He looked so genuinely bewildered that she laughed again, a hiccup sound halfway to a sob.
‘Because…I don’t know…’ She drew a breath, willing the tears to recede, and the desire too; she needed to find her composure once more and don it like armour.
‘I didn’t mean to make you sad.’
She glanced at him from the corner of her eye and saw him frown ruefully and run a hand through his hair, mussing it. The last wedge of sun glimmered on the horizon before it sank beneath the mountains and the night settled softly around them.
‘I’m not sad,’ Lucy said, and her voice came out firmly. She swallowed the last threat of tears and forced herself to look at Khaled directly. ‘Just emotional, perhaps. There’s been so much change recently, and the future is so uncertain.’
‘It doesn’t have to be.’
She shook her head, not wanting to start down that road. ‘And I’ve admitted before,’ she continued firmly, ‘that I am helpless when it comes to you, like a moth to the candle flame.’ Her mouth set in a grim line. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of.’
‘You make it sound like weakness.’
‘It is.’
Khaled was silent for a moment. ‘Would it be,’ he finally asked, ‘if I hadn’t left?’
Lucy drew back, startled. ‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve defined everything—me, yourself, our relationship—by the fact that I left without telling you.’
‘Of course I have,’ she snapped. ‘How could I not?’
‘Sometimes,’ Khaled said quietly, his eyes intent on hers, ‘I wish I hadn’t left.’
The breath left Lucy’s body, left her feeling dizzy and airless. She drew another breath and let it out shakily. ‘Do you really?’ she asked, hearing both the doubt and the desire in her voice. He offered her a twisted smile.
‘I told you I would correct some of these assumptions you have,’ Khaled said. His voice was soft, yet even so it held a certain grim resolution. ‘And one of them is about why I left—left England, left rugby—left you.’
Lucy’s hands curled into claws, her fingernails biting into her palms. Her heart began a relentless drumming. ‘All right,’ she said evenly. ‘So, tell me.’
Khaled’s gaze slid from hers; it was the first time he’d been the one to look away. Lucy felt his emotional withdrawal like a physical thing, as if a coolness had stolen over her.
‘You, of all people, know how I’ve had muscle strain in my knee,’ Khaled began. He kept his voice even, unemotional, his gaze on the now-darkened horizon. Lucy didn’t speak. Of course she knew; she’d iced and massaged his knee many times in the two years he’d played for England. The team physician had diagnosed stressed ligaments, and Lucy had agreed. An X-ray early on had shown nothing more serious. ‘I always assumed it was simply repetitive-strain injury,’ Khaled continued. ‘It was the easiest thing to believe—’
‘It was the diagnosis we gave,’ Lucy interjected quietly. She felt a sudden stab of guilt. If she had misdiagnosed Khaled, if the team physician had…
Briefly he touched her hand with his own, then removed it. ‘This is not your fault.’
Lucy said nothing, but the question ‘What isn’t my fault?’ seemed stuck in her throat and hovered silently in the air between them.
‘I didn’t tell you all my symptoms,’ Khaled explained, his voice heavy and quiet in the stillness of the evening air. ‘I ignored them myself. The severity, at least.’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s all past.’ He gave a sigh, raking his hand through his hair once more. ‘In the end, that final injury offered an unarguable diagnosis.’ He looked at her directly, bleakly honest. ‘I didn’t have a torn ligament, Lucy. I had loose fragments of my knee bone, of the patella.’
‘Osteochronditis dissecans,’ Lucy murmured. It must have begun after the X-ray, otherwise they would have picked it up. It was a rare condition, one she never would have thought of without more information, where the patella’s cartilage began to fragment and float. It was, she knew, very painful. ‘Still, it is treatable, with surgery—’
‘I had the surgery,’ Khaled interjected. ‘After my last injury. And that was when they diagnosed sudden onset of severe osteoarthritis. The osteochronditis had gone too far to be controlled.’
‘Hence the flare ups,’ Lucy murmured, silently adding, and the finished rugby career.
‘Yes.’ Khaled fell silent, and Lucy felt a ripple of frustration. He acted as though he’d explained everything, and she most certainly felt he had not.
‘I still don’t understand, Khaled,’ she said quietly, ‘why such a diagnosis would make you leave me in the way you did.’
Khaled averted his gaze as he spoke. ‘The doctor told me the arthritis would be degenerative, probably quickly so, because of my age and its severity. He gave me a year or two at most at my current mobility… Eventually I’d need a wheelchair.’
‘But you’re still walking,’ Lucy objected.
‘For now.’ He turned, smiling wryly, although there was a deep bleakness in his eyes reflected from his soul. ‘It’s only a matter of time, Lucy. And of course you need to know that…if you marry me. At some point I will most likely lose the ability to walk.’
‘At some point,’ Lucy repeated. ‘Have you had any X-rays since then?’
‘Yes, and the consultant admitted the damage was much less than he’d anticipated. But I still have the condition. That cannot be changed.’
Lucy was silent, trying to make sense of what he was saying. ‘You didn’t think to tell me this when you learned of it? When I was asking for you?’
‘I didn’t want to burden you with it,’ Khaled said, and a brusque note entered his voice. ‘I’ve seen what happens when someone is saddled with the long-term care of a loved one. I know it’s an impossible choice, and I didn’t want you to have to make it.’
‘But you should have let me,’ Lucy insisted quietly. ‘It was my right.’
‘And I considered it my right to keep the information to myself,’ Khaled returned, his voice sharpening.
Lucy shook her head, sorrow flooding through her. Her heart ached for Khaled four years ago—learning of such a devastating diagnosis—and for herself, longing to be with him. ‘I wanted to be with you,’ she said quietly. ‘Then. I would have stood by you, Khaled.’
‘I didn’t want your pity.’ Khaled jerked a shoulder. ‘I still don’t. I’ve learned to live with it, Lucy, but four years ago I couldn’t stand the thought of everyone I knew treating me with kid gloves, damning me with their mercy. Of you being that way. And if I’d told you, there would
