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“Didyouget a choice, Amber?”
I think back to the night he told me it was over. There was no room for me to reason with him, he was determined and firm. “I’m not talking about the night of the dance,” he adds softly.
My mind spins to the days I was throwing up, not knowing it was a baby causing the sickness. The futile thought I had back in those days where in my immature mind I wondered if perhaps I was dying of a broken heart. Then when I did understand what was going on, there was that single moment of blinding clarity when I realised whatever happened from that point, it was my own, single responsibility to deal with it, no one else’s.
“Maybe not.” I shrug.
“Do you hate me?”
“I did.” With my words, he jumps from his seat and paces away. “I forced myself to hate you,” I call after him in the warm nighttime air, my words whispering off into trees dancing with shadowed leaves. “But now I’m here I don’t know what I feel or think. I never expected to see you again. Then the other night when you kissed me . . .” I trail off and he pounces on my hesitation.
“What did you feel then?”
“Everything.” My voice crackles with restrained emotion. There seems little point lying any further.
Freddy throws himself back into his seat and I keenly absorb the sight of him. Long legs stretched out, hands fisted over his eyes, his blonde hair shining in the moonlight like falling stardust. “I knew I’d made a mistake, Amber, but if I’d known it was a mistake of this magnitude then I would have searched for you until the end of my life.”
A single lone tear slides down my face. “Freddy, we can’t tell Isaac.”
His hands whip away from shielding his face and he stares at me, his gaze intent. “Why?”
“Because I’ve messed him up enough. I never should have got married, especially to someone I wasn’t sure I was in love with. He now calls him Dad and it’s me who allowed that to happen. I’ve confused my son’s life more than I ever wanted to. I need him to have time to sort things out. For him and I to sort things out. If I turn around and tell him you are his real dad and here we are living back in the same town as you, with you turning up and kissing me late at night, what’s he going to think?”
“We could just tell him we made some mistakes but somehow the three of us will sort it out?”
“I will noteveruse the wordmistakewith my son!” I shout, an angry pound of blood pulsing through my veins.
Freddy’s eyes flicker and he clearly remembers when my own mother told me I was a mistake. I’m angry though and can’t hold back. “My son was never a mistake,” I seethe.
“Amber,” he says, his voice calm and reassuring. “Not him.Us. It’s totally different.”
“No! We can’t tell him.” This is my last word for the moment. “I created this mess and I won’t make it worse.”
“Will you let me at least try to build a relationship with him? I want to.”
I force oxygen around my body, using the tried and tested in through the nose out through the mouth routine I try and make Isaac do when he’s having one of his wild tiger lash out attacks. “Is that really what you want, or are you saying it because you think you should?”
“Amber, I would want to do that just because he’s your son, and I still, deep in my heart, think that we are something. It has nothing to do with what a blood test could tell me.”
I blurt out a truth. “Your blood is the same. They told me the day he was born that Isaac is AB negative, just like you.” I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him about the battle I had with myself about the right thing to do. I want to tell him about the dark hours I spent missing him and worrying about the choices I’d made. I want to tell him how the first moment I saw Isaac, I knew Freddy would always be with me, whether I ever saw him again or not… how this thing called love we created really would linger in my heart until death stole me away. I don’t say anything, I just watch his eyes shine in the dark.
“Well then, that’s a starting block to build on.”
“And what do we do, Freddy, now you know all the wrongs I’ve done you?”
He appraises me long and hard, and I find myself shrinking under his scrutiny. “We findourselvesa block to build on andwestart over.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I’m very handy with treehouses and I believe you have need for one in your back garden. I could start the week after next?”
“The week after next? That’s ages away!”
He laughs. “What’s the rush? I thought Isaac was seeing his dad next week?” Freddy’s voice struggles over the word and my heart tightens a notch.
“Oh, that’s true. Week after next, then.”
“Can’t wait.”
I bite down on the Freddy inducing grin that threatens to take over my face and make all this terrible mess magically disappear. “Don’t bother getting here early, he’s not much of an early riser these days.”
“I can fix that.”
“You can try.”
“I will.”
The grin that spreads across my face despite the evening’s revelations is cut short by the faintest touch of Freddy’s lips to my own. “No matter what, Amber. I still love doing that.”
