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‘What about your new partner?’
‘He’s not really my partner, I don’t think,’ Candy said as Anton helped her to sit up. ‘It was supposed to be just a casual thing. He starts a new job soon and is moving. He’ll be gone by the time I get back from my holiday. I don’t know what will happen then, if anything.’ She smiled at Anton. ‘My bad for falling in love.’
‘You have told the insurance companies that you’re pregnant?’
‘I have.’
‘Go and have and amazing holiday. Grieve, cry, smile and heal.’
‘Thank you.’
They sounded like pretty straightforward instructions and as she packed the last few pieces into her suitcase she called for a taxi to take her to the Underground.
Usually her parents would go with her to the airport to wave her off as if she were going on an expedition for a year but they were clearly not over the news yet so Candy took the Underground and battled with evening commuters and her suitcase.
She caught sight of a pregnant woman’s reflection in the window and it took a second before she realised that it was her own.
We’ll get there, she said in her mind to her small bump. She loved them already. The numb shock had worn off. The fear had gone. Already Candy knew she’d cope.
They would get through this.
As she checked in at Heathrow and watched her case shoot away she turned and saw her parents.
‘Ma...’ Candy ran over and hugged them.
‘We love you.’
‘I know you do.’
‘We’ll help.’
‘I know you will,’ Candy said, and they kissed and made up with much relief.
‘You move from that flat and come home,’ her mother said. ‘We can help you to raise them—’
‘We’ll talk when I get home,’ Candy said. ‘Thank you so much for coming to the airport. It means an awful lot to me.’
It had but as she sat on the plane she knew she was moving from her flat but not to her parents’ home.
She thought of Steele raised by his grandmother. No, she didn’t want that for the twins. She wanted to raise her children herself, her way, and not her parents’ way.
* * *
There was so much to sort out, so very much, but as she disembarked from the plane nearly a day later and a lei was placed around her neck Candy was the happiest tourist on the planet and knew Hawaii was the right place to be.
‘Aloha,’ a gorgeous woman said.
Yes, she was happy, yet that evening as she walked along the beach, how she wished Steele was here beside her—dipping his red toenails in the Pacific, making her laugh, making her smile, letting her be who she was.
Candy loved the way he accepted her just as she was.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘ARE YOU GOING to a funeral?’ Macey checked, seeing Steele’s dark suit and tie the following Tuesday morning. ‘Wait till you get to my age. I go to one a month.’
‘It’s a memorial service,’ he said. He really liked speaking with Macey. She was so blunt about everything.
‘Oh, is it for that nurse in Emergency?’ she asked. ‘The one Elaine’s crying over?’
‘Elaine?’ Steele glanced across the ward and sure enough a very flat Elaine, very un-bossy of late Elaine, was sitting at the desk when she’d normally be bustling about. ‘He got off with her at a Christmas party,’ Macey said, ‘from what I can make out. Then he had nothing to do with her the next day. I would say he wasn’t a good caretaker of lovely young hearts.’
‘Oh, he’s St Gerry now.’ Steele rolled his eyes.
‘And I shall be St Macey for a while after I die and then people will start to remember what a cantankerous old thing I really was.’
He laughed and looked into her wise eyes. ‘You don’t miss anything, do you?’
‘Not with the new medication.’ She smiled. ‘I’m back.’
‘God help us, then.’ Steele smiled.
‘You wouldn’t have met him, though,’ Macey said, and the smile was wiped off his face at her perception.
‘Sorry?’
‘He was in Greece, had been there a couple of months when it happened, well, according to the porter who took me for my X-ray... That’s what he said to the radiographer anyway.’
