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‘Approval. As in a-p-p-r-o-v-a-l. APPROVAL as in block letters. Approval as in italics. Simply approval. That’s what I wanted from you, Damien. That’s what you never gave me. Not even today.’
‘You’ve always had that, Natalie.’
‘Never.’
He dragged in a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry I was impatient with your grieving for Brett. Terribly sorry.’
‘I was grieving for Ryan, not Brett. Brett had whittled away my love for him. There was none left.’
‘How was I to know that? You never gave any indication. I never realised you were disillusioned with your marriage.’
‘Who parades private pain in public?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘How would you have reacted if I’d come running to tell you about Brett’s affairs? You would have hated me for it, Natalie.’
‘It would have destroyed your friendship,’ she mocked.
She wrenched her arm out of his grasp and headed for the staircase. What he said hurt. It bit painfully into her psyche. The deep-seated sense of rejection, the sense of failure, of being a discard, inadequate.
Damien fell into step beside her. ‘What makes you think I covered up for him?’
‘I know.’
‘Give me one example.’
‘You slipped up at the funeral.’ She paused at the head of the stairs to face him with bleak derisive eyes. ‘The woman who went on the camp with you and Brett that weekend...it was reported that she was your companion, Damien. She wasn’t.’
‘She was,’ he insisted.
‘Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your discretion. If the media had latched on to the fact that adultery was mixed up with the death of my son and my husband, they would have had more of a field day than they did.’
‘Natalie, I swear before God she was with me. I invited her. I took her there. She shared my tent. Brett had Ryan with him.’
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t add up, Damien. She wept copiously at the funeral. You didn’t go near her. Not one word or gesture of comfort.’
‘I didn’t leave your side,’ he asserted with passion. ‘She meant nothing to me. She was keen on abseiling. I asked her on the trip to make it a foursome instead of a threesome. I wasn’t to know you were going to be too sick to come. We were already there at the campsite when Brett arrived without you.’
Was he speaking the truth? Had she misread the situation? ‘How did Ryan get so close to the edge of the cliff? Why wasn’t Brett watching him? Ryan was a sensible little boy. He would have obeyed his father.’
‘Natalie, for God’s sake! Accidents can happen so quickly. Don’t torture yourself like this.’
‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said dully. ‘Nothing can bring my beautiful little boy back.’
She started down the staircase. She had to get away from all this. It wasn’t doing her any good, raking over the miseries of the past. She had to look to the future, break with Damien now, start a new life. That was abundantly clear.
Damien wasn’t a friend. And that hurt, too. In his way, he had acted honourably towards her. Yet she had known he had the same attitude towards challenges as Brett had. They were two of a kind. She simply hadn’t anticipated that he would see her as a challenge.
He was matching steps with her, still not prepared to let her walk away from him. ‘Why didn’t you leave Brett?’ he asked.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine any man would understand. Trapped by a pregnancy...making excuses. Trapped by wanting the best for her baby...making compromises. Hoping things would change. Wanting to believe in renewed promises because the sense of failure was too hard to face.
Brett wasn’t all bad. Mostly, but not all. She had fallen in love with his joy in living, his wit, his charm, his exuberant personality, the athletic body he made master of any physical challenge, the mind that thrived on solving problems few others could. She had thought herself the luckiest woman in the world that Brett Hayes had fallen in love with her.
She had never considered herself anyone special. She was averagely pretty, helped along by a better than average figure that had been very firm and trim when she had met Brett. She had been working then as a bush-walking guide, supplementing
an irregular income from the paintings she sold to the tourists who flocked to her hometown. Noosa was a very popular seaside resort on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and Brett had been one more tourist, indulging his love of the outdoors, and sweeping Natalie into a marriage that had seemed idyllic. At first.
She had come to realise, painfully, that Brett saw women as a challenge, too. All of them. He couldn’t resist testing himself, over and over again. Natalie he had put in a completely separate category. She was his chosen wife. The mother of his child.
