AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘He didn’t go into detail,’ Elle found herself half-apologising, as though she was intruding on someone else’s business.
‘That sounds like Fitz.’ Janine offered another soft, sad smile. ‘But the fact that he opened up to you at all should tell you all you need to know about how much he values you. How about his family? Did he tell you about them?’
She should end the conversation. It felt disloyal talking about Fitz behind his back. But a part of her couldn’t stop. He’d told her she was the only person he’d ever wanted to talk to about his family. At the time it had made her feel special, valued, as though he wanted her to understand him in a way he never had with anyone else.
It had turned out that was just a lie.
‘I know his mother and sister died in the car crash,’ Elle said after a moment.
Janine frowned.
‘It was his whole family. His poor father, too. It must have been devastating for Fitz, losing his whole family in one single instant, but he never spoke about it.’
Elle hesitated. Didn’t Janine know his father had been drinking? Had reappeared out of nowhere? Had abused his mother?
‘But he spoke about it with you,’ she pointed out cautiously, deliberately focussing on the check-up and avoiding Janine’s direct gaze.
‘Only because I made him. My father...he was a colonel back then, and when he found out that I’d been pregnant he told me to forget about Fitz, about the car crash. Told me that he was damaged.’
Damaged.
Exactly the words Fitz had used to describe himself that first night.
‘Did you ever say that to him?’ she demanded, unable to help herself. ‘Did you ever tell him he was damaged?’
The woman dropped her head, misery and guilt etched in every crevice and curve.
‘I never should have, I know that. But I was hurt and I was grieving. I’d just lost my baby, and Fitz didn’t seem bothered. I know now he was probably still numb from finding out in the first place—I’d only told him I was pregnant a few hours earlier...’
‘A few hours?’ Elle exclaimed.
‘He didn’t tell you that?’
‘He told me you were three months pregnant when you went out on that convoy. That he didn’t stop you. That he should have told someone and made sure you were sent home to safety. He holds himself responsible.’
‘Fitz does?’ Janine twisted around to face Elle. ‘How could any of it be his fault? I only told him that morning, before the convoy went out. I knew he was in shock but he immediately told me we’d get married and he would take care of us, just as I’d known he would. My convoy was due back that night and then I was heading home for R&R. I was going to tell my parents then.’
‘He never said.’ Elle shook her head.
Part of her was still reeling, yet another part of her was absorbing the revelations, sifting them in with the story Fitz had told her, working through how it had impacted on him. Compounding the guilt and helplessness and vulnerability he must already have felt at losing his mother and sister only a few years earlier.
No wonder he had trust issues.
No wonder he found it hard to let her in.
If she really loved him as much as she thought she did, then she had to find a way to prove she wasn’t going to let him down or leave him, while giving him the time and space he needed to accept her.
‘He thinks he let you down, betrayed your trust,’ Elle said at length.
It was a risk, telling Janine something that Fitz had told her in confidence, but Elle decided it was a risk she was prepared to take. Despite everything, there was a part of her that couldn’t help liking Janine and feeling sorry for her. She was no doubt a decent enough major, her army father would have drilled that into her, but as a woman Janine seemed a little naïve, a bit young for her age. And yet if anyone could tell her the truth about Fitz, Elle couldn’t help feeling it was going to be this woman.
‘He never let me down.’ Janine hung her head again. ‘I let him down. I...manipulated him. I’m not proud of it. But I was twenty-two and I was naïve and foolish, and I was desperate to get away from my controlling father. I fell for Fitz the first week of our officer training course, he was different from the other lads. Stronger, more focussed, resolute.
‘The longer I spent in his company, the more I fell in love. I thought if I could give him a family—like the one he’d lost—then I could break through those barriers of his and he would love me back. But he never did. He would have married me, he would have taken care of me, of our baby. But he never loved me like I thought I loved him. Yet if I had loved him, I suppose I never would have wanted to trap him.’
‘Getting pregnant was deliberate?’ Elle managed slowly.
‘No! At least, I don’t think so. Maybe. No. I don’t know, subconsciously perhaps? And I regret it, more than you can imagine.’
