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Where was Lewis today? Was he with Jessica?
It was several seconds before she realised how damning it was that she had thought firstly of Lewis and only secondly of Jessica. She drank her coffee. She ought to be outside working, not standing here in front of a window, allowing herself to give in to what was becoming an almost compulsive desire to allow Lewis into her thoughts…her mind…her heart. She gave a convulsive shudder. If she was honest with herself, hadn’t he always been there, no matter how hard she had tried to reject the way her emotions clung to the memory of him?
Those nights in which she dreamed of him. She was starting to tremble, to feel the aching, weak loneliness and misery that remembering how her life with him had once been always brought her.
She was a fool, she told herself bitterly. She was clinging to memories that had no basis in reality, to a love which had never really existed…at least not on Lewis’s part.
Tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away. The garden seat would be ready for its second coat of stain by now.
She was just about to go out when someone rang the front doorbell.
Jessica. Perhaps it was Jessica, she thought excitedly, and then acknowledged that her daughter was hardly likely to ring the bell when she had her own key. Grimacing a little at her untidy, stain-splashed state, she opened the door into the hall and hurried to the front door.
As she opened it the sunlight dazzled her, so that for a moment all she could see was the silhouette of a man, his features obscured and shadowed; and then he spoke, stepping towards her and into the house as he said quietly, ‘I hope I haven’t chosen an inconvenient time to call round but—’
Lewis. It was Lewis. What on earth was he doing here? And then, abruptly, she thought she knew, and her initial shock gave way to sick anger as she interrupted him, choking back bitterly, ‘But you just couldn’t wait to come and crow—is that it? Well, you’re too late. I’ve already spoken to Jessica. Why are you doing this, Lewis? You didn’t want her…you didn’t want any children. You said so yourself when you told me you’d chosen to ensure that you never had any…Biologically Jessica may be your child, but emotionally, morally, she’s mine and if you think I’m going to stand by and let you hurt her—’
‘Hurt her?’
She could hear the anger in his voice. It silenced her, shocking through her own anguish, making her pause and look at him. He looked haunted, drawn, ill almost, and as he moved she remembered the operation he had recently undergone, and even while she derided herself for it she couldn’t stop the surge of weakening concern for him that overrode the shock of seeing him and the anger burning inside her.
‘Hurt her,’ he repeated less harshly. ‘Is that really what you think I’d do?’
For some reason her eyes were stinging with tears. ‘Why not?’ she asked bitterly. ‘After all, you didn’t seem to mind hurting me.’
She went white and then red. What on earth had possessed her to make that kind of self-betraying statement? She held her breath, waiting for him to pounce on it, to deride her for it and taunt her with all that it had revealed, but instead he seemed to tense as though he had suffered a body-blow, his voice low and raw with emotion as he defended himself.
‘I had no option. I—’
‘You were in love with someone else. Yes…I know.’ She felt sick inside. Discussing the past was the very last thing she wanted to do. It had been idiotic of her to make that comment in the first place. Desperate to change the subject, while she still had at least some control of her emotions, she turned away from him and demanded gruffly, ‘Why did you go to see Jessica, Lewis? When you came here to see me you told me that your only concern was that she be informed of…of her medical history.’
He was silent for so long that she was forced to turn round and look at him.
He was watching her with a grave expression on his face. His eyes, so familiar, so achingly and accurately recorded by her memory, were dark with compassion and pity.
Anger stirred inside her, mingling with her pain and the burden of the knowledge she didn’t want to have. She knew already what had really happened, and no matter how desperately she tried to push the knowledge away from her, she couldn’t.
It was her pride that made her lift her head and grit her teeth to say shakily, ‘All right, so Jessica was the one to make contact with you. What do you expect? Of course she’s curious about you. Of course she wants to know—’ Her voice broke and she had to stop. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear him to see her weakness, but she had to go on, to prove to him that she didn’t in any way see Jessica’s behaviour as any kind of betrayal of her…of their love. She had to make him see that she was mature enough to accept, to understand.
Frantically she scoured her mind for something to cling on to, for something to rescue her, and then miraculously she found it and threw it at him, saying, ‘You, of all people, should know that. After all, you wanted to find your father…to know more about him. You can’t blame Jessica.’
‘I don’t blame her, Lacey. Not for anything. No, I don’t blame her.’
The way he emphasised the last word…The deep sadness in his voice checked her.
‘What are you trying to say?’ she demanded. ‘That you blame me…that I should never have had her? Well, it does take two, you know—just in case you’ve let that small fact slip your mind—!’
‘Lacey, please, I haven’t come here to quarrel with you,’ he interrupted her tiredly. ‘Look, could we go and sit down, and discuss this whole thing more rationally?’
‘Like we did when you told me you wanted a divorce?’ Lacey demanded recklessly. ‘You’
re very good at being rational, aren’t you, Lewis? Very good at locking everything away in neat little boxes, tidied up out of sight, when you no longer want them. As far as I can see there’s nothing for us to discuss. When you came here to tell me…to ask me if Jessica was your child, you said that you had no intention of trying to come between us; of trying to claim her as your daughter.’
‘What was I supposed to do, Lacey? She contacted me. Should I have rejected her?’
His voice was quiet and low, carrying a heavy undercurrent of pain.
It was that pain that silenced her. She wasn’t a girl any more, rushing heedlessly into an emotional confrontation. She was a woman with the maturity to see that no problem was ever clear-cut and divided neatly into right and wrong.
