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‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he asked, leaning away from her, subtly putting space between them.
Meena shook her head. ‘I thought it would be better for you not to know. I didn’t want you to feel the pain that I did.’
His expression registered shock, and she waited for it to shift or change, but it was fixed there, much as she remembered her own world stopping when she had first been told the news. She squeezed his hand, knowing what a blow he had just received. Wanting him to understand that he wasn’t alone in this.
‘Why did you change your mind?’ he asked eventually.
‘You had a right to know,’ she conceded. ‘I finally understood that.’
‘I was going to be a father?’ he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.
Meena gave a sad smile. ‘I think so.’
‘You think so?’
She took a deep breath, facing some of the uncertainties that had haunted her the longest. That had made her life the hardest over the years. Exposing the depths to which she had lost her sense of herself when the accident had stolen her memories.
‘I know that I was pregnant,’ she explained, ‘because the doctors in the clinic told me that I had had a miscarriage. But I don’t remember it, Guy. I don’t remember knowing that I was pregnant—if I knew that I was pregnant. I don’t know what we would have wanted for the future. I don’t know how we would have felt about a baby coming. We weren’t married. I was going back to my research...’
He reached for her hand, looking closely at her face as he narrowed his eyes.
‘You thought we wouldn’t be happy about it?’ he asked.
‘I... I don’t know.’ It was just one of the many, many things that she didn’t know about that summer. Who she’d been, what she’d wanted. How she’d changed.
‘I do,’ Guy said, squeezing her hand and moving closer again. ‘You would have told me, if you’d known about the baby. I know it. And we would have been excited.’ She was sure that his sad smile mirrored her own as they both thought about a life they hadn’t lived. A future that had been wrecked out on that road.
‘But...?’ How could he be so sure? How could he be so sure about what she would have wanted when she didn’t even know these things about herself?
‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Guy said, and she clung to the certainty in his voice. ‘Any of it. We would have been happy.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I have to rely on you to tell me how I would have felt. How do I know if you’re telling the truth?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t begin to know how difficult that must be. I guess you have to decide whether you can trust me or not. I’m sorry I can’t give you more than that.’
She breathed out and realised how much of a relief that was. How long she’d been carrying the fear that, as painful as it was to have lost the baby, perhaps before the accident she hadn’t wanted it.
‘We’d talked about it,’ Guy said, and Meena’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘But how could we have? You said you didn’t know I was pregnant.’
‘No, not this baby.’ He shook his head and she wondered what he was thinking. Wished that she knew him well enough to guess what he was feeling right now. ‘But we had talked about the future,’ he went on. ‘About children and marriage.’
How had they become so serious in so short a time that a smashed skull could erase it? she wondered, disbelieving. And how could it have ended so abruptly? Both of them going on with their lives as if it had never happened. As if it had never mattered.
‘Did you not wonder why I didn’t come to Australia?’ Meena asked, wanting answers to the questions that had haunted her for seven years.
‘Of course I wondered,’ Guy snapped, pulling his hand away. ‘I called your phone, but no one answered. I emailed. Same. You weren’t on social media. I could have called the resort, but you’d been so scared that if anyone found out about us that you would lose your job and I didn’t want to risk it. What would you have done, if the situation had been reversed?’
What would she have done? How could she possibly know? She had no idea why she’d made any of the decisions that she had when it came to Guy. No idea about who the woman making those decisions had been.
Except that wasn’t really true any more, was it? Not after that night on Le Bijou when she’d started kissing him and never wanted to stop. For the first time, she’d started to understand what had happened that summer. Had started to feel like the woman who had made those decisions.
‘I would have tried to find you,’ Meena said, but added on a sigh, ‘But I’m not sure I could have done more than you did.’
‘After a while, I just assumed that you had...moved on. And it made sense, really. Plenty of people have summer romances and they just...end.’
She shook her head. She thought that he’d known her better than that. At least, that was what she’d wanted to believe. ‘I don’t. I didn’t.’
