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Hailey sat. She was conscious of him looming over her and she didn’t breathe easily until he resumed his seat. He looked tired, his tie, sporting frogs in tiaras, had been loosened, his top button undone.
‘So. What’s happening with you? You look tired,’ he said tentatively.
‘So do you.’
‘Guess neither of us is getting much sleep.’
Hailey nodded. ‘He wants me to go back with him,’ she blurted out.
Callum felt his heart stop in his chest before it resumed at a more rapid pace. ‘And what do you want?’ he asked, breathing carefully, concentrating on staying calm and using logic and reason instead of petty, macho jealousy.
Hailey massaged her forehead. ‘I should want it, too.’
‘Should?’
‘It’s what I’d hoped for when I left the UK.’ She looked at him beseechingly, trying to make him understand how big this was for her.
‘And lately?’
Hailey shook her head and smiled sadly. ‘No. Not lately. Lately I’d started to forget…to feel good about my life. About being here.’ About you. ‘But…Oh, heavens, Callum, I didn’t think he was ever really going to show up like this. I mean, I’d hoped…back in the beginning but…I’m so confused.’
Callum counted five even breaths. ‘Well, I wish I could help you with that, Hailey, but I’m a little confused myself.’
‘He says he forgives me. That he doesn’t blame me. Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear that?’
‘Forgive you?’ Callum frowned. ‘What for?’
Hailey looked at him. ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, Callum,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t be so bloody obtuse. For Eric, of course.’
Callum felt his hackles rise. ‘Well, that’s very magnanimous of him.’
He’d tried to cut Paul some slack. He knew intimately how upside down and inside out things could become. But making Hailey feel bad about something that hadn’t been her fault was wrong. Letting her continue to beat herself up about it was worse. Making a big deal of absolving her for it was just plain screwed up.
‘Hey. His son died, Callum,’ she said sharply. ‘Eric died.’
Callum rose and leaned over the desk. ‘Yes, he did. And that wasn’t your fault.’
‘I was employed to care for him.’ She glared at him.
‘Oh, God.’ He shook his head and sat down again. ‘You do still blame yourself for this.’
The crazy thing was that she didn’t, not any more. Or at least she hadn’t. But seeing Paul again, reliving all those memories, hearing him talk about forgiveness and absolution, she’d been sucked back into the doubt and insecurities of that time.
‘You think going back to England with him, being with him, will absolve you? You want to be part of a couple where you’re going to be apportioned the role of blame? Where your place in the relationship rests on your guilt and his sick way of punishing you?’
Hailey shut her eyes and wished she could shut her ears to his criticism. ‘Eric was six, Callum. Tom’s age.’
‘And he contracted meningitis and he died. And it was rapid and virulent and it sucked. It wasn’t fair. It was just some random, screwed-up, life’s-a-bitch occurrence. Like my wife dying. Like Tom getting leukaemia. Like today, with Sarah. How quickly did her sepsis develop?’
Hailey blinked, her brain sluggishly searching back for the information. ‘She deteriorated over about fifteen minutes.’
‘Right. So from sick but stable to crashing in a heap in a quarter of an hour. Why’s that, do you think?’ he fired at her.
‘She compensated until she couldn’t any more.’
‘Right.’ He nodded with a satisfied bob of his head. ‘Compensation—kids do it really well. I bet Eric’s body did it really well too. Just like Sarah.’
‘But we got to Sarah in time, didn’t we?’
‘Sarah was already in hospital. Eric wasn’t. He had a very aggressive form of meningitis, Hailey. No one could have saved him.’
‘If I’d got him to hospital sooner…’
‘No, Hailey. No. There’s absolutely nothing to forgive and no blame to apportion. It wasn’t your fault and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him dump this on you.’
Hailey felt tears prick her eyes at Callum’s vehement defence of her. She shrugged. ‘He was grieving.’
‘And what about you, Hailey? Didn’t you love Eric too? You sure looked like you did in that photograph.’
She blinked her tears away. ‘He was Eric’s father, Callum. I think that’s a little different.’
