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‘No. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ he admitted. ‘Please, we were talking about your father...’
‘The night we met, I had just come back from trying to find him.’
The woman he had met that night in Ireland had been... He’d thought she was resolved, absolutely sure of herself. Had he got it wrong? Had that night been one in which he’d seen what he wanted to see, rather than the truth? Had the woman he’d sought to exorcise his own demons been already shattered by those of her own? A woman defined by his needs rather than hers? He was almost afraid to find out.
‘About three weeks before we met, I’d found some letters that were kept in the attic I was hoping to renovate for the bed and breakfast. All had been returned to the sender. Recognising my mother’s handwriting, and the first name on the envelope, I realised the letters must have been written by my mother to my father.’
‘Did you read any of them?’
Anna frowned, taking a sip of water from the glass in front of her before answering. ‘I didn’t feel that I could. These were my mother’s letters. If they were full of hate and anger, I didn’t want to read them. If they were full of love and need, I couldn’t read them. But I had my father’s full name and address. I used them to find that my father owned a small restaurant in London. It had recently won an award, which was why it was so easy to find.’
Her eyes had lost some of their sparkle, and she gazed over his shoulder as if seeing some imaginary scene.
‘Without telling Ma, I booked myself a flight to London, using some of the savings my grandmother had left me—those Ma hadn’t been able to drink away,’ she explained sadly.
‘It didn’t go well?’ Dimitri asked, pulling her back to the present.
‘I went there believing that if he saw me there would be some kind of innate biological recognition. In my head, he would start to cry, embrace me, take me back to his home, perhaps even find a way to help me to help Ma.’
The pain in her voice as she expressed such simple hopes from her father cut through him like a knife. Anna looked out, seemingly unseeing of the guests, of the night sky that had descended to cover the deep sea beyond.
‘He was busy. The restaurant was packed full of people, and the staff, clearly members of his family—his new family—were run off their feet. He glanced at me briefly, not really taking me in. Just trying to find somewhere out of the way to put a single diner. The ease he had with the people around me, his distraction... I didn’t feel able to speak to him. I just... I sat where he directed me to sit and watched them together. Laughing, joking, shouting even, as someone got an order wrong from the kitchen. But I was on the outside looking in. I didn’t even order any food. They’d forgotten about me in the busyness of the restaurant and I just...slipped away.
‘By the time I got back to Ireland, my mother had convinced herself that I wasn’t coming back and had drunk her way through most of the bar. That was why I was wearing her shirt the night you came to the bed and breakfast. I wasn’t supposed to be working, but she was in such a state that I couldn’t have let her anywhere near the guests. I’d just welcomed the last couple when you arrived on the doorstep. I nearly didn’t let you in,’ she added ruefully.
He looked at her, unable to voice the fear that he’d taken advantage of her that night, but he didn’t have to. Yet again, she read his thoughts as if he’d said them out loud.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I knew what I was doing that night. It was reckless, and foolish, but I wanted it. You. That night, I wanted you.’
That night. Not now. But in that moment he could tell that they were both imagining what their lives might have been like had she not let him in. But Anna seemed to skip over the thought quickly.
‘I feel so stupid for thinking that my father might have been able to recognise me on sight. I suppose that it’s a childish fantasy,’ she said, and because she’d turned her head away he nearly missed the question that fell from her lips. ‘Is that how you felt when you first saw Amalia?’
Dimitri could tell that she was both hopeful and fearful of his answer. And he wasn’t sure how to reply. Saying yes would acquit him in her eyes but would damn her father. And he couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing on their wedding day.
But it was too late. She’d seen it in his eyes, he could tell.
‘I’m pleased you had that. It’s an incredible moment when you see your child, hold her for the first time, recognise that burst of love that tells you that you would do anything, anything to protect her. That your world has irrevocably changed and there is this little person in the centre of it all. That the purpose of your life is now them.’
‘Do you understand, then,’ he pressed on, ‘why I did what I did? Why we needed to marry?’
‘I understand it,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘But I will never forgive you for doing it the way you did.’
The cool night air bit into her arms as the boat took them back from the hotel on the mainland to Dimitri’s island home. Little lights marked the jetty for the boat and the wind loosened tendrils of hair about Anna’s face, causing her to hold them back so she could see her footing.
Flora bid them goodnight, but she was still holding Amalia in her arms as she made her way back to her small home at the foot of the hills beneath the sprawling mansion that was to be their home.
‘Where is Flora taking Amalia?’ Anna asked Dimitri, a sense of dread pooling in her stomach.
‘Back to hers for the night. All the bedding and things that Amalia will need was moved this morning.’
Fury cut through her. ‘Without consulting me? You arranged for my daughter—’
‘Our daughter,’ he cut sternly into her sentence.
‘To spend the night somewhere else, without my knowledge?’
He stopped in his tracks and turned back to her, standing steady on the wooden jetty, being gently rocked as the boat made its way back to the mainland shore. ‘What outrages you more? That you weren’t consulted on the whereabouts of your daughter, or that you no longer have a barrier to stop you from acting on your desires?’
