a step back from her.
‘Here. I have some photos of her on my phone.’
He jumped when Beth pressed her phone into his hand. He stared at the screen, feeling his emotions multiply a hundredfold as he looked at the fair-haired moppet smiling up at him. She had Beth’s colouring and his eyes. She also had his nose if he wasn’t mistaken.
Words failed him as he flicked through the photos, one after the other. They were a record of his daughter’s life to date, the first one taken straight after her birth and the last one only a couple of days ago. All those months that had passed without him being there, he thought wretchedly. All that time during which she had grown up and he had known nothing about her existence.
How he longed to turn back the clock, to have been there for her from the very first moment, but it was impossible. He could never recapture that precious time he’d lost; all he could do was to make sure that he was there for the rest of her life. The thought stiffened his resolve, made him see just how important this was to him. He wasn’t going to give up. Even if Beth refused his pleas then he would find a way to maintain contact with his daughter.
‘She’s beautiful,’ he said, reluctantly relinquishing the phone. ‘She has your colouring and my eyes.’
‘Yes.’ Beth bit her lip and he could sense her hesitation before she hurried on. ‘I think she has your nose as well, although babies change so quickly that it’s hard to be certain. One minute they look like one parent and the next they look like the other.’
‘It must be fascinating, seeing all the changes,’ he said, struggling to control the emotions that kept welling up inside him. He cleared his throat when he saw Beth glance at him, not sure if he felt comfortable about laying himself bare this way. It would have been different if they’d still been together; he wouldn’t have felt nearly as self-conscious then. But they were no longer together, no longer involved apart from through their child, and he needed to protect himself.
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