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Because he’d failed his family.
Stalking the room, he bit back one cruel, damning comeback after another. What was the point in them? The only person who really deserved his condemnation was himself. Tia couldn’t hate him any more than he loathed himself right now.
‘So I kept calling them each day, until one day I called and they told me you had discharged yourself. They’d thought you would be with me, but you weren’t. Of course you weren’t,’ she choked out, anger and sadness inextricably interlinked.
No, he’d wanted to get as far away from her as possible. Because the temptation to go to her, to be with her, had been too great. He’d feared he might succumb and he’d been determined that the only time he would seek his wife out again would have been when he was strong enough to provide for her again.
He hadn’t banked on her leaving her medical career in the army. Effectively disappearing herself. He hadn’t for a moment imagined that she’d done so because she had a baby. A son.
His son.
It slammed into him, thrilling and proud, even if somewhat unsettling. And rumbling behind it, unsteadily and weaving a little, a ball of something that felt strangely like joy. He scarcely knew where to start.
‘Maybe I did need you to stay away from me in order for me to get myself together,’ he conceded at last. Ungraciously. ‘But you’re lying if you say you did it for me. You did it because it suited you, too. Because you didn’t want to be around me. Because you didn’t want me as father to our baby.’
Everything inside him was coiled up. Waiting. Desperate. Wanting her response.
It was like a fresh kind of hell when she dropped her eyes from his, unable to deny it.
‘I didn’t want the gung-ho Zeke. The man who basically jumped at any chance to risk his life. I didn’t want my child relegated to having to remember his father as some dead hero. I didn’t want him to have to wonder—every single day—if you were going to walk through that front door, the way I had to with my mother.’
Tia’s voice cracked, and for a moment Zeke almost floundered. He remembered how lost and alone he’d thought she was the first time he met her. It had never occurred to him that she had carried that weight around her neck all those years—right up to becoming a mother herself; perhaps it should have.
‘I’m so sorry...’ he began, but she turned on him, practically stumbling over angry words in an effort to cut him off.
‘I never wanted him to go through the pain I went through the night when she hurried out that door to the shout, kissing me and telling me that she’d be there when I woke in the morning. But she...she never was.’
Something kicked at him. Something he didn’t care to name.
‘I never realised... I’m so sorry, Tia.’
She dashed a furious hand over her eyes.
‘I don’t need your sympathy, Zeke. I just wanted you to understand.’
‘I do understand now,’ he started.
‘Not understand why I was frightened back then.’ She shook her head wildly. ‘I mean to understand why—after your heroics last night—I still don’t want you in Seth’s life.’
He stood, dumbfounded, feeling as if he’d been sucker-punched. It was impossible even to draw a breath.
‘I don’t want you to walk into my son’s life, and fulfil every childish fantasy he ever had, only to leave it again when something happens to you. Because it will happen, Zeke. I came back here because I heard you were here, and I thought you’d changed. But you haven’t learned to value your life at all, I see that now.’
How was it possible to feel the loss of something he hadn’t even known? And yet he felt it. Acutely. Unbearably. As if his son were being ripped from him, despite the fact that they’d never really had a chance to know each other.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he ground out, his mouth feeling wholly alien. ‘I am Seth’s father and I am going to be
in his life.’
‘No.’ She snapped her head up. ‘I can’t allow it. I won’t.’
‘And I won’t allow you to shut me out of his life any longer. Not only do I intend to spend time getting to know my son, I intend to take him with me when I leave for France in a few days.’
Her laugh was a sharp, hollow sound.
‘This time you really must be joking. You think I’m going to let you take him out of the country?’
‘I know you are.’
