by Fiona Harper
He didn’t say anything. His mind was too busy stretching to accommodate the flurry of words.
‘You want to know why I didn’t race to your side the moment I left Paris?’
He nodded. Of course he did.
Jennie pursed her lips, then nodded back at him. ‘Well, I needed time. And I supposed you needed time, too.’
Time for what?
‘To decide what you really wanted,’ she added, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d switched a word at the last moment. Not what, but who. Who you really wanted. And suddenly he started calculating mentally, adding up hours and minutes, doing the kind of maths Jennie must have done.
The clock had never been anything but a way of carving up the day to Alex. He hadn’t realised that seconds could be as precious as gold, to be hoarded when others spent them on you, or to be considered stolen if bestowed elsewhere. His absence hadn’t just been an inconvenience to Jennie, as he’d imagined. To her, it had been a gauge of his love.
She let out a long breath and relaxed back into the chair cushions again. ‘I left because I thought—’ she broke off to look back at him briefly ‘—that finding Becky again meant that you had decided.’
She didn’t finish the sentence, just looked in her lap.
That just didn’t make sense. Becky hadn’t even woken up the whole time he’d been there with her. Jennie couldn’t possibly think he actually … Any feelings he’d had for Becky had been those of sadness at a life wasted.
As far as he knew, he was the only person who’d ever given a damn about Becky, who had ever put her welfare first. Not even her family had given her that luxury. How could he have walked away and left her last moments to the hands of strangers?
Jennie was whispering now. ‘The longer you were away, the shorter the calls became, the more distant you were. I didn’t want to think it, but the old proverb’s right, Alex. Actions speak louder than words, and it was pretty clear where your loyalties lay. Even when she’d gone, it was her you wanted to be with.’
The rage he’d tucked neatly away surged up his throat, stinging as it went. How could she think that? Hadn’t the heady months they’d been together, all the promises they’d exchanged, been enough? Didn’t she know him at all?
She refused to meet his gaze. ‘I know we told each other we weren’t rushing into things, that we knew what we were doing, but I started to wonder…if maybe you realised you’d made a mistake, that I wasn’t the one you wanted.’
He closed his eyes. He’d hit the nail on the head. She really didn’t know him if she thought he was capable of being that fickle, if she thought he could make those promises one week and then take them back, like unwanted gifts, the next. He just wasn’t like that. And he had a wardrobe full of ghastly Christmas jumpers he never wore to prove the point.
But her reaction, while not particularly logical, had at least been honest. For days now he’d been worried about exactly the same thing. He’d wondered whether her departure was a sign that marrying him had been a whim, an impulse she’d regretted. He was relieved, he realised. Relieved that she’d left Paris because she’d been hurt, because she really did care, not because she didn’t give a hoot.
Just knowing that turned everything he’d been stewing over on its head. Something liquid and warm flowed inside him, something he thought had hardened into anger and disappointment. He wasn’t sure he wanted to feel it, but feel it he did, and he couldn’t help the next words that left his mouth.
‘That’s not true, Jennie. Of course I wanted you.’
He heard the little gasp in the back of her throat. She blinked furiously and then her lip wobbled. All her bravado drained away, leaving her looking young and very fragile. In his imagination he could see her leaving the hotel in Paris—large dark glasses covering her swollen pink eyes, refusing to look back as the taxi pulled away because it would be too painful.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘I didn’t realise you felt that way.’
Now the tears spilled over and coursed down her face, but she didn’t make a sound.
‘Thank you,’ she said in between sniffs, and went to fetch a tissue from a box on the small table. She sat back down and blew her nose loudly. ‘I appreciate you saying that—but it’s not enough. I need to know why, Alex. Why was she more important to you than I was?’
There. She’d said it, turned the fear that had been hiding round a corner in her heart into sounds and syllables. For a large chunk of her life, the people who mattered most to her had had more important things than her to tend to. She hadn’t been neglected, after all. She’d wanted for nothing, been to the best schools, had everything handed to her on a silver platter. And she’d seemed happy enough. Why would anyone have thought she’d needed anything more?
Jennie realised that this was the first time she’d ever had the courage to ask why. Why were other things, other people, always more important than her? Her normal tactic in this kind of situation had been to persuade her loved ones to move her up their list of priorities by being the most dazzling creature possible. And if that hadn’t worked, she’d got just naughty enough to bump herself up to the number one slot.
It was odd. She thought that if she’d ever let the words out to match what she felt, she’d crumple under the weight of them, but it wasn’t like that. She felt strangely light, almost ready to hear his answer—no matter what it was.
She met his gaze.
He didn’t blink, just pulled his shoulders back and heaved in some air. He kept his eyes on her as he stood up and walked round the coffee table to sit opposite her on the sofa. This obviously wasn’t going to be a quick chat.
‘The history Becky and I had. It’s complicated.’
She raised her eyebrows and mirrored his own response back to him. ‘Explain it to me, then.’
His eyes glazed slightly, and she guessed he was cataloguing memories, trying to find the best place to start. Knowing Alex’s ordered brain, he’d start at the beginning, lay a foundation, before he got on to the juicy stuff. She almost wanted to tell him to forget all of that, to put her out of her misery. There was a shift in his features, and she knew he’d found his ‘in’.
‘I grew up in a happy home,’ he said.
Okay, if they were going to go that far back, this was going to take all night. She didn’t say that, though.
‘My parents wanted more children after they had me and my brother, but it just wasn’t to be… By the time I’d started at university and Chris was studying for his A levels, I think my mother looked at her rapidly shrinking nest and decided to do something about it. So Mum and Dad decided to foster.’
She sat up straighter. He’d never mentioned that before, even though she’d heard plenty of stories about the happy-go-lucky Chris.
‘What has this got to do with your first—’ she couldn’t quite bring herself to use the same title she now occupied ‘—with Becky?’
He took a moment before he carried on. ‘Initially, my parents offered emergency foster care—children who needed a safe place to stay immediately, until they could be found something more permanent—but then they were asked to consider taking in a teenage girl.’
Her jaw loosened slightly. ‘You mean that girl was.’
He nodded. ‘I was away at university most of the time she was there, but slowly I got to know her. I can still picture her now, the way she looked the first day I met her. She was sitting in my parents’ kitchen, drinking lemonade. Fifteen years old, but nothing like the girls I’d known at that age. Dressed as if she was about to walk the streets, but so thin her tight skirt was baggy and shapeless. She looked frightened out of her wits, as if she’d run if I made any sudden move.’
Jennie could imagine it. A feral young woman, twitchy and skittish, large eyes with huge dark circles underneath. And in her mind’s eye she could see a young Alex, wanting to reach out to the girl to save her from all the awful things that had happened to her. Because that was what Alex was like, tha
t was why he did the job he did. He felt the need to make things right, to protect people.
She tried hard not to listen to the question ringing in her ears, the one that prodded her to think about why he hadn’t felt that same need to shield his new wife, why he had left her to cope on her own.
Thankfully, Alex distracted her with the rest of Becky’s story. He didn’t think much of his ex’s family, that was for sure. From what he told her, the whole lot of them—father, mother, two older brothers—were all petty criminals, and had been in and out of prison more times than Becky had been able to count.
Jennie tried to sit back and listen to the story impassively, tried not to get emotionally involved, but the tale of a child whose only value had been as a lookout when a corner shop was being robbed or as a mule to carry anything her relatives didn’t want to be caught with if the police turned up, touched her heart.
‘Her father was already doing time when her mother was remanded in custody for cheque fraud,’ Alex said. ‘Becky wasn’t immediately taken into care because she had older brothers who could act as guardians, but they didn’t stick around for long. She tried to manage on her own for a few weeks but eventually she ended up at my parents’ house.’
‘That’s awful,’ she said, leaning forward.
At least her own father had tried to do the right thing after her mother died. It hadn’t been his fault that he hadn’t been able to connect emotionally with a sad little girl. It was the way he had been brought up himself—stiff upper lip, none of that sissy talk about feelings. Those were the kind of things his generation left to the women.
But poor Becky. She’d had no one. Not one person on her side—until Alex and his family had come along. Suddenly Jennie felt incredibly proud of the young man her husband had once been, proud of him for looking deeper where others had probably only seen a troublemaker.
‘That’s not the worst of it,’ he said grimly. ‘She had followed the only example she’d ever had to deal with the chaos in her life. By the time she came to my parents’, she was recovering from a drug problem. At fifteen!’ He shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t talk about some periods of her life at all, but once I’d qualified I filled in the blanks. I met many, many people like her father and her brothers over the years. I’ve heard stories that would make your hair stand on end…truly.’
She asked another soft question, urging him on, glad that he hadn’t noticed that she’d turned the tables and that it was she who was cross-examining him. There was a heartbreaking look in his eyes—one she had yet to define—and she wondered if he was letting her do this because it felt good to finally say some of these things out loud.
He started to tell her how, over the next few years, Becky had fought hard to turn her life around. With the love and support of Alex’s parents, she’d beaten her addiction, started going to school again. He didn’t have to tell Jennie why he’d fallen in love with Becky, she could see it in his eyes. Despite her awful background, Becky had shown inner substance and strength. It was clear Alex had admired her for that and admiration had gradually blossomed into love. And it was hardly surprising he’d rushed to Becky’s side when he’d heard she’d been injured.
Jennie tried not to make comparisons, but it was impossible and, with each word that Alex spoke, her mood sank lower and lower. His new wife had grown up with all the privileges a girl could ask for and what had she achieved, how much inner substance had she shown? Not much. It had taken her until the grand old age of thirty to work up the guts to stop living off her father and strike out on her own.
No wonder nobody respected her. She’d made her teenage years stretch way into her twenties, and nobody had expected her to do much with her life except be a drain on her daddy’s platinum card. And, while she was starting to prove them wrong, she’d discovered that it took a lot more than a few happy clients and some money of her own in the bank to change people’s opinions. In her family’s eyes—and probably those of most of the people she knew—she was the leopard whose spots were well and truly tattooed on.
She drained her glass and filled it again from the open bottle on the coffee table. It probably wasn’t a good idea, seeing as she’d never quite made it to the buffet table this evening, but she reckoned she needed a little extra fortitude if she was going to have to sit through the details of Alex and Becky’s perfect first love.
It didn’t last…a nasty little voice crooned inside her head.
She couldn’t take solace in that either, though, because Alex had once let it slip that it had been Becky who’d done the leaving. Jennie knew the only way forward for her and Alex was to listen to what he had to say next, but she wished she could cover her ears. She didn’t want to know how heartbroken he’d been when Becky had left him, or how many years it had taken to get over her.
What if it was more than four? That was how long they’d been apart.
She looked at Alex, watching her intently from the sofa, and felt an internal hiccup that never quite made it to the surface. The look in his eyes said there was much more to tell, and she was starting to think that what he’d said earlier would be proved true—that she wouldn’t want to hear any of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALEX stared at the ceiling and tried to think how to condense the complex relationship he’d had with Becky into just a handful of sentences. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it for such a long time that it seemed like someone else’s story, as if he was trying to summarise a film he’d seen at the cinema. If only this story could have been like that—flat and unreal, at a comfortable distance. Instead, his past was more like a juggernaut from an action movie car chase, but that juggernaut had come crashing out of the screen and into reality.
But there was no point getting emotional about it. He’d done his grieving, mourned the loss of his marriage already. What Jennie needed was information, and he was going to give it to her.
‘We married young—too young, my parents said—while I was doing my post-graduate law degree. We both had to work hard to survive. It was a struggle, but Becky seemed to thrive on that. I can honestly say we were truly happy.’
Jennie suddenly stood up. ‘I think I need some fresh air,’ she said. ‘Do you need fresh air? Let’s open these windows.’ Before he could answer, she was across the room and opening the glazed doors that led onto a small balcony. Instead of just opening them a crack, she flung one open and walked outside. He watched her for a moment, palms flat on the stone balustrade, arms stiff, inhaling deeply enough for him to see her back muscles move beneath the satin of her dress, and then he walked outside to join her.
It was freezing, but there was something about the chill in the air that re-energised him, got his blood pumping.
‘Carry on,’ she said, not looking at him, but staring out into the moonlit countryside.
He turned and rested on the balustrade and stared back into the warm room they’d just vacated. Then he kicked the door shut with his foot, guessing they wouldn’t be out here long and they’d probably prefer the room to stay warm and welcoming.
‘After I passed the Bar Vocational Course and did my pupillage, Edward offered me a tenancy at his chambers. It was a fantastic opportunity and Becky and I thought everything we had worked for had finally paid off.’ He turned to look at Jennie, but she was still looking out over the moon-bathed downs. ‘Success turned out to be a double-edged sword. In the first couple of years I did well on a few cases, started to make my name. Becky loved the lifestyle, the fact we could afford nice cars and that she could shop in exclusive boutiques instead of discount stores. We were able to move to a better area, and we started being invited to social functions connected with work, and in turn were expected to entertain my colleagues and clients.’
Jennie frowned and looked sideways at him. ‘That sounds like a modern-day fairy tale, not a horror story.’
He nodded. At the time he’d thought so, too, but he’d been too pleased with himself, too infatuated with his own succe
ss to notice that Becky wasn’t coping with being a barrister’s wife.
‘The hectic nature of Becky’s life meant she hadn’t got many qualifications, and she was suddenly thrust into a world of high-flyers and overachievers and she struggled to fit in. But she’d seemed so happy and together for such a long time by then that I didn’t realise just how many scars she still carried from her past.’
Jennie’s gaze drifted down to her hands, splayed on the balustrade. He took her silence as an invitation to keep going.
‘A few minor faux pas at some important functions only worsened matters. When she finally came to the end of her tether, she flung it all at me—how they all looked down on her, how alone she felt when I was always having to cancel nights out for a last minute meeting or was “obsessed” by a case for days, if not weeks, at a time.’ He held a breath and then let it out slowly. ‘After that she got really low. The doctor said she was suffering from depression.’
What he remembered most about that time, apart from the week-long silences, was the anger. The way Becky had looked at him as if he was something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. Becky had blamed him. He’d put her in this situation. He’d wanted this life, so in her eyes it was all his fault.
And, yes, there’d been some blame to lay at his door, but not for doing what most people did. It was normal to want to make a success of yourself, to try to have a nice life. But he’d understood that Becky hadn’t had much normal in her life. He’d tried to understand, tried to help the only way he’d known how.
‘We got her help. We both went to counselling sessions. She saw a psychotherapist on her own. And for a while things seemed to get better.’
He stopped. Well, things had seemed better. Becky had been smiling again. He’d encouraged her to make new friends to widen her support system, and had been pleased when she’d taken his advice. He hadn’t felt quite so guilty about all the times his job demanded he work into the evening or be away overnight. Okay, yes, he’d sensed an odd kind of distance between him and Becky, but he’d put it down to the aftermath of her breakdown. They’d even started trying for a family. He hadn’t been sure they’d been ready for it, but Becky had seemed so set on the idea he’d gone along with it, hoping that having a baby to care for would give her something positive, something life-affirming to focus on. He’d known she’d make a good mother. Yes, she had her problems, but she had a heart of gold underneath.