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‘Don’t cry, matakia mou,’ he whispered, stroking her hair. ‘It will all work out. I promise.’
‘How?’ she asked between sobs. ‘How can it ever work out? We’re breaking her heart.’
‘No, we’re not.’
‘We are. Maybe she doesn’t love you yet, but she wants to. She wants your marriage to work. Have you even seen her since you got back from America?’
‘I’ve been busy.’
Disentangling herself from his hold, Amy grabbed a handful of tissues from a box. The tears kept falling.
‘Helios, the Princess is your fiancée. She’s come all this way to see you. You should be with her. This time before your marriage should be spent getting to know each other...’
‘We do know each other.’
‘Do you?’ She raised her shoulders. ‘Then tell me this—what are her dreams? What are her fears? Can you answer any of that? You’re going to be spending the rest of your life with her.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed tightly. ‘The rest of my life. But the rest of my life hasn’t started yet.’
‘It started the minute you put an engagement ring on her finger.’
The engagement ring. He’d told Catalina to choose her own, with the excuse that she would be the one wearing it and so she should have something that was to her own taste. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to do the deed himself.
He knew she coveted his mother’s sapphire ring. Growing up, he’d always known that ring would be given to the woman he made his wife. He’d had the ready-made excuse that it was a feature of the exhibition to stop him sliding it onto Catalina’s finger yet, but he’d promised that when the exhibition was over it would be hers.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ Amy said, her voice choking on the words. ‘What we’re doing to the Princess is abhorrent. She’s a princess but she’s real, not a fairy-tale creation. She’s human, and the guilt is eating me alive.’
He moved to take her back into his arms but she held up a hand to him and shook her head.
‘We can’t. I can’t. I won’t be the cause of someone else’s misery. How can I when I’ve seen first-hand the damage it causes?’ Wiping away a fresh batch of tears, she swallowed before saying, ‘When I came to Agon and I wanted to find my birth mother, it wasn’t because I wanted to form a relationship with her. I wanted to know my other family and my roots, yes, and I was desperate to see what she looked like. But what I really wanted from her was to know why.’
‘Why she abandoned you?’ She had told him on the phone about the meeting. How she had left within minutes, abandoning the mother who’d abandoned her.
‘Partly. What I really wanted to know was how she could have done what she did to my mum. She was her au pair—Mum had trusted her with her child and welcomed her into her home. My mum is the most loving woman in the world. There is no way she would have treated Neysa with anything but kindness. How could she sneak around behind her back with her husband? What kind of evil selfishness makes a person act like that?’
‘Did you ask her that?’
‘No. I was so desperate to get away from her that I didn’t ask her any of the questions I’d been storing up for seventeen years.’ She gave a half-hearted shrug. ‘And now I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear her excuses because that’s all they’ll be. I don’t think she feels any remorse.’
‘Amy, our situation is very different. How Neysa and your father behaved...it’s not like for like.’
‘You might not be married yet, but the intention and commitment are still there. The agony my mum must have gone through... She never got over it. She forgave my father but she’s never forgotten, and she’s not been able to trust him properly since.’
More tears fell, harder now, turning her face into a torrent of salt water.
‘I can’t live with the guilt. I’ve spent my entire life, through no fault of my own, being a person people point at and whisper about. I’ve had to work so hard to make myself believe that I didn’t deserve it and that I was innocent. But how can I be innocent when I’m the one now causing someone’s misery? I don’t want to be the selfish woman Neysa is. I don’t want to hurt anyone. The Princess is a good and lovely person and she doesn’t deserve this—no one does. Whatever she’s been raised to be, she’s still human.’
The depth of Amy’s guilt and misery stabbed at him, right in his guts, evoking a wave of shame that came rushing through him, a wave so powerful that he reeled and held on to the small kitchen table for support.
