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He’d hidden away the other parts, the bits of him he wanted to pretend didn’t exist. All the parts that made his family ashamed of him.
Would it have made a difference if he’d shown them to Clara? Or would they just have made her leave him sooner?
‘I always knew,’ he said slowly, ‘that something was different the last time you left. I just never guessed it could be this. I always thought that it was me and that I’d let you down. And I had, I know. But that’s not why you didn’t come back to try again. That was because...’
Clara finished the thought for him. ‘Ivy mattered more.’
‘And that’s why I could never have children.’ Jacob gave her a wonky smile then tilted his glass to drain the last few drops. ‘I never did seem to grasp the concept of other people mattering more.’
‘What do you mean?’ Clara asked, frowning. ‘Do you want me to tell you you’re selfish? Because you are a workaholic who often forgets there’s a life outside the office...or at least you used to be. I think this Perfect Christmas project of yours shows that you’re definitely capable of thinking of others when you want to.’
Jacob’s mind raced with warnings to himself. With all the things he’d never told Clara—all his failures, the acts and mistakes that would strip away any respect she’d ever had for him.
Why tell her now? Except it was his last chance. The last opportunity he might ever have to explain himself to her and to make her understand the sort of husband he’d been and why.
Should he tell her? He gazed into her eyes and saw a slight spark there. Was he imagining the connection that still existed between them? The thread that drew them together, even after all these years?
Would the truth be the thing that finally broke it? Or maybe—just maybe—could it draw her in to him again?
‘I made a mistake once,’ he started.
‘Just the once? Jacob, I’ve made hundreds.’ She was joking, of course, because she couldn’t know yet that this wasn’t a laughing matter. Not for him and not for his family.
‘Only once that counts,’ he said and something in his tone must have got through to her because she settled down in her chair, her expression suddenly serious.
‘What happened?’
‘My parents... They left me in charge of Heather one evening while they were at a friends’ Christmas party. I was sixteen. She was six. I resented it. I wanted to be out with my friends and instead I was stuck in, babysitting.’ Across the table, Clara’s eyes were wide as she waited, even though she had to know that the story ended as well as it could. Heather was still with them.
Just.
‘I was messing around in the kitchen,’ he went on, hating the very memory. He could still smell the scent of the Christmas tree in the hallway, the mulled wine spices in the pan on the stove. ‘I was experimenting. I used to think I wanted to be a scientist, did I ever tell you that?’
Clara shook her head. ‘No, you didn’t. Like your father, you mean? What changed?’
‘Yeah, like my dad.’ That was all he’d wanted: to be like his father. To invent something that changed people’s lives for the better. At least he had until that night. ‘And as for what changed...’ He swallowed. ‘I sent Heather up to bed early because I didn’t want her getting in my way. I was trying some experiment I’d read about—a flame in a bottle thing—when the phone rang. I turned towards it, moving away from the table.’ The memory was so clear, as if he was right there all over again. A familiar terror rose in his throat. As if it were happening again and this time he might not be able to stop it...
‘I was far enough away when I heard the explosion. And then I heard Heather scream,’ he went on, the lump in his throat growing painfully large. But still he struggled to speak around it. ‘The experiment... The fire should have been contained in the bottle, burning up the methanol. But I screwed it up, somehow. It exploded. And when I turned back... Heather...’
‘Oh, Jacob,’ Clara whispered and reached out across the table to take his hand. He squeezed her fingers in gratitude.
‘She’d come downstairs to see what I was doing,’ he explained. ‘She was right by the table when it happened. Her arms...’
‘I’d seen the scars,’ Clara admitted. ‘I just never thought... She always kept them covered, so I didn’t like to ask. I should have.’
‘No, you shouldn’t. We don’t... Nobody in my family likes to talk about it. We like to pretend it never happened.’ Even though there hadn’t been a day since when Jacob hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t wished he’d acted differently. ‘Dad only ever refers to it as our lucky escape. Heather put her arms up to protect herself when the bottle exploded but her pyjamas caught fire. I grabbed a throw blanket and smothered her with it to put the flames out but...’ He swallowed. This was the part of the memory that haunted him the most. ‘The fire chief said that she would have been burnt beyond recognition if I’d been a moment slower, if her hair had caught fire. It could have taken her sight too. And she might have...’
Clara’s fingers tightened around his. ‘But she didn’t. She’s fine, Jacob. She’s out there right now with your parents, waiting for this snow to clear. She’s fine.’
She’s alive. Some mornings, that was the first thing he said to himself. Whenever he worried about the day ahead, about a deal that might go wrong or a business decision he had to make, he just reminded himself that Heather was alive, and he knew anything was possible. But nothing had ever been the same since. His parents had never looked at him the same way. They loved him, he knew. Forgave him even, maybe. But they couldn’t love him the same way they had before he’d hurt their baby girl. And they couldn’t trust him, not with people.
He’d been lucky—far luckier than anyone had any right to be, his father had said. But Jacob knew he couldn’t ever rely on that again. He’d used up his allocation of good luck and all he had left was hard graft and determination.
A determination never to let his family down like that again. A resolution never to put himself in a position where he was responsible for a child again.
He couldn’t be trusted. He should always focus on his own dream, his own ambition, instead of another person’s welfare. He couldn’t take the risk of hurting another kid that way again.
He’d thought that maybe he could manage marriage, as long as it was on his terms. And when he’d met Clara he’d known he had to try.
But in the end he’d only let her down too. He’d neglected her the way he’d neglected Heather that night, but the difference was that Clara had been an adult.
When he’d hurt her, Clara could leave, and she had done exactly that.
And he couldn’t ever blame her.
* * *
Clara held Jacob’s hand hard and tight, her whole being filled with sympathy and love for that younger version of her husband. A teenage boy who’d been acting exactly like sixteen-year-old boys always would—foolishly—and had almost destroyed his family.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Jacob,’ she said and his gaze snapped up to meet hers.
‘How can you say that? It was entirely my fault. Every last bit of it.’
The awful thing was, he was right. ‘You were a child.’
‘I was sixteen. Old enough to be responsible, at least in my parents’ eyes. I let them down.’
And he’d never forgiven himself, Clara realised. He’d held this failure over himself for years and it had coloured every single thing he’d ever done since.
Even his marriage to her.
Clara sat back, her fingers falling away from his as the implications of that washed over her. In her mind, a movie reel replayed their whole relationship with this new knowledge colouring it.
Suddenly, so many things made sense in a way they never had before.
This—this was why he was so determined to succeed
, every moment of every day. Why he’d worked so hard to never let his father down, ever again. Why he did everything he could to bring glory and money and power to his family—to try and make up for the one time he’d got it wrong.
Finally she understood why he was so adamant that he never wanted children. Because the one time he’d been left in charge of a child something had gone terribly, almost tragically wrong.
He’d spent almost half of his life carrying this guilt, this determination not to screw up again.
Clara knew James Foster. He was a good man, a good father—but he demanded a lot. He was an innovative scientist who’d achieved a great deal in his lifetime and expected the same from his children.
She could only imagine how that sort of expectation, weighted down by his own guilt, had driven Jacob to such lengths to succeed.
She focused on her almost-ex-husband again, seeing him as if through a new camera lens. Suddenly, the man she’d thought she’d known inside out had turned out to be someone else entirely.
Someone she might never have had the chance to get to know were it not for an ill-timed snowfall and a castle in the middle of nowhere.
He was the father of her child. The man she’d always believed had no interest in kids or a family because he had other priorities—namely, chasing success. But that was only half of the truth, she realised now.
