my immediate welcome in the department seemed to put his mind at rest,’ she mused as she wheeled her awkward one-handed way towards Zara’s room, then an alternative suddenly struck her. ‘Or perhaps he took it as proof that they know me well because I’m always in here for treatment.’
She was still smiling at that thought when she tapped on Zara’s door and began to push it open.
‘There she is!’ Zara announced, her face twisting into an unattractive scowl. ‘And look at that smirk on her face. She just couldn’t wait to get her foot in the door, could she? All this time she’s resented the fact that Danny chose me and she waited until I’m too ill to do anything about it to move in with him and—’
‘Zara!’ Dan’s voice cracked over her increasingly hysterical rant like a whip. ‘That’s enough! You’re talking nonsense.’
‘It’s not nonsense!’ she argued fiercely. ‘How could you have let her move into my home after all the trouble she’s caused? Didn’t you read my note? It’s all her fault. Everything is Sara’s fault.’
‘Ah, yes. The note,’ Dan said, and Sara seemed to be the only one who noticed a strange edge to his voice.
‘You mentioned it before,’ he continued. ‘Remind me, when did you write it and where did you put it?’
‘I wrote it the afternoon I took the tablets, of course, and I put it on my bedside cabinet, where you’d see it when you came in … And I’m so sorry for doing that to you, but if you’d read the letter you would know how desperate I was … that I just couldn’t cope any more with Sara wanting to keep the baby and …’
‘Shh, sweetheart,’ Audrey soothed, reaching for one of her daughter’s flailing arms. ‘It can’t be good for you to get in such a state. Perhaps it would be better …’ She turned with a scowl on her face to send a meaningful glance between Sara and the door.
Sara hadn’t known whether to leave so that her sister didn’t upset herself any more, but Dan had already drawn the wheelchair fully into the room and shut the door for some semblance of privacy so she was completely trapped when he drew a slightly crumpled piece of paper out of his jacket pocket.
‘I take it that this is the letter you’re talking about?’ he said, and Sara felt sick when she saw the malice in Zara’s glance across at her.
‘You found it!’ she exclaimed. ‘So now you know exactly—’
‘“My darling Danny,”’ he read flatly, interrupting her without an apparent qualm. ‘“I can’t bear it any more. You know how hard we tried to have a baby and what a wrench it was for me to have to have my sister being a surrogate for us. I know that she’s always wanted you for herself and I’m just so afraid that she’s going to steal our precious baby and there’s nothing I can do about it. I just can’t bear it any more, Your loving Zara.”’
Sara felt the blood drain from her face then flood back in a scalding blush when he read the note for all to hear. Didn’t he realise how humiliating it was for her to have her unrequited love spoken about like that? Didn’t he realise that, even if she hadn’t loved him, she would still have loved the children she was carrying because they were an intrinsic part of her?
And the letter was a complete lie because even though she desperately wished that she was carrying Dan’s babies for the two of them, there was no way that she would have broken her promise to him to give him the family he wanted. He was going to be a wonderful father and Audrey would spoil her grandchildren at every opportunity and provide the feminine touch that Zara would probably be too busy for.
She really didn’t need all this extra emotional stress, to say nothing of the embarrassment of having her private feelings paraded for all, not when all the pregnancy books advised calm and serenity for the sake of the baby. After all, she was still recovering from her injuries and had, admittedly voluntarily, just gone through the exertions of moving out of his flat and back into her own.
And going from mind-blowing topics to the merely petty, there was the fact that she wasn’t certain her smart-enough-for-work trousers would ever recover from her decision to come all the way down four flights of stairs on her bottom.
‘Look at her face!’ Zara demanded shrilly, pointing straight at Sara. ‘At least she has the honesty to look guilty.’
With everyone’s eyes directed at her, Sara had felt the heat of embarrassment flooding into her face. She was unused to being the centre of attention at any time, least of all when she was in the same room as her twin.
She hated what Zara was doing to her but she had known for far too many years that there was no point protesting her innocence. Zara’s position as everybody’s favourite was unassailable. The thing that hurt worst was the fact that Dan was privy to all Zara’s spiteful lies. At least in the past it had been kept within the family.
‘You ask her, Danny,’ her sister demanded, with every evidence of being on the verge of tears. ‘You ask her if she hasn’t been thinking about keeping the kid for herself.’
Of course she’d been thinking about it, Sara admitted silently as she reached for the rim of the wheel to turn herself around. She was carrying the babies of the man she loved so it was obvious that she would long for the chance to bring them up with him, and there was no way she was staying in this room to allow her sister to make something shameful about a normal human response.
‘Sara, stay,’ Dan said in a low voice, his lean fingers resting on her wrist to dissuade her from opening the door. ‘Please?’
There was something in those amazing green eyes that told her she could trust him, that he wasn’t asking her to stay to have more humiliation heaped on her head. And even though she had no idea where this dreadful conversation was going, she knew that she could trust him, implicitly.
She missed the warmth of his touch when he took his hand away, but then he reached into his pocket again and pulled out a plastic bag.
Walking over to the side of Zara’s bed, he tipped out a piece of plastic onto her lap.
‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked in a quiet conversational tone.
Sara almost gave herself away with a gasp of surprise. The last time she’d seen a piece of plastic like that had been in the garage when they’d been asking about the damage to Zara’s car.
‘Of course I don’t know what it is,’ she said with a dismissive shrug. ‘It’s just a bit of scrap plastic.’
‘Actually, it’s a bit more than that,’ he said with a noticeably sharper edge to his voice as he retrieved it and put it back in the bag, without touching it with his fingers. ‘It’s part of the light from your BMW—the one you broke when you ran your sister down and left her lying in a side street, not caring whether she was alive or dead.’
‘That’s a lie!’ Audrey gasped, clearly shocked out of her unaccustomed bystander’s role. ‘That’s a wicked, wicked lie. Danny, why are you doing this to Zara? She’s your wife and she’s ill. You should be supporting her, not spouting this ridiculous nonsense that Sara’s been feeding you.’
‘Audrey—’ Dan said forcefully, trying to break into her tirade.
‘I know why you’re doing it,’ she continued, condemnation in every stiff inch of her. ‘The
