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It had been Sarah herself who had suggested that they should have the pregnancy terminated—neither of them, after all, had been thinking of a baby when Honor had been conceived—but Silas had persuaded her not to go ahead with it.
‘I can’t afford to bring up a baby,’ she had told him frantically.
‘I can,’ Silas had replied.
A week later they had been married and just over seven months after that Honor had been born.
Forty-eight hours after giving birth Sarah had been dead despite everything that the doctors had done to try and save her. Nothing had been able to stop the massive haemorrhaging which had ended her life and, in the end, the doctors had told Silas that there was simply nothing they could do, that no amount of blood transfusions were going to help, that her body was too far in shock for them to be able to risk any kind of emergency surgery.
She had died without ever seeing Honor.
It hadn’t been easy in those early years being totally responsible for a motherless girl child. His own parents had been retired and living abroad, and he had been determined that since he was Honor’s only parent he was going to be as involved in her life and as much ‘there’ for her as he possibly could be, and so he had learned to change nappies without flinching, to bring up wind and to correctly interpret what all those different baby cries meant. But then, almost as soon as he had mastered those complexities, Honor had found new ways to tax his parenting skills—was still finding new ways to tax them, he admitted ten minutes later as he ushered her upstairs to her own bedroom, newly decorated last year for her birthday since she had announced that the ‘Barbie’ colour scheme and decor she had insisted on having for her sixth birthday was now totally passé and far too babyish for a girl of her new maturity.
In its place her room was now resplendent with everything necessary for a devout and ardent fan of the latest popular ‘girl band’.
‘I really like Verity,’ Honor told him drowsily as he was tucking her up. ‘I wish…’
‘Go to sleep,’ Silas said.
He had reached the doorway and was just about to switch off the light when she called out, ‘Da-ad.’
‘Yes.’ Silas waited.
Honor sat bolt upright in her bed and eyed him seriously. ‘You do know, don’t you, that I’m getting to an age where I need to have a woman to talk to?’
Silas wasn’t deceived. Honor, as he well knew, could run rings around a woman four times her age—could and, exasperatingly, very often did.
‘You know what I mean,’ Honor stressed. ‘There are things I need to know…girl-type things…’
Silas gave her a sceptical look. He and Honor had always had a very open and honest relationship, no subject was taboo between them, and he had assumed that when the time came the subject of Honor’s burgeoning womanhood and sexuality would be one they would cope with together. Honor, or so she was implying, had other ideas.
‘Go to sleep,’ he advised his daughter thoughtfully before switching off the light and going downstairs.
He only wished he could go to bed himself, but he had some paperwork to do. The landscaping business, which he had built up from nothing, had thrived—two years running he had won critical acclaim from the judges at the Chelsea Flower Show and he was now fully booked up with design commissions for the next eighteen months.
Add to that the garden centre side of his business and it was no wonder that, increasingly, he was finding it difficult to juggle all the various demands on his time.
It had hurt him more than he liked to think about even now when Verity had made it plain that taking over from her uncle in his business meant more to her than being with him—had hurt him and had damn near destroyed him. It wasn’t that he was arrogant enough to think that a woman, his woman, should not want to have a career or run her own life, it was just…It was just that he had assumed that their relationship, their love, had meant as much to her as it had to him and that…
Plainly, though, he had been wrong.
‘Give me time,’ she had begged him, and because he had loved her so much he had.
‘I have to go to New York,’ she had told him. ‘But I’ll be back…It won’t be for ever and there’ll be holidays.’ But too many months had come and gone without her coming back and in the end he had been the one to go to her. A meagre forty-eight hours was all they had had together—all he’d been able to afford to pay for and he had only managed that because he had picked up the short break as a special tour operator’s bargain.
‘Don’t make me wait too long,’ he had begged her.
‘Please understand,’ she had asked him.
Finally, pushed to the limits of his pride and his love, he had given her an ultimatum.
‘Come home, we need to talk,’ he had written to her, but she had ignored his letter—and when he had rung her apartment a strange male voice had answered the phone, claiming not to know where she was.
He hadn’t rung again and then, four weeks later, he had met Sarah, and the rest, as they said, was history.
The local paper had carried several articles about Verity’s uncle five years ago when he had died—he had been, after all, probably the town’s most successful and wealthy inhabitant—but Silas had never expected that Verity would come back.
If it hadn’t been for that incident with Honor and her roller blades, he doubted that they would even have seen one another. And he wished to God that they hadn’t. Tonight had resurrected too many painful memories. Grimly he switched his thoughts back to the present.
