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He couldn’t have borne it.
Darkness rippled within him as a pain stabbed through his arm. It took Zeke a moment to realise he’d been clenching his fist tightly, and his wrist—also damaged in the blast five years ago—was screaming in protest.
Releasing Tia from what he’d feared would be a lifetime of feeling trapped had been one thing, but the realisation that he had effectively turned his back on his pregnant wife, his future child? That felt like something different entirely.
‘Perhaps that’s the truth,’ he ground out. ‘But I can’t know for certain, can I? Because you never afforded me that courtesy. You concealed it from me for months whilst I was in that rehab centre. Visiting me every day despite me telling you—shouting at you—to stay away.’
‘Not for months.’ Tia sucked in a shaky breath. ‘Actually, not at all during that time. I didn’t know I was pregnant.’
It was pathetic how hope sprang up so instantly wit
hin him. He stomped it down savagely. His tone harsher than ever.
‘You were on a tour of duty for three months before I got caught in that IED blast. You would have known.’
‘But I didn’t.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘You’ll believe whatever you want,’ she cried in frustration. ‘You always do, Zeke, that’s the point. But if you’re asking me for the truth, it’s that I had no idea. Our jobs pushed us, always training, often in danger, and I was never...regular. You know that. I could go six months without having to worry about anything like that. So I just put it down to the stress of your accident, and the amputation.’
‘You visited me in that centre day after day. However many times I told you to stay away, to give me space. You kept coming back.’
Right up until he’d finally found a way to keep her away. The day he’d lied to her and told her that he could never forgive her for what she’d done.
For a long moment they simply stared at each other. Neither of them apparently wanting to talk about that final argument.
‘I didn’t know.’ Her desperation was almost enough to convince him. ‘I stayed away because...you were so adamant. Because the nursing staff believed that I was doing more harm than good by visiting. Because I thought if I gave you space, maybe you’d find a way to forgive me for making the only choice I could possibly have made.
‘But I swear to you, Zeke, it was only after that I began to suspect I was pregnant.’
‘And yet you never came back to me,’ he growled.
‘How could I? I was afraid that putting additional pressure on you would be damaging. I was warned to let you come to terms with the amputation in your own time.’ She flung her arms out helplessly.
‘Warned?’
‘By the staff at the centre. You were so closed off, it worried everyone. And I was in an impossible situation, Zeke. I wanted to tell you because I hoped it might give you something positive to hold onto, and to work towards. Yet at the same time, I was terrified that you would try to rush your recovery. I was terrified you would push yourself too hard because you felt as though you had to be the one providing for us. For me, and for Seth.’
‘That was my job to look after you both. I was his father. I am his father.’
The frustration was so thick, so deep, so bitter, he could almost drown in it. And he felt hot, too hot. If he hadn’t known better then he might have thought the carefully regulated temperature of his hi-tech home was failing.
‘You’d already told me to stay away,’ she countered, and he couldn’t tell whether she was more furious or sad. ‘How could I have loaded that onto you? I figured that I’d give you a bit of space, maybe a couple of weeks, even a month. I thought I had time. But I used to call them. Every day, Zeke. You have to believe that.’
Without warning she moved towards him and placed her hand on his arm.
The effect was electric. Shooting up his arm and through his body in an instant. He could feel her everywhere, and the ache slammed into him with all the force of those metres-high waves on his lifeboat barely a few hours earlier.
‘They gave me updates and warned me that you were in a bad place. Survivor’s guilt was bandied about for a long while. Hardly a surprise, but it was stopping you from recovering as you should. There was no way you were ready to be told you had a baby on the way. So I knew that staying away from you was the only way you were going to heal. Mentally and physically. Or do you really deny that?’
He hated that she was right.
And he hated the fact that his inability to come to terms with what had happened to him that night had caused Tia to stay away from him. And to keep his son away from him.
Zeke seethed inwardly.
Ultimately, it meant that however much he had congratulated himself on pulling out of that bleak place and setting up a company that he could never have anticipated would take off as it had, he was a failure after all.
