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‘But Sabine can’t …’ Becca slammed her mouth shut.
What was wrong with her that anger with Grace almost made her share privileged information?
The anger simmered away. It had been years since she’d let herself get angry with Grace. But then they’d been focusing on the children. Now Morgan was back, Grace was back in protective mother mode.
‘I’m not asking Morgan to marry me. All I want is for the children to be with their father. They’ve missed out on having him here through no fault of their own. Morgan’s missed out through no fault of his own.’
‘He chose not to come back here after he graduated. It was his choice.’
‘It was your choice to let him stay away without giving him a reason to come home. You know he’d have come back for the children, whatever he feels about me.’
A flush stained the older woman’s cheeks. ‘I didn’t want him to let the children influence him.’ She flexed her fingers and flattened them on her knees. ‘It wasn’t fair. I knew he’d eventually marry. I didn’t want it to be you. You had everything I wanted and it was easy for you.’
‘Easy? You think it was easy?’ Becca sucked in a deep breath. Hysteria wasn’t going to help.
‘Twins. You gave birth to twins and they survived. It made me angry. A slip of a thing like you could sleep with my son and get pregnant with two healthy babies and I couldn’t carry to term.’
‘You have Morgan.’
Grace smiled, her eyes holding a wealth of pain. ‘The only one and he almost didn’t survive. I don’t like to remember how many pregnancies I miscarried before Morgan was born. Afterwards, I was too concerned with keeping him alive to consider more children. I was nearly forty by then, anyway.’
Becca struggled to focus on what Grace was trying to say. ‘You lost a baby from a live birth?’
‘Two. I was pregnant with twins.’ Her cold eyes softened. ‘They say it runs in families. I lost them at seven months.’
‘Does Morgan know?’
She shook her head, a denial in her eyes before it made it to her lips. ‘He couldn’t know. It was before.’
‘Before you married Ned?’
A silent nod confirmed the guess. ‘Your great uncle Stephen. You won’t remember him. He died long before you were born. Before I married Ned. A sickly family.’ She said it like it was something learned by rote.
Becca stayed silent, shocked at Grace’s sudden willingness to talk.
‘I wasn’t much older than you were when you had the twins. Stephen was a little older. I knew your father and Dan’s stepfather when they were children. You’d remember your Uncle Blue.’
Grace should know she didn’t remember her own father. Not properly. But Becca remembered his brother as being kind. Blue Walters was the sort of guy to marry a widow like Dan’s mother to give her a home and her boy a father. ‘I didn’t know either of them well. Uncle Blue was away a lot working in the mines and then he was killed in that collapse that was on the news.’ After which fifteen-year-old Dan started to go off the rails. Becca’s stepdad was no role model and no-one had regretted him when he died soon after from liver failure. Grace was right. The whole Walters family was a disaster. ‘I hardly remember my real dad.’
Grace acknowledged the snippet with a barely perceptible tightening of her lips. ‘I suppose someone your age can’t imagine what it was like back then. My parents didn’t approve of Stephen but we were in love. Some puerile fantasy of being Romeo and Juliet.’ The hardness was back in her voice briefly. ‘Of course I became pregnant. My parents refused to let us marry and I refused to do anything else. I was sent away to stay with an aunt. They talked about adoption. In the end it didn’t matter. They came early. The boy only lived a few minutes. The girl almost a day.’
Her heart aching, Becca searched for words. ‘What happened with your Stephen?’
‘He died while I was away. Fighting a bushfire in the hills. He had an asthma attack.’ One finger drew a pattern on her knee. ‘He hated people thinking he was weak. So he died.’
‘I’m sorry, Grace. But what does it have to do with me? I’d have thought you’d be more sympathetic. Not less.’
‘Every time I look at you with the children, it reminds me of what I lost. You look like your father and he looked like Stephen. Edward could have been my son.’
Becca remembered the first time Grace had seen the children, only a few days old. She’d hardly looked at Gabby with her quiff of bright red hair—the image of Morgan. She’d stared at Edward with a palpable hunger never repeated. Becca had thought at the time it was because Edward was male.
Grace kept talking, as if now the words were coming out, she couldn’t hold in the torrent. ‘It took ten years before I could bring myself to marry Ned. Another ten years before I managed to deliver a live child. For months we thought he wouldn’t survive. I sometimes wonder if that’s why he …’ She gulped in the last of the words, the trickle petering out.
‘Does Ned know?’
Looking up from her hands, Grace nodded. ‘He always knew. We were neighbours.’ She indicated the property on the opposite side to Morgan’s place, extending off into the hills. ‘He was older of course, but the Taites and the Cavanaughs always socialised. He was my partner for the Debutante ball because I wasn’t allowed to go with Stephen. I never expected Ned to want to marry me. Not after what happened.’
There was a heavy silence, weighted with the emotions of this woman who Becca had dismissed as cold. The past exacted a heavy toll.
