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“Why?”
She turned away then, looking out over Rome. “There was no one else.”
Breath hissed from beneath his teeth and her ey
es jerked to him again.
“If anything happened to me, I needed to know he’d be looked after.”
His eyes pinned her to the spot and saw right inside her heart. “But only if something happened to you. Only as a last resort.”
She bit down on her lip. “I’ve explained that. I can’t keep saying it. You might not agree with my decision but surely you can at least understand why—,”
He stood up then, pacing across the terrace, his back to her, his spine stiff.
“I do.” The words were quiet, so she had to strain to hear them. He whipped round to face her, his eyes showing his torment. “I understand that you thought you were doing the good and noble thing. But you weren’t. You were jealous of my wife, and angry at me. You thought I’d cheated on Alison with you and you didn’t think I deserved to know about him.”
“No.” Her eyes were haunted. “I was angry but I would never have kept your child from you for that reason. I was thinking of her, of your wife, and how little she deserved to have a stick of dynamite thrown into her life.” She remembered the way she’d felt then so vividly, it was like a dream from which there was no escape. “I was thinking of how complicated our baby’s life would be, how layered with arguments and unpleasantness from birth. I was thinking of the impossibility of it all, and determined that he wouldn’t become a pawn, or an object of hatred and resentment.”
He didn’t speak.
“Surely you can see why I thought that would be the case?” She implored him. “It wasn’t like I thought you or your wife would welcome him with open arms. Nor me. What if you or she tried to…” she looked away, the words difficult to form.
“What, Elodie?” He insisted, and when she lifted her gaze back to him, he had his hands on his hips, his face locked in an expression that was unforgiving and furious.
“You were married, wealthy, prominent in the business community. I was a nobody, on my own in a foreign country. I couldn’t afford to fight you for him.”
“The day in the hospital, you implied that you could.”
Danger rushed through her but having such a monumental lie between them, she needed to be completely honest now. “I have some money, but not enough. As you said, you’d hire ten lawyers for every one of mine. I was alone, pregnant, hormonal and terrified, yes, okay? I was terrified of what would happen.”
“So you took the easy path and kept me from him.” The words were thrown at her, harsh and searing.
“The easy path? Do you think for one second any of this has been easy for me? Raising a little boy on my own, looking at him and seeing you, carrying the guilt of my decision every day,” her voice cracked. “Whenever I see other families, dads with their babies, I would think of you, imagine you and him, and it felt as though my heart had been torn into pieces. Do you think I didn’t realise the importance of what I was doing? Separating you from him?” She shook her head angrily. “But so far as I knew you were married, and there was no easy way to ignore that. I couldn’t see what our life would be like – his and mine – I didn’t know he’d be welcomed, and there was a part of me that felt it was better for him to be a secret than to be unwanted.”
“He is my son,” he shouted, and then tilted his head back, staring at the sky, his chest moving with the force of his breathing. “I would always have wanted him.”
“I know that now.”
“You would have known it then, if you’d put aside your fears and come to speak to me.”
A tiny sob escaped her because he was right. But how could she have known he would feel like this? Everything she knew about him to that point made it impossible to believe he would act in her best interests – or those of their son.
He shook his head, his expression like an iron mask. “There is no sense discussing it. Neither of us can change the past, even if we wanted to.”
“No,” she agreed with him there. Her voice grew soft, cautious. “But you can’t keep banging me over the head with it, either, Fiero.”
At the use of his name, they both shifted a little. It was such a distinctive name, the sounds so familiar to her, names she had cried into the air on that night they spent together. “If this is going to work, you have to let it go. You have to accept what I did, and who I am.”
His eyes narrowed.
“We made a child together. A beautiful, intelligent little boy, and you’re in his life now, regardless of the decisions I made then.”
“But if you hadn’t been hit by a van, Elodie?”
She nodded jerkily, surprised by the rush of fear that assaulted her. “I know.”
“You don’t know.” He moved back towards her, crouching down at her eye level once more, so she could see the torment in his features. “All I can think about is ‘what if’. What if you hadn’t been hit by the van? What if you were taken to a different hospital? What if you had died and our son was sent somewhere with someone else, and I never knew about him. You say it is in the past but the decision you made will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
