AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That word again—mistake. I look out of the window, resting a hand on my bump. I know the babies weren’t planned, and my life would be a lot easier if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, but I don’t want to think of them as a mistake.
“Are you religious?” I ask.
“No. Agnostic, I guess. I don’t think we have any hope of understanding what’s beyond our ken. You?”
“My mum was. She had me christened, and I used to go to church with her. But I haven’t been since she died.”
“Do you still believe?”
“I don’t think about it.” It’s not strictly true, but I feel a lot of anger toward God, and I don’t know how to vocalize it.
“Do you believe in Fate? That everything is meant to happen?”
I don’t answer for a moment. Nobody has ever asked me anything like that before.
“I’m not sure if there’s an almighty being who has a plan for everyone,” I say, “because if so I’d want to have words with Him or Her about why they dealt me such a shit hand.”
“That’s fair enough. So you don’t think we were meant to meet that night? That you were supposed to get pregnant?”
I look across at him, taken aback. “Is that what you think?”
“Not necessarily. It’s one possibility—that we’re just following a blueprint. Maybe our babies were waiting in heaven for us to meet.” He smiles. Then he chuckles at the look on my face. “Not sure if I believe it, but it’s a nice theory.”
His words fill me with wonder. “I’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before.”
“You’re going to love my family, then. We talk like that all the time. Mum and Dad like philosophical discussions.” He slows the car and indicates. As he turns to the right, the houses give way and suddenly there’s the sea, a choppy dark blue in the late evening sunshine.
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah, nice isn’t it?” The Aston purrs forward a short way, then he presses the button on a device clipped to his sun visor, slows the car, and turns right. The drive slopes down, the garage door already rising, and he drives into the garage and turns off the engine. “Come on,” he says.
I get out. Behind the Aston, at the other end of the large garage, are two beautiful, gleaming motorbikes. My heart racing, I follow him across and up a few steps to a door into the house, which he unlocks. He goes in first, then holds the door as I follow him.
I walk past him into a small hallway, and then pause and look into the kitchen. The cupboards and countertop are white, the trim is black, and the wooden floorboards are polished to a high shine. Big windows look out onto a huge enclosed patio, where beautiful pink flowers woven through trellis work provide a splash of color.
He gestures for me to walk along the corridor. I slip off my boots.
“You don’t need to do that,” he says.
I don’t reply, because the carpet is a light gray, and the place looks spotless. Leaving my boots by the door to the garage, I walk forward into the next room. The same carpet runs through here, and it’s a huge room with large sliding glass doors on two walls, and high slanted ceilings, so the whole place feels very light. The end nearest me is a living room with two gray sofas and a couple of armchairs, a wooden coffee table, and an absolutely oh-my-god-gigantic TV that looks more like a cinema screen beneath which sit a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X.
At the other end of the room is a dining table that he obviously uses to work on because, as in the hotel room in Auckland, it’s covered in paperwork. Against the wall is a workstation with several towers, three monitors, two keyboards, about six mice, and hundreds of portable drives, USB drives, and computer internal organs scattered over the surface. To one side is a record player—a real record player!—with a cupboard underneath that I’m guessing holds vinyl albums. There’s also a wood-fire stove that would give the place a lovely glow on a wintry day.
The sliding doors at the end look out over the patio with an outdoor table and chairs, and beyond that a large lawn, neatly manicured. I bet he has a gardener. I can’t imagine him mowing the lawn, somehow.
“Do you like it?” he asks, a touch of hope in his voice.
I turn to look at him, flabbergasted. “I thought you said it was small.”
He looks around. “Well it is, compared to my folks’ home.”
“Saxon, it’s fucking enormous.”
He grins. “Honestly, it’s not, but I guess if you’re used to an apartment, it’s pretty big.”
I think about my flat, and the way I can’t walk from my bed to the bathroom without having to squeeze past the desk, and give a hysterical laugh. “Mind you,” I say, turning around, “it’s not the kind of place I thought a billionaire would live. I thought you’d have tennis courts and pools and gold-plated taps, and twenty staff waiting on you hand and foot.”
“I’m a geek, not a rock star. We’re very different beings.”
