Flawed

by Jo Bannister

  Brodie spread an accepting hand. ‘I'm not trying to get rid of you, Jack, I just don't want to rush you. I know I've sprung this on you. I couldn't think of a way of telling you that didn't seem like springing it.’

  ‘How long…’ It caught in his throat so he had to try again. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘And how long has it been on the way?’

  ‘About three and a half months.’

  She saw him doing the math. Three and a half months ago they were already having problems, but neither of them had been ready to call it a day. Three and a half months ago…

  Deacon's eyes flashed suddenly wide. ‘I suppose you're sure it's mine?’

  All Brodie's instincts were to slap him. Inside her shoes her very toes clenched with the effort to remember that what she'd known for weeks he'd learnt in the last couple of minutes. Of course he was off-balance. And he wasn't diplomatic even when he hadn't just had his world turned upside down. And, in fact, he was entitled to ask.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said levelly. ‘We can get a blood-test to confirm it once the baby's born, but barring delayed implantation like you get in badgers’ – she had no idea how she knew that: from Daniel, probably, he was a mine of useless information – ‘it's yours. Biologically,’ she added, because she didn't want him to feel she was dumping a problem on him. ‘If you want, that can be the extent of your involvement. We don't need to put your name on the birth certificate.’

  His eyes were hot. ‘I don't know how you have the nerve to say that to me.’

  Patience was never Brodie's strong suit and she felt it stretching, like a rubber-band just before it pings in your face. ‘Jack, I'm not trying to upset you. In fact, I'm trying quite hard not to upset you. If you insist on being upset anyway I shall stop trying.’

  Struggling to control his feelings, for a moment he shut his eyes. ‘I'm sorry if I'm not doing this very well. I've never been in this position before – I'm making it up as I go along. I'm not upset. I'm – gob-smacked. You've changed my world with a couple of sentences. I don't know what you expect of me. I came here thinking we were going to talk about who keeps which CDs, and I find you've changed my life forever. How do I feel about that? Stunned. I'm sorry if that isn't what you were expecting.’

  ‘OK,’ said Brodie sharply, ‘two things. First, I don't expect anything from you. I've already said that, but I'll say it again as often as it takes for you to believe it. I can imagine this has come as a shock. Now you imagine how I felt.

  ‘Because secondly, this isn't something I did. I didn't change your life a fraction as much as you changed mine. Neither of us wanted this, and both of us thought we'd guarded against it, but the reality is that it happened anyway, and you have a choice about what you do next but I really don't. With or without you, I'll be dealing with the consequences for the next twenty years. So don't tell me I've turned your world upside down. It wasn't a case of immaculate conception, and I sure as hell didn't rape you!’

  Deacon sucked in a ragged breath as if it had been a while since he'd thought to. By degrees, hand over hand up a greasy pole, he was catching up with developments. The possibility of intelligent thought and rational decision-making drifted nearer. Finally he met Brodie's gaze and held it steady. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Tell me how you feel.’

  And she nodded slowly, and flicked him a brittle smile. ‘Gob-smacked,’ she admitted. ‘And worried sick. And kind of happy.’

  When Daniel smiled it was like sunrise flooding a valley. When Deacon did, it was more like melt-water pouring off a glacier. He was megalithic in construct and craggy of mien, and there was a touch of the mountain in everything he did. ‘I'm glad. Not so much about the worried sick bit.’

  Brodie grinned. She'd been dreading this. Time and again she'd got to the point of calling him and put the phone down as if it had grown hot in her hand. In the event it hadn't gone badly. They hadn't ended up shouting at one another. They hadn't sunk to recriminations. ‘Less worried now than I was an hour ago.’

  ‘Why did you wait so long? Before telling me?’

  She shrugged. ‘A couple of reasons. Not every pregnancy goes to term. If this one hadn't there'd have been nothing to gain by telling anyone, even you. I'm thirty-three now, and you tend to hit more problems as you get older. And then, it didn't get the best start in life. I don't know what effect veterinary tranquilliser is likely to have on an embryo, but I can't believe it's good for it.’

  It wasn't that he'd forgotten, more that he'd thought she'd got away with it. She'd cornered a manufacturer of designer drugs and he'd tried to kill her. But he'd failed. The chemicals had cleared her system and Deacon had thought that was the end of the matter. Now he realised he should have been more concerned. Brodie's fondness for meddling in his job had almost cost her her life. It could still cost her the baby.

  ‘Have you? Hit problems?’

  ‘Not so far. A bit of morning sickness, nothing dramatic. I feel fine. And, three months in, the odds improve. I thought it was time to let you in on the secret.’

  ‘Do you know what it is yet?’

  Brodie blinked. ‘I think it's a baby.’

  Deacon breathed heavily at her. ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Don't know. Do you mind?’

  He shook his head decisively. ‘Not as long as it's healthy.’

  Brodie laughed aloud. ‘People always say that. But I want to be there when the midwife hands you a little bundle of joy and says, “We don't know what sex it is but by God it's healthy!”’

  Deacon didn't think that was funny. But then, this whole business was new to him. Brodie had a child already: Deacon, as far as he knew, hadn't. Had never wanted one; had never understood how you were meant to fit one in with everything else that needed doing. But a couple of sentences, and all at once finding time to wash the car and getting a bit of sleep in what his job left of the night were the last things on his mind. You make room in your life for what you want. The CPU in Deacon's brain was defragmenting in order to make space on the hard disk for a baby.exe file.

  He realised that Brodie would have done a lot of thinking in the last six weeks, and almost certainly had an answer to any question he might ask. But he wanted to make sure. ‘Have you thought how you're going to manage? What you're going to need? I don't need to say, do I, that any problems that money will solve, I'll take care of.’

  She touched his hand, the briefest butterfly kiss that left his skin tingling. ‘Thanks, Jack. That's nice to know.’

  ‘What about this place?’ He looked round him critically. ‘Can you keep it going and look after a baby?’

  ‘Now there,’ she said, ‘I was lucky. I've taken on staff. Daniel's going to come and work for me – keep things ticking over until I'm ready to come back. It was the most amazing thing. He came to me for a job before he even knew I was pregnant.’

  Deacon went on watching her steadily. But if she'd been paying attention, had not still been enjoying the sense of relief that came with getting this said, Brodie would have heard the creak that was the melt-water turning back to ice. ‘Before he knew.’

  Brodie nodded cheerfully. ‘Coincidence or what?’

  ‘So Daniel knows you're pregnant.’

  Again she nodded. By now, though, her brows were gathering in a perplexed little frown.

  ‘You told Daniel Hood that you're carrying my baby before you told me?’

  Perhaps that had been less than tactful. But it was too late to deny it, even if Brodie had felt the need. ‘He asked me for a job. It was a God-send – 1 jumped at it, and I told him why.’

  ‘And now you're telling me.’

  She wasn't going to apologise. ‘Don't be like that. I had to explain the situation. I wasn't going to lie to him.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Deacon, with a tiny growl like a cat who's been stroked long enough. ‘He's your friend.’

  ‘That's right, he is.’

  ‘And I'm your b
aby's father!’

  Brodie felt her own hackles rising now. ‘Yes, but you're not my husband. You're not my partner any more. You're my ex. You have rights in relation to the baby: you have none in relation to me. That's the reality, Jack, get used to it. When I was expecting Paddy, John and I talked endlessly about what we should do and agreed things down to the tiniest detail. This is different. I'm a single woman. I'll keep you informed, I'll listen to your opinions, but I'll make my own decisions. When to inform my closest friends of my pregnancy is one of them. I don't need your permission.’

  ‘And this,’ said Deacon softly, ‘is why we're ex-partners. Because of how you set your priorities. You want it all, don't you, Brodie? You want the relationship, but you also want the freedom of being single. You want to make all the decisions. And one of them – one of the big ones, the ones that got in the way of us being a success – was that you were never prepared to forsake all others and cleave only unto me. Not for as long as we both shall live – not for a few years – not at all.’

  Anger brought the blood to her cheeks. She might have given him reason once, but she'd thought – and he'd said -they'd got beyond the brief madness of her infidelity. ‘That's not fair, Jack. I'm sorry about what happened with Eric Chandos, but I'm not going to spend the rest of my life saying so. I wouldn't have done if we'd stayed together – I'm damned if I'm going to grovel for forgiveness now!’

  ‘I wasn't talking about Chandos,’ growled Deacon. ‘It wasn't him who split us up. I was talking about Daniel.’

  Outrage and genuine astonishment clashed in her voice like cymbals. ‘Daniel didn't split us up!’

  ‘Yes, Brodie,’ Deacon retorted forcefully, ‘he did. I don't think he meant to, but that's what happened. He took things out of our relationship that it needed to survive. But I don't blame Daniel. He didn't steal those things, he was given them. You gave him parts of yourself that you owed to me. I knew from the start that you weren't a free agent. I knew you had a child who would always come first. Of course Paddy has first claim: on your time, on your love. But I expected to be next in line. I wasn't prepared to come third.’

  ‘I am not in love with Daniel Hood!’ shouted Brodie, furious with exasperation. ‘I never was, I'm not now, I'm never going to be. He's my best friend. I care about him, and he cares about me. None of which is any threat to what you and I had. If we couldn't make a go of it, you need to look elsewhere for the reason. Keep blaming Daniel for everything that goes wrong with your life if you must, but it isn't just me who's starting to find that pretty pathetic!’

  Men in positions of power – and being senior detective in even a small town qualifies – need families. They need people around them who aren't intimidated by their status, who'll tell them when they're being stupid or paranoid or are just plain wrong. Without that reality check they start to feel self-important, cocooned from the rough-and-tumble of everyday argument, invulnerable to the forces that moderate other people's actions. It's a dangerously short step from being master under God to thinking you're God.

  Before he knew Brodie, Deacon had never had that. There were arguments enough in his short marriage but it was easier to walk away than to resolve them. They finally stopped the arguments by not giving a toss, and the marriage ended soon afterwards.

  There were no children, and Deacon had no close friends, so until he met Brodie he had a simple rule-of-thumb for dealing with the world. Criminals, suspects and police officers of lower rank he shouted at; witnesses he listened to with frank incredulity; and the same for police officers of higher rank except that he tried to hide the incredulity. The system served well enough but left him almost totally ignorant of the language of personal intercourse. He spoke a kind of pidgin version, and never got enough practice to improve his accent.

  He'd been called all sorts of names in the course of his career, many of them unprintable, but before Brodie no one had looked at his six-foot frame, his traffic-stopping shoulders and his riot-quelling fists, and come up with the word Pathetic.

  Not that Brodie was a shining example of how to run a mature relationship. She was selfish. She admitted as much quite freely, even proudly. She hadn't always been. She'd been most men's idea of the perfect wife: attractive, attentive, admiring, clever but not too clever, an efficient housekeeper and devoted mother. She'd worked at being a good wife. She'd thought she had a happy marriage.

  But when John Farrell fell, inexplicably but hard, for a pleasant, slightly plump librarian, the rule-book went on the fire. What emerged from the ashes was Brodie Farrell as she was today – still a devoted mother but also a sharp businesswoman, a hard negotiator, a clear-eyed pragmatist, a bit of a cynic. Someone who was quick to identify what she wanted and prepared to tread on toes to get it.

  She was, in fact, a more socially adroit and easier-on-theeye version of Deacon himself. Perhaps that was the real reason for their unlikely partnership, and also why it ended. Neither of them was good at compromising. They never saw why they should.

  ‘I don't have a single problem with Daniel!’ snarled Deacon. ‘He might be peculiar but at least he's honest. He doesn't say one thing and do something else. He doesn't pretend that you aren't the most important thing in his life. And he doesn't think he can run another relationship alongside that without a conflict. That's why he's always on his own. If he can't be with you, it's the only honest way to be.’

  All the expression had fallen out of Brodie's face and her eyes were still. Her voice was low and rigidly controlled. ‘And what do you know about it?’

  Deacon was reckless with passion, too angry to heed the warning signs. ‘I know he's in love with you. He told me as much. He begged me not to tell you but, hey, this is a day for sharing secrets! Why don't you admit you're in love with him too?’

  If they'd been standing up, making it less awkward, Brodie would probably have slapped him. Her temper was like a tiger caged within her. Most of the time it was pretty quiet but every so often someone left the latch up and then it was just a question of whether the beast was hungry or not. Today she knew as if she'd seen it that if Deacon said one more thing, took one more snipe at her, the tiger would rip his throat out.

  She said, ‘Did you think I didn't know? Did you think I'd be shocked? That I'd be so unnerved I'd beg you to take me back? Is that how you think, Jack – that you can scare people into doing what you want? And that there's no difference between that and them wanting what you want?

  ‘I know Daniel's in love with me. He told me so. He knows I'm not in love with him: I told him. Do you know something? I wish I was. I wish I could marry him with a clear conscience. He'd never hurt me; he'd never use my feelings against me; and I don't think he'd let irrational fears of the future spoil the here-and-now. I think I could be happy with Daniel. I think, if he mattered just a little less to me, I'd take the chance.’

  Her voice was calm now but Deacon could hear the regret in it. ‘But I'm not going to. He deserves better. Actually, so do I. Nobody needs to be stuck in a relationship where one party is trying to do enough loving for both. We could make it work, for a year or two. But long-term we'd end up resenting one another. I'd feel guilty, he'd feel used. I'm not going to risk our friendship when I know it would end like that. He understands. Do you know why? Because he listened when I told him, and he believed me.

  ‘That's the bit you and I never managed to get right, Jack.’ An edge was creeping back into her voice. ‘Not even the listening but the believing. I told you over and over that Daniel was no threat to us, that the only threat to us was us. But you couldn't believe me. You kept looking for the wedge that would force us apart. Well, you look that hard for anything, you're going to find it – hell, you're going to make it. We all create our own demons. You were so obsessed with my feelings for Daniel that you managed to strangle what we felt for each other. God knows I haven't always behaved well, but I wanted this to work. I tried to make it work. Daniel was never the obstacle. Your fear of Daniel was.’

&
nbsp; For a second, denial was on the tip of his tongue. He almost said she was crazy, he was never afraid of anyone, if he was going to be afraid of someone it wouldn't be a neurotic maths teacher who shaved maybe twice a week. Some impulse of honesty stopped him. Actually, she was right. He was afraid of Daniel Hood. Because Daniel stood, and had always stood, between him and what he wanted most, and he could never find a way of moving him that wouldn't mean immediate and total defeat. Now the game, or perhaps it was a war, was over he could afford to tell the truth.

  But now it was over he didn't need to. ‘Do you know something, Brodie? I don't care. You want to play house with Daniel, you go right ahead. I hope you'll be very happy together. Tell you what: why don't you tell people it's his baby? Give them a laugh.’

  Brodie clung onto her temper only because there were important decisions to be made here. She was astonished at the turn the conversation had taken. For once, she really didn't think it was her fault. Of course she'd surprised him. But he was a grown man and a detective superintendent: it couldn't be the first time he'd heard something unexpected. She said through her teeth, ‘Are you seriously telling me you don't want to be this baby's father?’

  He seemed incapable of damming the bitterness long enough to see the implications of his words. ‘Now? What's the point? Six months ago I'd have given my right hand to be having a baby with you. But now? You've already made it clear there are too many compromises involved in sharing your life with me. You don't want to live with me, you don't want to be with me, and you don't want me muscling in on the decision-making process. I'll meet whatever legal and financial obligations there are, and if you need anything more from me, call. But in all the circumstances, Brodie, I'm finding it hard to see this baby as mine. There isn't enough of it left over from being yours.’

  Angry as she was, she was also on the brink of tears. The steel in her voice was to stop it cracking. ‘You don't want to give it your name?’

  Deacon stood up abruptly, filling the little office, and reached for the door. ‘Call it what you like, Brodie. Let me know what you decide and I'll send it a birthday card.’ Then, leaving the door quivering on its hinges, he was gone.