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‘I think this is how it works from now on. We have to get used to that.’
Of course he was right. It was just that it had been easy to kid herself so far that nothing was going to change that much. Sure, she’d have a baby to care for, but her whole day was already spent caring for people.
There would be maternity leave, and then, if everything went as she hoped, she would be back at work, just with extra drop-offs and pick-ups to work into her day. Appointments with health visitors and childminders and looking for a nursery. A whole new column to add to her calendar and her diary and her to-do list.
That was the choice she had made. But at no point had she chosen Fraser. Well, she had, she supposed, in the half-light of the botanic gardens. But she’d chosen him for right then. For pleasure. For that night. Not for ever.
‘I’m not going to disappear on you or the bairn, Elspeth. Like your dad or mine. I’m here. I’m always going to be here.’
Well, he didn’t have to make it sound like a threat... But she felt his words in the pit of her stomach, the commitment that he had just made to her child, and a tiny part of her fear melted away with it.
And then another, larger part, doubled in size. She knew she was never going to be rid of him, and she was going to have to spend her whole lifetime resisting him. It was going to be exhausting, and she had no idea where she was going to find the energy to do it.
‘Your dad...’ Elspeth started, not really sure where she wanted the conversation to go, just knowing that she wanted it to move away from her, and the changes to her life. He could sit under the spotlight for a while. ‘You said that he left. What happened?’
Fraser made a casual gesture, but she could see from the hard-set lines of his face that he felt anything but relaxed about the subject.
‘He met someone else. I was fifteen. He and Mum broke up and I told him that if he married the new woman I wouldn’t see him again. He chose her.’
Elspeth stopped in her tracks. ‘You gave him an ultimatum?’
‘And he chose her.’
She stood and looked at him for a moment, shocked by the strength of mind that he’d had at fifteen. The stubbornness that she knew he still had now. ‘I’m sorry, Fraser, that must have been hard. And you’ve had no contact since?’
‘He contacts my mum occasionally. But other than that... Nothing.’
She really didn’t want to be on the wrong side of an argument with him. This was brutal, she thought, on both sides. Though she couldn’t help but consider that his father had been put in an impossible position. There were rarely any winners when people started dishing out ultimatums. But Fraser had only been a kid himself at the time.
‘How did your mum feel about this?’ Elspeth asked, still trying to imagine the shockwaves that something like this would send through a family.
‘She was devastated when he told her he wanted a divorce. It took her years to be happy again. I couldn’t see him after watching her go through that. And I couldn’t go back to... I couldn’t go home. To see someone else in our home. He destroyed our family.’
‘But surely...?’
Elspeth hesitated. She knew that she didn’t have all the information, but to cut off any contact like that seemed so...drastic. It was heartbreaking when a family broke up, but plenty of people managed to keep relationships going in worse circumstances. People less stubborn than Fraser and his father, clearly.
‘You don’t think that was a little...?’
The look on Fraser’s face told her that her opinion was not welcome on this subject. Well, fine. Not today. But she had a feeling that they would be revisiting this one.
‘I suppose I’ll have to see him now, though,’ Fraser said eventually, and Elspeth whipped her head round to look at him.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I’m all for it, if my opinion counts for anything,’ she clarified.
The last thing she wanted was her baby to be born in the middle of a family feud, but this was such an about-turn. After what—fifteen years of silence?—he was suddenly going to change his mind?
‘Because my father still lives in our family home. It’s a part of me, and I want my child to know it. That’s more important than how I feel about my father.’
She gave him a sidelong look, aware that there was something she wasn’t understanding here, that Fraser was choosing to hold back.
She felt a shot of something cold. A protective instinct that she recognised as maternal. The first stirrings of her inner mama bear. ‘The baby’s home will be with us,’ she said.
‘Of course with us. But it’s also...there. Where I grew up.’
Elspeth bit her tongue. It was as clear as anything that Fraser was still carrying a lot of emotional baggage about his father. But it wasn’t her place to interfere. She wasn’t his wife, or even his girlfriend. She was the mother of his child, and that was it. No opinions about his personal life were allowed. Or necessary, she remembered. This wasn’t her fight, however sad she might be for that poor teenaged Fraser, feeling abandoned by his dad.
‘Well, I can be there with you. If you want,’ Elspeth said.
