“University of Oxford?” she replied, her eyebrows flying up. “How ambitious of us.”
He smiled back at her. “But clearly, in real life, you had all the support you needed right here. I saw the diplomas and awards in your den. Congratulations, Dr. Baxter. You did well.”
“Thank you.” The compliment filled her with pride.
They reached the west point and stepped carefully from one large beach boulder to another, then stopped on a flat outcropping.
“I suppose it was fate that had other plans for us,” Emma said. “We weren’t meant to be together back then, for all sorts of reasons. We weren’t lucky that way.”
He pondered that notion while they watched a fishing boat motor toward open water. “Not many people were lucky after the war. But bad luck touches all of us, even during peacetime.”
The sun moved behind a cloud, and the harbor turned gray. The temperature cooled, and ripples appeared on the surface of the water.
Emma touched Oliver’s arm. “Maybe we should start over. I’ve already apologized for being rude when you first arrived. But now I know that we were both told things that weren’t true. You thought Iwent back to Logan, and I thought you were dead. If I’d known you were alive, I would have tried to contact you again. Which makes me wonder ... Didn’t your wife ever tell you about the letters I sent?”
Oliver turned to her, his brow furrowed. “What letters?”
Emma stared at him, processing his response, thinking back to that day in Ruth’s living room, when she’d learned of his alleged death.
Slowly, Emma began to grasp the true course of events, the source of their lifelong separation—the rudder that had steered them away from each other.
“I wrote to you about being pregnant,” she said. “I sent a number of desperate letters to your flat. That’s how I learned about your death, because your wife read them and wrote back to inform me.”
He frowned and shook his head with confusion. “You learned about the explosion from Mary?”
“Yes.”
“But when I came home, she never mentioned any letters from you. Are you telling me that she knew you were expecting my child?”
Emma was overcome with dismay. “Yes.”
Oliver stared at her in shock. “That can’t be.”
Emma closed her eyes and said nothing. She’d thought she understood everything before, but this was something else. She gave him time to comprehend the facts and accept them, as she was doing.
“In all the years we were together,” he said, “she never told me anything about that.”
A breeze blew in from the east, and small whitecaps appeared on the harbor.
Oliver bowed his head and grabbed great clumps of his hair in both fists. “Mary, you didn’t.” His voice was low and gruff with ire.
Over the years, Emma had counseled many patients about how to cope with shock, anger, and the fact that they had been lied to. But now she, too, was a victim of manipulation. She and Oliver, together, had lived separate lives with no knowledge of the truth. And it was his unfaithful wife, Mary, who had misled them both.
All Emma wanted to do in that moment was call Mary directly and rail at her with hateful words and threatening accusations. How could she have kept a father away from his child, even if it was a child born out of wedlock?
“Where is your wife now?” she asked in a threatening tone.
“Dead,” Oliver replied numbly.
His response came down on Emma like a hammer. She couldn’t form words.
Meanwhile, Oliver’s eyes were wild. He was clenching his teeth as he spoke. “She should have told me. It would have changed how our lives turned out. All of us.”
“Maybe that’s what she was afraid of,” Emma replied.
They stared at each other, dumbfounded, while the wind grew stronger and hissed through the evergreens.
“This is all my fault,” Oliver said. “I shouldn’t have lost faith, and I shouldn’t have trusted my wife not to do something like that. She’d betrayed me before. Why didn’t I at least try to see you? Why in God’s name did I give up?”
