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Xavier nodded, the awkwardness of the situation made all the worse by his damned incomplete memories. A white-hot anger flashed inside of him – why couldn’t he remember? Where had those months gone in his mind? And would he ever get them back?
“I … Excuse me.” Elizabeth muttered, spinning and almost knocking her head on the door jamb as she went.
Xavier went to follow but Arabella caught his arm, grabbing him and spinning him around. “How old is he?”
Xavier’s chest was being ripped in half. “I have to explain to her – and to you – but Elizabeth first –,”
“How old?” Arabella was more determined than he’d ever seen her.
Xavier’s head was in agony. “Three. But I must go to her…”
“Three? But … You… I don’t understand. When?”
“I wish I could understand how I ever came to cheat on you,” he said, thinking of Elizabeth and knowing instinctively that she was the only woman he would ever have broken his strong moral code for.
“When did you and she meet?” Arabella asked urgently, lifting shaking fingers to her necklace and toying with it.
“The weekend before the crash,” he said. “I apologise, Arabella. I can’t defend my actions. There is no damned defense for them.”
“Stop.” She swallowed, her expression grim. “You’re not at fault.”
“Don’t.” His word held a warning. “You always make excuses for me, you tolerate everything. But this is beyond excuses.”
“No, you don’t understand. Oh, God, Xavier.” She lifted a hand to her mouth, covering a mangled noise of pain.
But Xavier barely heard it. “I have to go to her.”
“No.” Arabella reached for his hand and squeezed it. “You have to hear me out first.”
There was a ringing in Ellie’s ears.
She watched as Joshua kicked his legs to coordinate his swinging – up and back, up and back. It was a cool afternoon but Ellie had left the house without thinking to grab a coat, so she huddled down deeper on the park bench, her eyes trained on their child as he sailed through the air, care-free and giggling.
“He’s adorable,” a woman with a heavy European accent admired, sitting beside Ellie.
She nodded her thanks, but didn’t reply. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She didn’t know what she wanted.
Only that coming home to see Xavier with his ex-wife in the kitchen had filled her with the strangest feeling that she was being drowned, her head being pushed beneath water, her lungs filling with liquid until she couldn’t breathe.
The worst of it was that Ellie had felt like an outsider – again. She had loved Xavier, and she’d loved him with all of herself. She’d made a child with him, and then he’d married someone else. And seeing that someone else in the present had rocked Ellie to the core because it reminded her that she’d always be an outsider. His second choice bride.
None of this was about her, for him.
God, and for Ellie?
She swallowed convulsively, fiddling her fingers in her lap. To Ellie, he was so much more than that. He was her first lover, and her first love. He was also her first heartbreak and her biggest lesson in not trusting her heart.
“Mummy!” Joshua came running over, his little hands outstretched, and when she looked down, saw that he’d found a small rock, shaped like a perfect heart. “Look! It’s for you!”
She smiled slowly, wistfully, and grabbed for him, lifting him to her lap and cuddling him close. “Is it, baby?”
“I’m not a baby!” He disputed, then giggle when she tickled his tummy. “I’m such a big boy now! Xavier says so!”
Ellie nodded, her cheek pressed against his soft, downy curls. That was true – he was growing up too fast.
“Do you want it?” She looked down at the little heart stone he was offering so freely and swept her eyes shut for a moment. Hearts were special, and should be given freely, just like this.
She’d given all of her heart to Xavier four years earlier, and he hadn’t deserved it. And now? He still held it. She’d given it freely, a long time ago, and it turns out, there was no taking it back. She’d loved him and probably always would.
