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The words still burning in his brain, he stared at the woman standing in front of him, seeing a stranger.
‘When did it happen?’ he asked.
There was the briefest of silences, so that her answer almost overlapped his question. ‘In London.’
He stared at her, with a terrible dropping feeling in his chest. How could that be? He had arrived at the London apartment late in the evening on the day she’d been to visit her parents’ graves. Delphi had been quiet, but he had thought she was still angry with him for not cancelling his meeting and going with her. He had kissed her, apologised again for not being there, and asked her about her day. That was when she had told him about seeing the paparazzi and deciding not to go to the graves.
At no point had she told him that she had miscarried their baby.
‘And you didn’t think to mention it?’ He held her gaze, shock curdling in his stomach. ‘I didn’t even know you were having a baby.’
Were. Past tense. Anger and misery rushed through him again. She had always been secretive, but surely this hadn’t been only her secret to keep.
‘How many weeks were you?’
‘Eight. But I didn’t realise. There was so much going on...’
Eight weeks. Two months. So, the baby would have been roughly the shape and size of a bean. For a second he couldn’t feel himself breathing. Little bean. That was what Jalila had called Khalid when she was pregnant.
‘So, when did you realise?’
‘At about seven weeks.’
He felt like he was floating away from the confines of his body. ‘I’m your husband, Delphi. You should have told me.’
She drew in a quick, unsteady breath. ‘I was going to.’
‘You were going to?’ he repeated.
His chest was still warm from holding Khalid in his arms, and that hurt most of all. Knowing that he would never feel their baby’s warmth or kiss its forehead.
He took a step back from her, no longer needing sympathy but space. If he hadn’t asked if she was pregnant, would he have ever known about their lost baby’s momentary tiny, fluttering existence? The only reason he did now was because he had made it impossible for her not to tell him.
What would have happened if he hadn’t tracked Delphi down and forced her to come to Dubai?
The answer to that question tore at his insides.
‘You expect me to believe you? Actually, you don’t need to answer that.’ A muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘You don’t care if I believe you or not, right?’
He scarcely recognised his own voice, but he didn’t care. Nor did he believe her. Delphi had never told him anything willingly in her life. Everything had to be prised out of her. Why should this be any different?
Her eyes were huge and dark in the moonlight. ‘Of course I care. But it’s complicated.’
It’s complicated.
He gritted his teeth. It was one of her stock get-out-of-jail-free responses to any difficult conversation—‘difficult’ being anything that trespassed into the personal. But personal meant relating only to one individual; this was about him too.
‘No, it’s simple, Delphi. You were pregnant with our baby, and you didn’t tell me. And then you lost our baby, and you didn’t tell me that either.’
The starkness of his words appeared to shock her—shock them both. But so much of his life had been spent trying to matter, and this was one occasion when he should automatically have done so—only she hadn’t deemed him important enough to tell him anything.
She still didn’t.
He watched her take a small step backwards, her eyes darting past his, planning her next escape route.
‘Look, I know this is a shock...’ she said.
Had it been a shock for her too? Not the miscarriage...the pregnancy?
