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‘I have a daughter,’ he repeated, his hand dropping from Evie’s hair as he pushed himself away from her. ‘I have a three-month-old baby, and you didn’t tell me until now?’
Evie crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to meet his eyes.
‘Five months old,’ she answered shakily.
‘Sorry?’
‘Imogen is five months old. Not three.’
He turned to pin her with a narrow gaze as she reached for his glass and took a generous gulp as though she was parched. It took a moment for him to register.
‘That’s enough,’ he bit out, taking the juice from her and setting it out of reach before pushing himself up from the couch and moving over to the window, reinforcing the space between them.
‘Drinking that won’t help you,’ he muttered, staring out at the uneventful street scene.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered so quietly he almost missed it.
He could certainly go for a drink himself. A drink of the large, stiff variety, not a glass of orange juice. And he rarely drank.
‘We slept together a year ago. You’re telling me the baby was two months premature?’
‘That’s not unusual given my...condition.’
He had to strain to hear her.
‘The baby was born at thirty-two weeks? Thirty-three?’
‘Thirty-two weeks. I went onto dialysis five days a week to carry her for as long as I could, but my body was under pressure, so they made the decision...’
Part of his brain told him that she’d done well to get that far. Her health would have been deteriorating rapidly as the growing foetus put more and more strain on her already stressed organs. It certainly explained why she’d gone from healthy when they were together a year ago, to being taken in for her transplant within the week.
‘You never thought to...not to have it? For your health? For the baby’s health?’
Even the words tasted bitter in his mouth.
He knew instantly that he’d said the wrong thing. If he’d felt he’d somehow passed some unknown test earlier, he knew he’d clearly fallen short of the mark now. A shuttered expression dropped over Evie’s features and her voice turned cold.
‘That’s all I needed to know.’ Her voice was shaking. Whether from anger or distress, he couldn’t be sure, but his own emotions were too uprooted to care.
‘Please leave, Max.’
How had this turned around so that she was the one furious with him?
He swung around incredulously.
‘Really, Evangeline? For the last twelve months you have wilfully kept the knowledge of my baby from me, and now you’re the one acting hard done by?’
‘Because you’ve just told me you thought I should have...never had her.’
‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ he bit out. ‘I was only concerned about the impact on your health as well as the baby’s. You admitted yourself that the stress of carrying a baby was too much for your body and they had to carry out a C-section when it was only seven months old.’
‘She.’
He looked at her in confusion.
‘Pardon?’
‘My baby is a she, not an it,’ Evie choked out at him.
