by Fiona Harper
‘No.’
‘You won’t forgive me?’
She shut her eyes, not able to face him when they were so close, but then made herself open them again. He deserved this. After all the years she’d hidden away from him, she had to look him in the eye, no matter how uncomfortable it was.
‘The pregnancy test was positive.’
A flicker of a smile passed over his face, before the logical side of his brain worked out something was wrong.
‘But…’
The hands cupping her face relaxed a little and pain registered in his eyes.
She was not going to look down. She ordered herself not to, even though she needed to blink to evict the tears clogging her lashes.
‘I lost it, Nick. Our baby died at just six weeks.’
In an instant, he was off the bed and standing almost on the other side of the room. A dark cloud passed across his features. The room was suddenly ten times as chilly as her snowbound car had been. Adele felt her heart start to rip apart.
‘And you never thought to tell me before now?’
She bit her lip. She had to look away now. His anger was more than she could handle. The tear in her heart widened, leaving messy, frayed edges that would be impossible to repair.
‘At first, when the test was positive, I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. I thought you might have left me…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! I wasn’t leaving you when I got on that plane; I was just going to work. You’re the one who decided it was over.’
She felt her teeth squeeze together. She was being attacked and there was only one way to respond to that.
‘You got on a plane and went thousands of miles away without telling me. Don’t say that didn’t give me a little room for doubting your commitment!’
‘Commitment? Hah! That’s rich coming from you!’
She stood up, suddenly needing to be on the same level as him. ‘I was committed! Who was there in the home, running the show, while you messed around with bits of metal in the shed?’
This was all sounding so horribly familiar. She could almost have this argument on autopilot.
‘OK, I forgot to wash up a few times, but that’s just peripheral stuff. Emotionally, I was one hundred per cent committed. But where it counts—’ he patted the area of his chest covering his heart ‘—you were only ever half there.’
Adele felt as if she’d been punched clean on the jaw. She could hardly get the words out her lips were quivering so much in a combination of despair and rage.
‘Don’t you dare tell me that I didn’t love you!’
He ran his hand through his hair and walked to the window. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. Before tonight I’ve never truly questioned it, no matter what stupid games we were playing.’
Her stomach lurched and rolled. She had a choice here. She could re-erect the armour plating and fight her corner, or she could smash the last of her defences to pieces. Only one of these options was going to save her marriage.
She walked over to him and he turned as he sensed her approach. She took hold of his hands. They felt as heavy as lead weights.
‘I do love you,’ she said, demanding eye contact from him. ‘More than anything.’
The expression on his face was blank. ‘Suddenly that’s not good enough any more.’ He dropped her hands and walked past her.
She couldn’t move—actually physically couldn’t move—as he crossed the room and walked out of the door.
Not good enough.
Adele sank into the armchair close by. Well, she’d known it all along, hadn’t she? He was right: she was a lame, emotionally crippled excuse for a wife. No wonder he didn’t want her any more.
She walked over to the bed, kicked her heels off and slid under the covers. When the world crumbled around her, she thought she’d feel differently, that she’d feel…something. It was as if all her circuits had overloaded and refused to process what had just happened.
Her husband had just walked out on her and all she could do was lie here and stare at the wall.
When dawn came she gave up trying to sleep and threw back the covers. Her case was still sitting on the other side of the bed, where Nick should have been. She unzipped it slowly, her fingers struggling to do even the simplest of tasks.
She dressed in her jeans, boots and a thick pullover, put on her coat and headed outside. Despite the heavy snowfall in the Lakes, only the highest, most distant mountains were snowcapped here. The sky was the palest of pinks on the horizon and the loch was almost completely flat. The hotel was next to a quay with a stony beach beside and she worked her way down the stairs to stand on the pebbles.
She picked her way over the large, almost fist-sized rocks that made up the beach until she was standing right on the shoreline.
What was she going to do now?
The only plan she had been able to come up with during the long hours of the night was to go home and throw herself into her business.
Nobody had said it was a good plan. It was a bad plan. And it wasn’t just a bad plan; it was a recycled bad plan. It was what she’d done last time Nick had left her. At least back then she’d been able to kid herself she could make it the centre of her life. That it could be the only thing that mattered. Only now she knew that wasn’t enough for her.
Not enough.
Nick’s words from the night before echoed round her head. She’d squeezed every last drop of her soul out of its hiding place and presented him with it last night and that had been his verdict.
She took one more look at the snowy mountains, their peaks glowing pinker as the sun rose. There was no solace here, not even with all this beauty.
She stuffed her hands in her pockets and made her way back to the hotel.
She tried not to look for Nick as she entered the lobby. Where had he gone last night? Where had he slept? In the space of a few hours she was right back where she’d been only a week ago, knowing virtually nothing about her husband’s life and movements.
No one was up yet. The party had gone on into the early hours. She’d vaguely been aware of the diminishing noise levels throughout the night, although her ears had actually been straining for the sound of his shoes in the corridor outside their room.
She wandered into the lounge and sat there in the darkness, waiting for the rest of the world to start living again.
It was there Maggie found her, staring out of the window, some time later.
‘Adele?’
Adele twisted her head to look at her mother-in-law. Focusing on her seemed such an effort.
‘What are you doing up so early?’
She was too tired to think of a convincing excuse and, since the worst had already happened, she might just as well tell it as it was.
‘Nick and I had a fight and I don’t know where he is.’
Maggie turned towards the lobby then looked back at her. ‘I saw him out there, a while ago. He said he was going to go climbing with his cousin, Simon. I assumed you knew all about it.’
Adele shook her head.
‘He’ll be back, darling. He used to do this when he was a little boy—run off and hide somewhere while he sorted his troubles out. He doesn’t like anyone to see anything but his happy, sunny side.’
‘He won’t be back this time. At least, not for me.’
Maggie sank into the chair beside her and stared out of the window too. After a few minutes she said, ‘I’m sorry about that. I thought this trip would be good for you both and instead my little plan backfired.’
‘Plan?’ Adele turned sharply to look at Maggie, then her eyes widened and her mouth parted as the penny dropped. ‘You knew? About me and Nick?’
Maggie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m sixty-five, Adele, not stupid. I knew there was something going on. My Nick’s not very good at keeping things under wraps, is he?’
Unlike me, Adele silently added.
‘I thought some time together might help you two see what a good thin
g you had going and that you ought to give it another go.’ Maggie looked as if she was going to cry, a sight Adele had never seen before. She put her arm around the older woman.
‘It almost worked. You knocked some sense into me, at least. Only it took me too long to realise what I had, and by the time I tried to get it back it had already evaporated. I should have been honest from the start,’ she added, mostly for her own benefit.
Maggie seemed to be able to make sense of what she was saying. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve changed a lot in the time that I’ve known you, and sometimes it takes something seemingly catastrophic to catapult us out of our comfort zone before we can grow.’
Adele managed a wry smile. ‘You’ve got that right.’
‘Sarah told me about the baby, Adele. I’m so sorry.’
She couldn’t cry again, really she couldn’t. Her throat was too thick, so she just nodded her answer. Maggie pulled her closer and she laid her head on her shoulder—just the kind of gesture she’d always hoped her mother would make for her when she was upset.
She got a tiny glimmer of why Nick put so much stock in his family. She sighed. Too bad she didn’t have much of a family of her own to put stock in. Her parents didn’t count. Nick was all she had, and she’d blasted their family to bits just as effectively as if she’d taken a shotgun to it.
The journey home was uneventful. No jams. No snowstorms. No stupid detours. Adele turned the sat nav on for company, even if she ignored almost every instruction it issued.
She’d thought that the trip up here had been bad, but she’d been wrong. This journey, with the empty seat beside her, was the journey from hell.
One more overhang to get over and he’d be at the summit. Nick hauled himself up the rope to join Simon at the top of Ben Dubh. The view was stunning. The ancient mountains with the sharp tops weathered off them looked both lonely and beautiful at the same time.
Thank goodness they were finally at the top. He took a look at Simon, who grinned back at him. That was the thing about mountains. When you looked down from the summit, as he was doing now, you could see all the ridges and obstacles. The path seemed easy, but on the way up it was harder to see what was what.
You could be climbing towards a lump of rock, thinking you were almost there, but once you were over it, you realised there was more climbing to be done—and it was usually harder and more frightening.
Off in the distance he could see the sparkle of Loch Garrig and the black and white houses of Invergarrig on its edge.
Standing up here, could he get a little perspective on the bombshell Adele had dropped?
At first, he’d felt angry and betrayed and incredibly, incredibly sad at the thought that, for a few weeks, he’d been a father and he hadn’t even known about it. He felt as if he wanted to grieve, but he didn’t know how. And it had all happened so long ago. He felt another bolt of anger flare within him. Adele had robbed him of that too, as well as of hearing the news their longed-for child was finally on the way.
OK, he’d have only had the joy for a few weeks, but he might never have that opportunity again.
Add to that the fact that Adele thought so little of him. She couldn’t even trust him enough to tell him she was pregnant and, more than that, had obviously thought he’d be as good as useless in helping her through the miscarriage.
If she’d told him, he’d have been straight on that plane. He’d have held her and gone to the hospital with her. Together they could have got through it. But Adele didn’t want together. He was only a last resort. Useful for catching spiders and that was about it.
He kicked a rock hard with his climbing boot and watched it tumble and bounce its way down the mountainside until it was too small to see.
If only she’d let him be there for her. If only she could have said just once that she needed him, but Adele had proved with one last, grand gesture that she was never going to change. He was an outsider and he always would be.
As he and Simon descended, his thoughts turned to the months following their split.
He’d thought her perfect in every way when he’d met her. Bright, passionate, energising. He hadn’t reckoned on the ghost of a little girl, desperate for love and acceptance, hiding under the surface.
But Adele wasn’t perfect at all. The events of the last year had blown that concept right out of the water. Although he’d wanted her to take down the barriers, he hadn’t reckoned on the fact life was going to be a lot messier without them.
And, as he placed one foot in front of the other, he started to think, not about himself and his own wounded pride, but about the woman he now knew was nowhere near invincible and how on earth she’d made it through the nightmare alone.
He leaned against the low wall surrounding the tiny front garden and waited for the doorbell to be answered. The sun had just set and, in a rather random pattern, the streetlamps were popping into life.
The door swung open and the woman looked at him and bristled.
‘Nick Hughes! I ought to smack you right into the middle of next Thursday,’ she said, barely hiding her contempt.
‘Nice to see you too, Mona. May I come in?’
The scowl intensified. ‘Only because I can’t afford to let the heat out talking to you with the door wide open.’ She turned and marched down the hall and into the back part of the house. Nick followed, closing the door behind him.
‘What do you want?’ she barked as soon as he entered the kitchen. ‘And don’t you even think of using that stupid grin of yours on me.’
Funnily enough, he didn’t feel the slightest bit like using his dimples.
‘I need to talk to you about Adele.’
‘Why? So you can break her heart a third time?’
He took a steadying breath. There was something about Mona that made his hackles rise. She was just so…bitter.
‘I need to understand, Mona. And you are the only person I can ask. She tells you everything. I only ever get the crumbs.’
Somehow this seemed to appeal to Mona’s warped vanity. She sat down on a kitchen stool and handed the baby sitting in her high chair a rice cake.
‘What do you want to know?’
No point in beating around the bush, so he launched straight in. ‘Why didn’t she tell me she lost the baby? I can sort of understand why she didn’t tell me she was pregnant at first. Let’s face it, Adele needs a long cooling-off period.’
Mona almost smiled at that. He took it as a sign to continue.
‘I just want to know why she couldn’t trust me.’
Mona laughed. ‘Aside from the fact you’re the biggest kid she knows?’
‘I might make light of things occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I’m immature. We all have different coping mechanisms, Mona. And at least I tried to patch our marriage up—twice now. And I wouldn’t be here gearing myself up for a third try if I was the child you all insist I am.’
‘All men are kids,’ she muttered, but the verbal attack stopped, so he guessed he’d made his point.
‘You’ve got to realise it wasn’t a conscious decision not to tell you, not at first anyway. She was a mess, Nick. I’ve never seen her like that. She didn’t go to work. The house was a state. Every time she saw Bethany she lost the plot. It was awful.’
He frowned. So much was starting to fall into place now.
‘And when she told you the news you did…what? Support her? Comfort her? No such luck. You tell her she’s not good enough.’
‘I never…’
It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t said. He was hearing his own words the way Adele must have heard them and he felt sick and angry all at the same time. Acting like an adult? Pah! He was fooling himself.
Mona gave him a long, hard look. ‘Take that feeling and multiply it by a hundred and then you’ll be where Adele was back then.’
He took a while to let all of that sink into his imagination. ‘Good grief,’ was all he could say after a long pause.
‘Exactly. So stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘I’m not!’
‘Give me a break. You ran off to lick your wounds, just like you did last time.’
‘So, what do I—?’
He was cut off by an ear-splitting wail from the top of the stairs.
‘Mummy! I’ve been sick.’
Mona jumped off the stool and raced out of the room. ‘Hang on there, Josh. Mummy’s coming.’
He waited for five minutes then decided Mona would probably want shot of him as soon as possible. He was halfway down the hall when he heard her coming down the stairs. She stopped at the bottom and he turned to look at her.
‘I haven’t got time for this, boy wonder. I’ve got my own mess to sort out. You’ll just have to deal with yours.’
He nodded and opened the catch. Just as he pulled the door open, she called out to him.
‘Nick?’
‘Yes?’
‘For what it’s worth, I didn’t think you had the balls to come back and have another go.’ She shrugged. ‘When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.’
He smiled as he closed the door behind him.
Coming from Mona, that was high praise.
Hazelford Farm, the sign said. Adele turned off the main road and followed a bumpy lane for about a quarter of a mile until she reached a quaint but rather neglected farmhouse flanked by a couple of low outbuildings.
This was where FX Designs had their main office?
She checked the slip of paper tucked into the road atlas on the passenger seat. Hazelford Farm, Limpington, Kent. She’d assumed it was going to be a commercial unit on the site of an old farm, not an actual farm, but this was the place. She was supposed to be meeting the managing director here at ten to discuss some areas of the business he felt needed attention.
If the premises was anything to go by, she was going to have her work cut out for her.
She was a little early as it had only taken thirty minutes to get out of London and find the place. No harm in having a wander around. She might as well get a feel for the site while she was here. Making the most of the property they owned was one of the items on the list the director’s secretary had sent her.