thing, though. Sam was very pretty. But she was sweet too.
With a proud smile, she nodded. ‘She’s a lovely girl. She’s studying social work at university. It’s always been her ambition to help people.’
‘You must have raised her well.’
‘Oh, no. It’s all her own doing. Even as a toddler she was like that. At kindergarten she used to get terribly upset if one of the other children fell and scraped a knee. Empathy. That’s her strongest trait.’
It felt so good to talk about her kids. Her fellow students were barely older than Sam and Kyle and had no interest whatsoever in her maternal ramblings. But Jacques didn’t seem bored.
He gave her an encouraging nod as she brought up a picture of Kyle. She turned the phone to face him.
‘He does not look so much like you.’
‘He looks just like his father did at the same age.’
Shane had been just the opposite of Jacques. Taller, and lanky. His limbs had seemed too long for him at school and he’d never really grown into them. Blond, with a serious face. It was the seriousness that had attracted her to him in the first place. He was different from the other boys at school.
Jacques gave her a curious look. ‘You said you had been married? You are no longer…?’
‘I was married to Shane for twenty years. Till he died. Three years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘He’d been ill for a long time.’ She took a sip of coffee.
After a pause, he said, ‘Three years is not such a long time. You must miss him still.’
‘Oh, I do.’ Yes, she missed Shane, and she always would, but she no longer woke during the night shocked to find he wasn’t there. She hadn’t done that for months now. She’d even taken her wedding ring off, and tucked it away safely in her jewellery box at home. She was getting used to being alone. ‘I do miss having him there to talk to about the kids, and to make plans with. Though, to be honest, we hadn’t really made any plans for a long time.’
She stopped for another sip of coffee.
‘Tell me about your son,’ Jacques said.
This brought a smile to her face again as she looked up, and she guessed that had been his intention.
‘He’s great too, but in a very different way from Samantha. He’s such a boy.’ Then, not sure that Jacques would understand what she meant, she went on. ‘He loves action movies and football and off-road driving with his mates. He drives Sam to distraction. When they were kids he used to torment her with creepy crawlies and the like, but he thinks the world of his sister and wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.’
Physically, at least, she thought. There was nothing Kyle or she could do to stop Sam being hurt by people who took advantage of her soft heart, as they’d discovered already.
Sighing, she lifted her head to look into Jacques’ brown eyes. ‘And what about you? Married? Children?’
He hesitated, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet. After opening it, he gazed at it for a moment before turning it so that Leonie could see two photos. ‘My son. Antoine.’
She leaned forward to get a better look, and saw a boy who obviously had Jacques’ genes. ‘Oh, gosh, he looks just like you.’
And being in his father’s arms made it that much more obvious. But as she had the thought she also registered that he was kind of big to be carried by his father.
Shifting her eyes to the second picture, she saw the reason. In this one, Antoine was on his own, and in a wheelchair.
She looked up. ‘He’s cute. How old is he?’
‘Ten. These photos were taken a year ago.’
She nodded. ‘And the wheelchair?’ She could have ignored it, but that wasn’t in her nature. Her question was straightforward because she wanted to know the answer.
‘Spina bifida. He has no feeling in his legs.’
‘I see.’
‘And to answer your other question…’ Jacques paused, and put his wallet away before continuing ‘…I was married. Antoine’s mother left while he was still very young. We were divorced twelve months later.’
Leonie’s jaw dropped and for a moment she stared at him. ‘She left?’
He nodded. ‘She couldn’t cope.’
‘Couldn’t cope? But surely you could have got help?’
‘Yes, yes.’ He waved a hand. ‘It wasn’t the work involved, it was…’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘She was a perfectionist. Everything in her life had to be one-hundred-per-cent perfect. In her eyes, Antoine was…defective.’
‘Defective?’ She spluttered the word, then pursed her lips for a moment. ‘Oh, my, I think it was better that she did leave if that was her attitude.’
‘Exactly.’
Leonie blew out a breath. ‘So, is it just you and him now?’
‘We live with my mother and my brother. It wouldn’t be practical for the two of us to live alone. Some aspects of Antoine’s care require more than one pair of hands, especially now that he is growing older and heavier. I couldn’t manage him on my own, and, besides, I have to work.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘At the risk of sounding…what is the word? Soppy. He is the most important thing in my life.’
‘It’s not soppy. I mean, yes, that’s the right word, but I understand completely. Like I said, I came very close to going home because I miss my two so much.’
‘What stopped you?’
Would he be shocked to hear that he had? Probably, but it was true. Not because she had any silly ideas about him, just because it had done her heaps of good to make a connection, however small, with another human being. It was such a relief to know that she didn’t have to spend her entire stay feeling lonely.
‘I didn’t want to give up on the course.’ That was true too. ‘I might not be very good at it, but I do want to improve. It’s supposed to be a really good course. It uses all the latest audio-visual methods, and language labs and so on, but I just feel left behind.’
He made a sympathetic sound.
‘Maybe it’s an age-related thing. If I was younger, I might be more receptive to it. I studied French at high school and I did quite well there, so I thought I’d be able to pick it up quickly. But that was a long time ago, and I was wrong.’
She sighed. ‘I wish I could speak it as well as you speak English.’
‘I’m sure you will, but it takes real-life practice.’
