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“No. Not okay. Nothing about this is ‘okay’. I find your actions to be reprehensible – and that is using the most polite word I can think of.”
“Oh!” She let out an angry retort. “You’re one to talk! You who went around sowing his wild oats all the while having promised yourself to a perfectly nice woman? Isn’t that a little like the pot calling the kettle black?”
“So apparently I used you for sex!” He said, the words grim, his expression guarded. “I cheated on my fiancé who, I agree, is the best woman I’ve ever known.” Pain ripped through Elizabeth’s body. “I was a bastard. But nothing, nothing, nothing gave you the moral right to keep my son from me! I do not care what you think of me personally. He is my son.” He pointed a hand at his chest, his eyes flaying her with the strength of their pain. “My flesh and my blood make up his small body, and you wanted to keep that from me. Nothing conferred upon you that right.”
Uncertainty was a tidal wave and she was caught inside of it, unable to ride above it, sinking through the water, tumbling to the bottom. She was lost, and she could only stare at him. She tried to hold onto her reasoning, to remember the motives behind her choices.
“You were getting married. I had no idea I was pregnant. By the time I discovered the truth, you’d left England.”
“So you kept track of me? Why?”
She swallowed past the bitterness curdling inside her throat. Because I loved you. “I don’t know. A sick obsession,” she spat angrily. “But you married and as soon as I saw those photos, I gave up.”
“But you were pregnant.”
“Yes. I was pregnant and alone!” She turned it on him, angrily. “I didn’t know you’d lost your memory! I thought you were simply choosing to forget me. To ignore me. You never called. You never texted. I thought – at the time – that you might have wondered if there’d been consequences to our passion and not bothered to check.”
“You thought me capable of that?”
“You were capable of cheating on your fiancé with me,” she pointed out. “So I didn’t exactly hold your actions in high regard.”
He recoiled as though she’d slapped him. “I’d lost my memory. I would like to think that, had it not been for the accident, I would have contacted you to ensure you were… well, after our time together.”
She let out a sarcastic laugh. “Oh, yes. I’m sure you have protocols for that kind of thing well established. No doubt I would have received some kind of ‘dear Jane’ break up text and flowers as well. Instead, there was only worry, and deafening silence, and then the discovery that I was having your baby. Your baby! The baby of a man who didn’t want me, who was committed to another woman. What was I meant to do?”
“Tell me!” He said, the sentence grim, his eyes clashing with hers. “Tell me regardless of what you feared. Move heaven and earth to ensure I had this information. You should have done all that you could to bring my son to me after his birth. This is not a question of opinion. You were wrong. No circumstance on earth justifies your actions.”
“Don’t you dare say that,” she rebuffed. “Walk a mile in my shoes before you criticize.”
He took another drink of his coffee and then placed the cup down, a little more firmly than was necessary, so a loud noise cut through the silence of her house. A drawing was on the fridge – one of Joshua’s latest masterpieces. It was of a pussy cat and a cloud, though it looked a little more like swirls and triangles.
“What is my son’s name?”
She swept her eyes shut, pain in her heart. “Joshua.”
“Joshua what?”
“Joshua Xavier Jones.”
Xavier spun around. “You gave him my name after all?”
She blinked. “Yes. Not his surname,” she whispered. “But… a part of you.” A part no one could trace.
His own eyes closed now, and he nodded, as if dismissing all of the past for the moment. “When we are married, it will not matter. He’ll take my name, as will you.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You’re being ridiculous. You can move to London, by all means. Gradually become a part of his life. But I won’t marry you, Xavier. To do so would be madness.”
“Keeping my son from me was madness. This is the first decision you’ll make that has any merit, believe me.”
“Believe you?” She said with a nod, but it was a nod of dissent. “When all you’ve ever done is lie to me?”
“You can no longer bang me over the head with that. Not when your own judgement is so lacking.”
“I told you, I thought you were married. I thought you would be glad I stayed out of your life.”
“Glad?” His expression was one of barely-contained fury. “No man worth living would ever wish to be kept estranged from his own child.”
“You could have called me!”
