by Anna Clifton
She needn’t have hurried.
Her instincts told her Adam would be at some pub drowning his sorrows or walking his miseries off on the streets of Sydney, and they’d been right. His three-storey terrace was in complete darkness when she arrived.
Still, Abbie went through the motions of ringing the front door bell, listening in frustration to its lonely echo in the dark and empty rooms within. After a minute or two of her exercise in futility, she sank down onto the front steps, vowing to sit there all night if necessary. Yet she had absolutely no idea what she was going to say to Adam when he finally returned home, if he returned home at all that night.
Well, it didn’t matter.
The first thing she’d do was make sure he was okay. The second thing she’d do was somehow get through to him about how desperately sorry she was for the terrible thing she’d done and her determination to now make things as right as she possibly could.
Abbie remained on the step and barely moved a muscle; not even when the day’s temperature finally plummeted two hours later; not even when the heavens opened and rain fell in sheets until she was completely drenched. The only thing that stirred her was the occasional sound of approaching footsteps.
Her hopes lifted each time as she waited for Adam to come into view. But time and time again, they were dashed as strangers passed by, staring in obvious surprise from underneath their umbrellas at the odd sight of the wet and bedraggled girl sitting on the third step of the elegant Paddington home.
As midnight finally ticked by, Abbie sunk her head in defeat onto her folded arms and closed her eyes—exhausted, half-frozen and utterly miserable.
How long she sat there like that, or even whether she dozed off for a little while, she never knew. But finally she sensed that someone was standing next to her.
Lifting her head slowly, she found Adam towering above her. He was dressed in jeans and a blue v-necked T-shirt. One foot was resting on the step she sat on. He was also dry, unlike her. But the most disturbing thing about him was the way he was watching her, silently and without a flicker of emotion, his face no more than an eerie mask.
“Come inside. I’ll get you something dry to put on,” he muttered before walking up the stairs and unlocking his front door.
Stiff and frozen in every one of her joints, Abbie climbed awkwardly to her feet. In the next moment she’d stumbled into his front hallway as he flicked a switch, filling his home with low, soft lighting. Uncertain what to do next, she waited where she was and watched him disappear, only to return a minute or two later with a bundle of clothing in his arms.
“Put these on,” he ordered as he passed them to her, avoiding her eyes. “They’ll be too big for you but they’re all I have.”
He disappeared again and she made her way up the stairs to the bathroom to do as he asked in mortified obedience.
Adam was right about the clothing. His tracksuit was enormous on her. She had to pull on most of the drawstring to stop the pants from plunging to her feet every time she moved. As for the top, it hung around her legs to about mid-thigh. But it was dry and warm; Abbie was beginning to feel her fingers and toes again as she wandered back down the stairs and through the house in search of him.
She followed the lights to the kitchen where he was making a pot of coffee, two mugs out on the bench in front of him. But to Abbie it looked like an executioner preparing his tools of trade—suddenly she was wondering whether her coffee would be as restorative as she might have hoped.
He lifted his eyes to take her in, clutching at her pants to keep them up as she slipped onto one of his kitchen stools. And right then something passed across his expression, but it was so fleeting and cryptic she couldn’t decipher it at all.
“Where have you been?” Abbie asked more boldly than she felt as she accepted a mug of coffee from him, wrapping her hands around its warmth gratefully. “I was worried about you.”
“Worried! Really!” His voice was scathing but eerily calm. “Never mind where I was. I was somewhere doing a lot of thinking about you, me, Pete and Henry. And although it’s taken me all this time to work out what I want from this mess, it will take precisely sixty seconds to communicate it to you.”
Although Abbie knew she was staring at Adam in wide-eyed alarm at what was coming she couldn’t drag her eyes away from his, let alone speak. It didn’t matter. Adam clearly had no interest in hearing from her.
“I want Henry in my life full-time while I’m in Sydney. I can never regain the time I’ve lost with him and I’m not prepared to lose another minute while you and I waste time in court and argue over access.”
Abbie’s heart clenched hard within her chest. It sounded like they were moving into an acrimonious divorce without anything like a real marriage to precede it. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but couldn’t.
“You know as well as I do that the family court are giving fathers bigger portions of time with their children these days,” he went on with about as much warmth as he would have displayed were he handing down a sentence to a convicted criminal. “Despite what you’ve done though, I’m not out for revenge. It’s not in Henry’s interests to blow your life with him apart, and so I’m going to offer you a choice. You can opt for an agreed court order for access where Henry’s week will be split between us, or you can move in here with him by Saturday night. But I’m not talking a couple of suitcases. If you choose the second option your whole life will move in here—every book, every toy, everything. You and I will look after these boys as a couple—I’ll give you all the help and support I can, and I want the same from you. As far as Henry is concerned, this will be his home, and as far as Pete is concerned, you’ll be his primary carer—just as much as I am. Pete’s struggling with anxiety and confidence issues that I’m determined to resolve, and you’re going to help me do it. That’s part of the deal and it’s not negotiable.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll do everything you say,” Abbie blurted immediately.
Despite his cold demeanour, Adam looked taken aback at her swift and sure reply.
“Hang on, Abbie!” he protested after several seconds of visibly struggling to process her words. “This is not something you decide on the spur of the moment.”
“Yes you do,” Abbie replied, hearing more composure in her voice than she was feeling. “You think that’s a choice? In one scenario I see less of Henry, and in the other I don’t. That’s not a choice. I’ll be moved in by Saturday.”
And Abbie meant it.
What choice did she have? It was no muddier a decision than whether to breathe or not.
How could she ever choose to lose her son for even five minutes out of any week? And how could she deny Adam what he asked of her when he was entitled to see as much of Henry from then on as was humanly possible?
Yet despite everything she’d done to him, she despaired for herself living with a man who didn’t care for her. And she despaired for him too, for thinking the living arrangements he was proposing could ever work.
“But you haven’t thought through what it will mean,” Adam argued. “We’ll be living together, you and me, as a couple—in all ways except the bedroom.”
“I know what it means. But as I said, I have no choice.”
“Okay then,” Adam replied huskily after watching her for several seconds, clearly trying to gauge whether she was of sound mind or not that night. But then pressing his lips together momentarily, he shook his head a little in despair.
“The cruelest irony in all this is that twenty-four hours ago I decided to ask you if we could put our past behind us and work together to encourage the friendship between the boys. But that was before I knew what you …” Adam stopped, all the while staring at her as though he was looking for something he’d lost. He bit down on his bottom lip and nodded his head a little as though making a private decision before he continued on. “Anyway, there’s no use looking back. There are four bedrooms and three bathrooms here so there’s plenty of room. My only
concern is that it’s not an orthodox situation for the boys to be in. But neither is Pete, Henry and I finding out about each other when Henry’s nearly four years old. So frankly, I don’t give a damn about orthodox.”
“Orthodox and my life are not especially good friends anyway,” Abbie thought out loud in a self-deprecating voice, and again Adam’s expression flickered out of its rigidity for a sliver of a second.
“Anyway, that’s enough for tonight,” he finished crisply.
With that Adam tipped his untouched coffee down the sink, placed the mug on the bench and began to walk in the direction of the front door. He was plainly intent on showing her out as soon as possible, but Abbie didn’t move. She was too busy trying to get her head around the fact that she’d had all the anger, misery and despair she was going to get from him that night.
Well, she wasn’t having it!
She’d waited for hours so that he could have his explosion, his breakdown, his tantrum—whatever he wanted to throw at her. Instead she’d received a cold-blooded judgement and a list of binding conditions. Then he’d simply moved off the bench in that judicial fashion of his. As far as he was concerned, the family law matter of Cooper and McCarthy was closed until he chose to open it again on whichever terms he thought necessary.
Abbie slipped off the stool but moved no further. Adam appeared at the door again, his eyes searching for her.
“Well? Are you going home or not?” he asked in unconcealed irritation.
“Not!” she shot at him, distracted by trying to tighten his oversized track pants around her waist again.
“Why not?”
“Because believe it or not,” she began hotly, continuing to struggle with the uncooperative drawstring. “I came here tonight to let you vent your spleen about me keeping Henry from you all these years. Damn these things!” Abbie shouted in explosive exasperation at the pants that were determined to move south to her ankles. Finally, letting them fall to her feet, she kicked them off in such a wild rage that that they flew across his kitchen and landed on the range hood, one of the legs dangling precariously over the stovetop.
Adam leant against the doorframe and crossed his arms. Those eyes of his that had deepened in colour that night to perfectly match his blue T-shirt slid with frosty focus down her bare legs until they reached her trainers.
“I’m under no obligation to display any emotion to you,” he began, the chilliness of his eyes matching his voice as he lifted them to lock with hers again. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“You’re right. You don’t. And rest assured that you haven’t shown me a modicum of emotion from the moment you walked out of my life all those years ago. But like it or not, I’m the mother of your child. And if you think I’m going to reach agreement with you on matters concerning Henry in that bloodless, ‘this is the way it is—take it or leave it’ way of yours, then you can forget it. That’s no way to responsibly parent any child.”
“Oh, is that right!” he scoffed in cutting derision, his powerful arms locking more tightly across his chest. “Then tell me, in which part of the pantomime in which you concealed a child from his father did you behave like the responsible parent?”
“I know I should have told you!” Abbie hurled at him, the anguish and tension building over the last few days finally erupting. “But when you washed me out of your life, I knew the last thing you would want was an unplanned pregnancy with a girl you never wanted to see again. And even though I intended to tell you—even though I went all the way to London to find you—once I saw the endless photos of you and Ellen and your perfect marriage spread all over the newspapers, I just couldn’t go through with it—not then. Your name would have been mud—the public would have despised you forever, and so would Ellen’s family. But I’ll be honest; I wasn’t only thinking of you. I was thinking of myself too, because I was frightened. I didn’t want my life reduced to nothing more than the tart who took advantage of the golden-haired boy of London society during his three week stay in Sydney. And I certainly didn’t want Henry’s life being reduced to your nuisance illegitimate child.”
“It wouldn’t have been like that!” Adam snapped, and at that moment Abbie knew she’d finally cracked him, his anger zipping like Catherine wheels around the room as he began to pace backwards and forwards as though half-demented.
“That’s exactly how it would have been!” Abbie threw at him in breathless conviction, pacing by his side in a vain attempt to catch his eyes that were fixedly averted from hers. “Maybe not for you, but for everyone around you whose opinion you valued.”
“So even if that’s your excuse for not telling me at first,” Adam retorted incredulously, “how can you ever justify your motives for keeping him from me after that?”
Abbie paused, digging deep for complete honesty. Although it was all too late Adam deserved at least that.
“The truth is that I didn’t have a day arrive which seemed to be the right one to tell you about Henry. Maeve and I were managing and Henry was thriving. And to be honest, for a while I thought you might come … Anyway, that’s all in the past. The fact is, it wasn’t until Henry was seriously ill with meningitis that I finally woke up to the terrible thing I’d done to you both. The very day I returned to work after he’d recovered, Justin told me you were coming back to help him with the Sydney office. That’s when I asked him to take me to the Incipio ball.”
“Jesus, Abbie!” Adam moaned in despair, ceasing his pacing for a moment to stare at her in agonised disbelief. “Henry had meningitis and I didn’t even know it? And all I’m really hearing from you is that you assumed I wouldn’t want my own son in my life, that you didn’t want people to think badly of us, that you got used to not telling me. It’s all about you, isn’t it, Abbie? But what about Pete and Henry? You’ve kept them from each other their whole lives! And what about me? I’m the one who didn’t share Henry’s first smiles, his first words, his first steps …” But Adam stopped then, a strange choking sound preventing him from saying another word.
“I know what you and the boys have lost!” Abbie half wailed as she threw herself in his path and grabbed his arms to make him stop and look at her. “And I’ll never forgive myself for taking that from you all. And you’re right, I can be unforgivably stupid and selfish sometimes, but I’m trying not to be now. I really am.”
Adam stared at her before yanking away from her grip, throwing himself onto a nearby lounge chair in an exhausted sprawl and snarling, “Now there’s a pointless waste of effort.”
“As pointless as you trying not to be the cold fish that you are?” she threw right back at him before she could stop herself. “Do you ever show any emotion, Adam? Any at all?” And horrified at finding herself in the middle of a slanging match when the best interests of two little boys were at stake, Abbie threw her arms up in the air in a gesture of hopelessness. She then announced that their conversation was over and headed for his front door.
But Abbie could sense that Adam had leapt out of his seat and was right behind her. Before she could reach for the door handle, he’d caught her arm and turned her around.
Instinctively she backed up against the wall, but he was right there in front of her, placing his hands on either side of her head, leaning in dangerously close. Suddenly filling her vision were those eyes of his, enticing her like the blue waters of Capri, cool and inviting but riddled with hidden caves of mystery.
“You think that I’m bloodless don’t you, that I feel nothing?” he purred icily. “You’re right. Except as a father, I don’t feel anything—not since I watched Ellen being told she was going to die, knowing she’d never see her baby grow up, knowing she wouldn’t live on in his memory. You try watching that unfold when you’re the goddamn reason it got to that point in the first place. Then we’ll see how well feeling comes out the other end for you.”
Abbie gaped at Adam, desperately searching for the meaning behind his shocking words of self-accusation, but it was useless. The answer skip
ped away from her as she made a mental grab for it—then it was gone for good.
“But you weren’t cold and distant in those weeks we were together after Ellen died,” Abbie threw at him in heated despair. “You were warm. You needed people then. You needed me. But during our last days together that man disappeared. And now everything about you feels so measured and controlled and … so terribly unhappy. I get the sense that Ellen preoccupies you day and night. And although I truly believe there’s such a thing as the love of one’s life, the love of your life is gone. Surely Ellen would have wanted you to move on.”
“I don’t need you, of all people, to tell me that I need to move on,” he threw at her in icy rebuttal. “But you’re right about Ellen. She does preoccupy me, especially the promise I gave her that Pete would be happy.”
“Pete is important, but there has to be more!” Abbie retorted fiercely, shaking her head in strident rejection of the life sentence he’d handed down for himself. “What about finding love again? If not for yourself, at least think about Pete. How will he learn to ride the roller coaster of life if you never show him how to make it through the dips and bends of a loving relationship?”
“My life with Pete is full, despite what you think. We have our friends, our family back home, and now we have Henry. We don’t need anything more than that.”
“But has there been no woman in your life since Ellen?” Abbie asked stunned. For even if Adam hadn’t been interested, he was downright gorgeous enough to ensure that a long queue of enthusiastic females would have been ever-present in his life.
But then her pounding heart suddenly stopped beating, for he’d lifted his hands to cradle her jaw, his thumbs trailing along the line of her cheekbones, the white ice in his eyes transforming itself into white-hot fire.
“There have been others, but the only one who meant anything at all was you,” he finished in husky abstraction as he took a step closer to her. “Starting with the night I walked into Justin’s apartment, out of my mind over losing Ellen, and walked out of there wanting you so badly I could hardly think straight. Does that not make me monstrous? If it doesn’t, then I don’t know what does.”
