by Lucy King
Which hadn’t gone down well. Stella’s face had instantly set and she’d been stonily silent in the taxi on the way back. He wasn’t sure why. He’d have thought she’d be as glad as he was that the scan had been normal and she and the baby were fine.
He should probably leave her to deal with whatever was going on and just sit it out. For him, at least, that would be the safest course of action. Yet somehow that didn’t appeal. It reminded him of the time he’d left her in Scotland and hadn’t called her to apologise, and it seemed to smack of weakness.
Before he could change his mind, Jack put down his glass, strode across the room and hammered on Stella’s door.
“What?” she yelled from deep within.
“I’d like to come in.”
“It’s your flat.”
He opened the door. A suitcase was lying open on the bed and she was dashing round the room, throwing things into it. “Where are you going?” he said, watching her carefully and going strangely cold.
“To see my parents.”
“Why?” Why would she do that? She’d said she hardly ever saw them. He’d got the impression there was little love lost there. Was she leaving? She could not be leaving.
“Because they need to know about the baby.”
“So call them.”
“I need to get away. Once I’ve seen them I’m going home.”
Home? This was her home. “To Somerset?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t be here right now. It’s all too intense.”
Jack gritted his teeth and fought the urge to tell her she was going nowhere because if anything was likely not to improve this it was that. “Fine,” he said, thinking instead he’d be wise to tread carefully because the last thing he wanted was her to leave for good. He didn’t think he could stand that. “I’ll drive you.”
“I’ll take the train.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“I’ll take the train.”
She still hadn’t looked at him and he found he didn’t like it. “What’s going on, Stella?”
“Absolutely nothing,” she said, tossing a washbag into the suitcase. “And that’s the problem.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me on how to communicate. I’ve tried my hardest to make this work, Jack, and you, quite simply, haven’t – and you know what? Right now, I’ve had enough.”
Jack stared at her, completely and utterly baffled. What the hell was she talking about? Hadn’t he done everything she’d asked him to do? Hadn’t he taken time off from work? Hadn’t they hung out and done things together and talked? “What could you possibly mean by that?”
She stopped, whirled round, and finally, finally, looked at him. “I’ve told you everything,” she said, her hands on her hips, her colour high, her eyes blazing. “Everything. Do you know how hard that’s been for me to do? Do you? No. Because you’ve never bothered to ask, have you? You’re simply not interested. Well, I’ll tell you. Remember how I said I used paint as a way of expressing my feelings about my parents’ lack of interest in me? That only worked until I was ten when it finally sank in that I was basically on my own. From then on I shut down. I closed off my emotions and withdrew and thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with me because parents are supposed to love their children unconditionally and mine very obviously didn’t. For years I had no friends because no one could get anywhere near me. I was too withdrawn and unapproachable, too afraid of being rejected and wholly unsure of what was expected of me, and even now I can’t bring myself to totally trust the few friends I do have. I’ve been a mess for years, despite some therapy, but for the sake of this child I’ve tried to get over all that. I decided to open up and try and build a proper relationship with you but you just won’t reciprocate, and so what I’d like to know, Jack, what I’d really like to know is: are you ever going to tell me about your wife?”
At her words, flying through the space between them and slamming into his head, Jack froze. Reeled. It was too much to take in. He didn’t know what to start with. So he went with the last. “How did you know?”
“Cora,” said Stella, letting out a breath, clearly battling for calm. “She told me the morning she came to see me.”
“How much do you know?”
“Not much. Only that you were married, she was pregnant and then she died.”
“My sister shouldn’t have told you.”
Hurt, Stella winced but she rallied quickly enough. “She didn’t know I didn’t know. She’s very loyal.”
“Too damn loyal.”
“She cares.”
Jack said nothing to that because he had no response. It was true. Cora was deeply loyal and she cared a lot. Despite their current issues, if she thought Stella was causing him anguish she’d have done something about it. He just wished she’d told him what she’d been up to before she’d jetted off to Spain. Then he’d have had time to work out how to deal with this. As it was he didn’t. At all. “Was that why you changed your mind about moving in?” he asked, taking the easy option and going with the facts.
“Yes. It seemed unnecessarily cruel not to.”
“You pitied me.”
“Only for a moment. I don’t any more.” She continued looking at him for a second, then whipped round to resume her packing and Jack snapped out of his trance to process every enormous thing he’d learned in the last thirty seconds about her.
God, she was incredible, he thought, running through what she’d told him. Brave, resilient and simply bloody amazing. The way she tackled her issues… She didn’t duck from what life threw at her. She didn’t wonder what the point of everything was or find herself stuck and helpless. If she landed in trouble or got into a mess she looked for a way out and took it. Her approach was practical and upfront and he envied it. Admired it. Admired her and liked her.
Whereas she clearly felt quite the opposite about him. And why wouldn’t she? She’d put her own fears aside to make things easier for him, but had he done the same for her? No. Because of some deep-seated need to stay safe by keeping his distance he hadn’t given her a chance. He hadn’t allowed this to work.
But he could, and he should, because this wasn’t about him any more. It was about their child, who was as lucky to have Stella as a mother as he was that she hadn’t given up on him sooner. He’d never discussed the details of that terrible week with anyone outside his family, but Stella sort of was family. She deserved to know.
Taking a deep breath, Jack braced himself and said, “Stella.”
“What?”
“Stop.”
Something in his voice – he didn’t know what – made her do as he asked. He watched her freeze, straighten, then slowly turn back to him.
“Mia and I met when we were at school,” he said flatly, keeping his eyes on her, keeping solely to the facts. “We got together the night of her seventeenth birthday and started dating. She went off to Oxford; I moved to London. We made it work. God knows how in retrospect but we did. We eventually got married around the same time I set up my company and we were happy. The following January I went to New York for a week-long conference. Mia was fine when I left. I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t even know she was. She was so busy at work.”
“What did she do?” asked Stella, her expression giving absolutely nothing away although her voice was maybe a fraction less harsh than it had been.
“Marketing. For a hotel chain.” He cleared his throat and rubbed a hand along his jaw. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’d been away for a couple of days when she mentioned on the phone that she had stomach pains and had been vomiting. I told her to go to A&E, which she did. They diagnosed gastroenteritis, gave her some painkillers and sent her home.
“Two days later, though, the pains weren’t getting any better. In fact they were getting worse, and she was just about to go back to A&E when she had a heart attack. At work. She was ru
shed to hospital and they carried out an emergency operation but she had another cardiac arrest while that was happening. I flew back as soon as I found out what was happening, but by the time I got there she was on life support. We decided to switch it off the next day. Tests showed that she’d been seven weeks’ pregnant. It had been ectopic.” He stopped, waited again for the wave of grief and guilt that didn’t come, then concluded, “And that’s it, in a nutshell.”
“How do you feel about it now?”
Jack tensed. He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. But how could he not? “I’m not entirely sure,” he said, his throat tight. “I should have been there. I’d vowed to support her in sickness and in health and I didn’t.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“On an intellectual level I know that.”
“And on an emotional level?”
“I’m conflicted.”
For a long time Stella said nothing, just looked at him as if trying to peer right into his soul while his heart thumped and his blood rushed in his ears, and God he hoped she didn’t probe any further because he truly didn’t know what to say. But then her face softened and the tension gripping her eased and eventually, to his utter relief, she said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You can drive me to Norfolk in the morning.”
*
Thanks to a remarkably empty M1, the journey to the village of Little Snoring, where her parents lived, took only two hours, so by the time they got there Stella had had more than enough time to absorb the events of yesterday afternoon.
At the clinic she’d been so disappointed by Jack’s refusal to talk, so angry, she just hadn’t been able to let it go, even though her common sense had told her to tread carefully. How much more careful could she have been? She’d been tiptoeing round the subject for days. And shouldn’t she know? Wasn’t it really rather important to understand the man who was going to co-parent her child?
She hadn’t stayed angry with him for long, however. When he’d told her what had happened to his wife, her heart had practically broken for him. What he must have gone through. The grief, the pain, the sheer effort of getting through the days. The struggle he still clearly had with it all. While she’d had her cottage to escape to when things were bad, what did he do? Where did he go? It sounded like he hadn’t got over his wife’s death at all, and what he’d been through, what he was obviously still going through, certainly put her own hang-ups into perspective.
In the two hours since they’d left London Jack had been quiet, reflective even, very possibly thinking about his wife and she wondered if he regretted telling her. She hoped he didn’t, because it seemed as if some of his tension had eased and it felt like something between them had shifted and settled.
Stella was feeling similarly reflective, only for her it was due wholly to the upcoming visit. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to tell her parents about the baby. They were unlikely to be even the slightest bit interested, yet they had to know at some point. And somewhere deep inside her she harboured the tiniest hope that they might turn out to be better grandparents than parents, even though she knew it wasn’t a scenario she should waste too much time dreaming about.
Nevertheless, as she pointed out the sign to the village and Jack turned off the main road and onto the narrow lane that led to her parents’ house, nerves started fluttering around inside her. What would she find? What would they say about the baby? What would they think of Jack?
“This is it,” she said, her mouth desert dry as her heart began to pound. “Right here on the left.”
Jack pulled into the driveway of a large modern brick and flint house, and she automatically tensed.
“Are you OK?” he asked, switching off the engine.
“I’m fine,” she said and pulled herself together. “I apologise in advance for whatever happens next. I never know what to expect. There was no answer when I called this morning and we’re a bit earlier than originally planned, so they could be in the middle of an argument or in the throes of making up. Either will be excruciating. Come on. Let’s get this over and done with.”
She unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door. She got out of the car and took a deep breath. She released it slowly and shook out her arms and her hands as if that might somehow ease the nerves. Suddenly Jack was at her side, taking one of her hands in one of his and giving it a minute squeeze of support.
And goodness she was glad he was with her, she thought, a bloom of soft warmth unfurling inside her at his touch. He’d listened to everything she’d told him about her parents and her upbringing and he instinctively knew this was going to be hard for her. For the first time in her life it felt as if she had support, someone on her side.
She gave him a small smile of gratitude and then they walked up to the white front door. She pressed the doorbell and waited, so distracted by the feel of her hand in his, so giddy at the realisation that he might actually care a bit, that it was a few moments before she registered the lack of response to her ring of the doorbell.
However, it gradually dawned on her that there was no sound of approaching footsteps, no sound of anything for that matter, so she rang the bell again and hoped to God her parents were in the garden or had the radio up loud and were not in the middle of something no daughter would want to interrupt.
But as the seconds ticked by with still no response that hope dwindled and Stella felt the familiar sensation of her heart sinking and disappointment surging.
She pulled her hand out of Jack’s, fixed a smile to her face and looked up at him, and then wished she hadn’t because his jaw was set and he was frowning. Now she felt even worse because, of course, this was going to turn out to be such a waste of his time. Still, she could get through this with her pride sort of intact. Heaven knew she’d had enough practice.
“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that no one’s home,” she said brightly, and really, after all these years, she shouldn’t be surprised. Why on earth she’d ever imagined her ‘news’ might be of interest to her parents when nothing else she’d done to date had she had no idea. She didn’t know why she’d even bothered. She should have known that her mother was barely listening when she rang.
“Why don’t you phone them?”
Largely to humour him, Stella did as Jack suggested and then shrugged. “Straight to voice mail,” she said, cutting the call since there didn’t seem much point in leaving a message.
“Are you certain you told them the right day?”
“Oh, I’m certain.”
Jack looked as if he was about to say something else, but she heard a car pulling up behind them and for one stupidly insane moment, she thought it might be them. Her heart actually began to gallop with hope as she turned round to find out.
But it wasn’t them. Of course it wasn’t. She didn’t know who the middle-aged woman getting out of the car was.
“Can I help you?” said the woman pleasantly enough, rummaging in her handbag and extracting a set of keys.
“Er, yes,” said Stella, as she approached. “We’re here to see the Grants.”
“And you are…?”
“Their daughter, Stella.”
The woman’s eyes widened and her eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” she said in surprise. “I didn’t realise –” She stopped suddenly, and Stella felt a sharp jab of years-old pain hit her square in the chest. “Yes. Well. Anyway,” she continued. “They’re away in the Bahamas. For a fortnight. They left yesterday and asked me to come in and feed the cats. I’m Annie.”
Annie held out her hand and numbly Stella shook it, her throat thick and her head spinning with the distressing realisation that after everything she still cared. She still hoped that things might have changed, stupid idiot that she was.
“I expect they forgot to mention it,” said Annie kindly.
“I expect they did.” Except they hadn’t. They’d forgotten about her.
“Would you
like to come in and leave a message?”
“No,” said Stella, swallowing down the lump in her throat and pulling herself together because she just had to get over it and if not now, then when? “But thank you. I’ll give them a call when they’re back.”
“Sure?”
She nodded. Smiled. “Quite sure,” she said firmly. “We should get going.”
As Annie opened the front door and went into the house, Stella headed back to the car, feeling like a fool and hating that Jack had witnessed it.
“I’m sorry about this,” she said, glancing over at him and inwardly cringing at the look of thunder on his face. What must he be thinking? she wondered with a silent groan. His family was normal. His parents would never forget about him. Family meant something to the Macleans. She bet they’d circled the wagons around him when his wife had died, and she tried not to envy him. “I’m so sorry for wasting so much of your time.”
“You, sweetheart,” said Jack, sounding so icily furious that she actually shivered, “have absolutely nothing to apologise for.”
*
How Jack kept it together on the drive back to London he had no idea. He was so angry he wanted to punch something. How could Stella’s parents have done that? How could any parents have done that? Were they really so self-absorbed that they’d just forgotten to tell her they were going away? Or had her phone call even registered at all? Christ. Even the fucking cats got more attention than she did.
He looked at her for a second and his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. She was trying to put a brave face on it, but her smile was too bright and her voice was strained as she chatted valiantly about this and that. It was clear she was devastated. And why wouldn’t she be? Family was supposed to be there for you, the way his had been when Mia had died. Hers weren’t. She had no support. Apart from him.
He hoped she knew she could count on him. She should. He didn’t hold hands with just anyone. He hadn’t even known he was going to take hers until it was done. But just in case she didn’t, he was going to try and make this easier for her, the way she’d tried to make things easier for him by moving in. He would give her no cause to regret her decision. He’d distract her. Charm her. Make her laugh. He might be out of practice but he’d once been pretty good at that sort of thing. It couldn’t be that hard to dust off the rust. And even if it was, it would be worth doing because right now, whether she liked it or not, Stella had no one else but him.
