry knocked on the open door.
‘I hate to interrupt,’ he said in a tone that said he was glad to have a reason to separate them right now. ‘But I just had a call from London. I’m so sorry, Helena, but your father has been rushed to hospital. Heart attack. We need to get back to London. Immediately.’
CHAPTER TEN
HELENA KEPT HER silence all the way to London.
She felt as if she’d spoken all the words inside of her already; that if she tried for any more all that would come out would be gibberish. She had no more angry barbs to throw at Flynn, no more defences to try, no more arguments to make. And she was still too far from understanding what her father’s heart attack meant, or how she felt about it, to even begin to speak on the subject.
So she grabbed her most important things in silence, forcing them into her carry-on bag, knowing that the villa staff would pack up and send on the rest. She dressed as comfortably and casually as she could manage, needing the sensation of soft cotton and warm cashmere against her skin, now she couldn’t rely on her husband’s touch.
She slipped her sunglasses on, nodded goodbye to the maid at the door and climbed into the back of the car Henry had hired at the airport, ignoring the two men in the front.
And then she headed home.
It was dark by the time they reached the hospital. Henry had asked—not Flynn, of course; he’d barely looked at her for the last thousand miles—if she wanted to go home first, to change, to sleep, whatever. But Helena had shaken her head, and he’d asked the taxi driver to go straight to the hospital.
Drizzle misted the windows of the cab, familiar, damp and chill. Suddenly, Helena was glad to be back home. Tuscany had felt like such an escape, such a fairy tale, until today. But she knew it could never be that for her again. And to stay another moment would only ever have reminded her of what she’d lost.
She didn’t wait for Henry or Flynn to follow as she strode into the hospital. Flynn had called his mother from the car and Helena had heard enough to know where her father was, so she headed straight to him.
Isabella seemed to have aged a decade in just a week. She stood, leaning against the wall outside Thomas’s room, her make-up faded and her hair no longer fixed in place. She looked up as Helena approached and her face crumpled.
‘Is he...?’ Her first words for a thousand miles, Helena thought, and she couldn’t even finish the sentence.
Isabella shook her head. ‘The doctors say the surgery went well. They’ve done...’ she gulped in air and Helena realised she was trying to keep from crying; Isabella, the icy matriarch, had actual tears in her eyes ‘...something,’ she finished. ‘They’ll tell you all about it. I don’t...I don’t understand it all. Not at all.’
It was the day for it, Helena thought. Nothing at all made sense today.
Flynn and Henry caught up at last, Flynn wrapping his arms around his mother in a way Helena was sure she’d never done for him. Did he know, she wondered, about Isabella and Thomas’s decade-long affair? She’d never asked. One more secret between them, she supposed.
Ignored, Helena moved to the door, pushing it open to step inside her father’s room. He looked smaller there in the bed, hooked up to machines and tucked under crisp white hospital sheets. He wouldn’t even know she was there. And if he didn’t recover, if something else happened...he might never know how her
past had come back to screw up her present. That he’d been right that night eight years ago when he’d told her she’d wilfully ruined her life.
‘Oh, Daddy.’ Her throat thickened as the tears welled up. Clenching her fists, Helena tried to stop them, tried to keep at bay all the feelings that threatened to wash her away in their flood.
‘Helena?’ Henry’s cautious voice came from behind her, but she didn’t turn. ‘Are you okay? Do you need...anything?’
No, she wasn’t okay. She might never be okay again. She hurt so deep she thought her bones might crack, and she feared that anger might be the only thing holding her together—anger at her father for almost dying, at Flynn for not understanding, at those not quite men who had almost destroyed her, and at herself for letting them.
Henry couldn’t fix any of that. But there was one thing he might be able to do.
‘I need my sister,’ she told him.
* * *
It took an hour of persuasion to get his mother to leave the hospital and, even then, she wouldn’t go home. Instead, Isabella insisted on being taken to Thomas’s town house, saying she wouldn’t be able to sleep anywhere else.
Flynn supposed this meant that the polite charade of ignoring the fact that his mother had been sleeping with his father’s best friend for the last ten years was over. Everybody’s secrets were being exposed today, and it left Flynn feeling as if he’d been scraped raw.
Helena wouldn’t leave her father’s room, and Flynn had refused to even try to persuade her.
Henry waited for him in the cab while he got his mother settled, then asked, ‘Where to now?’ as soon as he returned.
Flynn wished he had an answer. A bar was tempting—somewhere he could drink away the memory of the last week. But when he sobered up nothing would have changed, and a hangover wouldn’t help anything at all.
