could have acted in that moment. What he didn’t understand was why that one, unlucky coincidence, when he’d driven past with Francesca, had decided everything, had defined both their futures.
‘But you didn’t think to ask me? To find out for sure? Maybe not right then, when you were still angry, but what about the next month or the one after that? What about when the baby was born, or when you registered her? On her first birthday? On any of her birthdays? Hasn’t she asked questions? Doesn’t she want to know?’
Jackie just stared at him.
Maybe his daughter took after her mother. Maybe Jackie had brought her up to be as hard and self-obsessed as she was. Unfortunately he could imagine it all too easily. The elegant flat in one of the classier parts of London, the two of them being very sophisticated together, eating out, going to fashion shows. What he couldn’t imagine was them laughing, making daisy chains or having fun.
He sighed. Jackie had always been such hard work, had always kept him on his toes. What would it be like if he had two such women to placate? It would leave him breathless.
He’d drifted off, almost forgotten Jackie was there. Her voice pulled him out of his daydream…nightmare…whatever.
‘I did think of you when she was born, in the days following…’ She paused, made a strange hiccupping noise. ‘And don’t think that every birthday wasn’t torture, because it was. But by then it was too late. It had already been done. And I wouldn’t have turned back time if I could have done. It would have been selfish and wrong.’
His first reaction was to stoke his anger—she was talking in riddles again—but the weighty sorrow that had settled on her, making her shoulders droop, diluted his rage with curiosity.
‘What do you mean “it was too late”?’
Jackie looked up, puzzled. ‘She’d gone to her new family—the people who adopted her.’
The words didn’t sink in at first. He heard the sounds, even knew what they represented, but, somehow, they still didn’t make sense. He walked away from her, back towards the grotto and stuck his hand—shirtsleeves and all—into one of the chilly black pools, just because he needed something physical, something to shock his body and brain into reacting.
It worked all right. Suddenly his brain was alive with responses. Unfortunately, the temperature of the water had done nothing to cool his temper. He flicked the water off with his hands and dried them on the back of his beautifully crafted, mortgage-worthy suit.
‘You’re telling me that, rather than raise our daughter yourself, rather than telling me—her father—of her existence, that you gave her away to strangers? Like she was something disposable?’
He marched up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders.
‘Is that what it was like, Jackie? She didn’t fit into your nice, ordered plans for your life, so you just put her out of sight…out of mind?’
Jackie’s jaw moved, but no sound came out. She had gone white. And then she wrenched herself free and stumbled out of the garden on her high heels, gaining speed with every step.
For a man who lived his life in the shallows, Romano experienced the unfamiliar feeling of knowing he’d gone too deep, said too much, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. There wasn’t a quip, a smart remark, that could save the situation. He was in open water and land was nowhere in sight.
Jackie had disappeared along the path and into the small patch of woodland that hid the sunken garden from the island’s shore.
The path. The one that led down to the beach.
Oh, hell.
He sprinted after her, even though he couldn’t rationalise why stopping her from bumping into Jack and Lizzie was so important. In his mind she deserved all she got. He told himself he was speeding after her to stop her putting a huge dampener on the wedding and ignored the pity that twinged in him every time he thought of how much she would hate anyone—especially her adored older sister—to see her in such a mess.
It didn’t take long to catch her up, only twenty steps away from where the trees parted and she would have a full view of the shingle beach.
‘Jackie!’ It wasn’t quite a shout, wasn’t quite a whisper, but a strange combination of the two.
She faltered but didn’t alter her course. He was closer now and put a restraining hand on her arm, spoke in a low voice. ‘Not that way.’
All of her back muscles tensed and he just knew she was getting ready to let rip, but then they heard a rumble of low laughter from the direction of the water’s edge and she jolted in surprise.
‘This way,’he said, as quietly as possible, and led her through the trees in the opposite direction, heading for the narrow tip of the island, away from the house, where they would be less likely to be disturbed by wandering wedding guests. They reached a clearing with a soft grassy bank and she just seemed to lose the ability to keep her joints locked. Her knees folded under her and she sat down on the grass with a thud.
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘You don’t know…’
It took Romano a couple of seconds to realise she was continuing the conversation she’d walked out on as if no time had passed. And that wasn’t the only strange thing that had happened. He no longer wanted to erupt. He didn’t know why. Maybe he’d experienced so many strong emotions in the last half-hour that he’d just run out, had none left. He sat down beside her.
‘So tell me what it was like.’
He knew his request didn’t sound exactly friendly, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
She kicked off her shoes and sank her bare feet into the grass. Even the shade of her toenails complemented her outfit. So Jackie…
She hugged her legs, drew them up until she was almost in a little ball, and rested her cheek on her knees. Her face was turned in his direction, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
‘I wanted to believe you’d come,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of a little girl’s. ‘I wanted to believe that it would all turn out right, but I truly didn’t think it was ever going to happen.’
Another nail in the coffin. Another confirmation from her that he was a loser. He ought to get angry again, but there was something in her voice, her face, that totally arrested him.
Honesty. Pure and unguarded.
It was such a rare commodity where Jackie was concerned that he decided not to do anything to scare it away. He needed answers and she was the only one who could provide them.
‘Mamma was so cross when I told her I was pregnant that I thought she was going to break something.’
One corner of his mouth lifted. Yes, he could well imagine the scene. It wouldn’t have been pretty.
‘She insisted that adoption was the only way. How could I argue with her? I couldn’t do it on my own.’
‘What about your father?’
She
