Kyriakou Bank. I had—and still have—no intention of taking money from you, or depriving whatever number of illegitimate children you fathered before, or since, your imprisonment of any child support.’
‘There are no other children,’ he ground out. ‘When I...when I was arrested certain...women sought me out, claiming that I had fathered numerous children unrelated to me.’ Their sordid attempts at extortion had snuffed out the last little flame of hope he’d had in human decency. To use a child in such a way was horrific to him. In total four women had jumped on the wrong bandwagon, assuming he’d pay for their silence. But none of them, neither his two ex-girlfriends nor the two strangers who had claimed an acquaintance with him, had realised that he would never, never let a child of his disappear from his life. Dimitri resisted the urge to reach out to Anna. ‘I swear to you. There were no other women, no other children.’
‘And I’m supposed to just believe you?’ Her scorn cut him to the quick. ‘So, this is your lawyer? Tell me, Mr Lawyer, what would the courts say to a man who turns up at ten thirty at night making false accusations of alcoholic behaviour, costing me three bookings and irreconcilable damage to my professional reputation, threatening to take my daughter away from me and trying to blackmail me?’
And, finally, it was then that their daughter started to cry.
‘You’re making her upset,’ Dimitri accused.
‘No, you are,’ she returned.
Feeling the ground beneath him start to slip further, Dimitri pressed on, ignoring his own internal warning bell.
‘It’s neither here nor there. You need to pack. Get your things—we’re leaving,’ he commanded. Even to his own ears he sounded obtuse. But he couldn’t help it. It was this situation...his childhood memories clawing their way up from the past and into the present making him rash, making him desperate.
‘I’m not going anywhere and I really will call the police if you try to force me. You clearly don’t know the first thing about parenting if you’re expecting it to be okay to just upend a child at ten thirty at night.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ he heard himself shout, immediately regretting his loss of control. Nothing about this situation had gone as he’d intended and that there was a grain of truth in her last accusation struck him deeply.
David shifted in the hallway, drawing their attention.
‘My recommendation is to sleep on this a little. Clearly there has been a series of misunderstandings and we each need time to reflect on the new information we all have. Dimitri, we should take the car back to Dublin and return in the morning.’
‘I’m not leaving my daughter,’ Dimitri growled.
‘Ms Moore, is this something that you are happy to accommodate?’
Dimitri almost couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to gauge her reaction. When he’d walked into this, he’d been so sure. Sure of his plan, of his information, of the situation. Yet the moment she’d revealed that she wasn’t Mary, but Anna, he knew she wasn’t lying. He’d felt the truth of it settle about his shoulders and, looking at it now, he was relieved. The woman who had given birth to his daughter wasn’t an alcoholic. Hadn’t been arrested. The woman he’d slept with and spent years dreaming about... Layers and layers of cloudy images began to shift, and when he opened his eyes he looked at Anna and they became clear.
Anna was looking down at her daughter, rocking her gently in her arms as she settled their child, making soothing noises that seemed to satisfy the girl...his daughter. And he held his breath before her pronouncement. He felt, rather than heard, her sigh.
‘I’ll put him in one of the recently vacated rooms. I’m not comfortable with the way he’s done things.’ It irked him that she was directing her conversation to David rather than him, but he had to be fair. It was justified after the accusations he’d hurled at her. And Dimitri knew a thing or two about wrongful accusations. ‘But we do,’ she continued, ‘need to talk and figure out where we go from here.’
Dimitri followed David out to the car, assuring David that he wasn’t such a monster as to cause harm or fear to his daughter or the mother of his child, especially given that she was clearly not the woman he had thought from the report. He took several deep breaths of cool night air before returning to the small bed and breakfast. Peeking into empty rooms on the ground floor, he felt like a trespasser in his daughter’s home and hated it.
He followed the soothing sounds of a gentle lullaby that contrarily only fuelled the anger within him. How many nights had he missed the simple pleasure of putting his daughter to bed, knowing that she was safe, cared for...loved? He paused on the threshold of a dusky-pink room, gently lit by a softly glowing night light.
Dimitri looked at the nearly sleeping child in the crib. She was peaceful and angelic. He knew that was a cliché, but he couldn’t think of any other words to describe his daughter. It was the first time he’d really seen her, not hidden by the shoulder of a stranger or buried in her mother’s arms. Her skin was dark, like both her parents’, but the eyes—they were his. He knew that Anna hadn’t seen him yet, her body hadn’t stiffened the way it had every single time he’d come within a foot of her. But she was far from relaxed, and he deeply regretted that their adult emotions had come to interfere with his child’s sleep.
* * *
How had this mess happened? She’d been shocked by Dimitri’s accusations, his presence...all of it. For nineteen months, she’d forced herself to abandon the hope that he might come for her. The hope that her daughter wouldn’t grow up feeling that same sense of rejection that felt almost a solid part of Anna. But that was the thing—Anna’s father hadn’t just been absent, it wasn’t a passive thing...he had walked away. Had actively chosen to leave her and her mother behind.
She pushed at the adrenaline still pounding through her veins, desperately fighting the need to flee. Instead, she clung to the words she’d spoken to the lawyer. They really did need to find a way forward, now that he knew about Amalia, now that he claimed to want their child. Wasn’t that what she’d dreamed of when she first reached out to him? Never would she have chosen to raise her daughter without a father in her life...the way she had been raised.
As Anna watched her daughter in the crib, she marvelled at how she’d got so big. She was twenty-seven months old and before lying down on the soft mattress Amalia had held on to the bars and looked at Anna with big brown eyes. Anna had reached out and smoothed a soft curl of hair from Amalia’s forehead. She’d bent down and whispered a promise to her child.
‘It will be okay, sweetheart. It will.’ She’d hoped that she wasn’t lying.
Anna waited until she heard the sounds of her daughter’s breathing slow. She waited until she knew she couldn’t put it off any more and turned to leave the room.
But Dimitri stood in the doorway.
How many times had she imagined him standing there? How many times, during Amalia’s sleepless nights, the teething, the crying...the times when Anna had been so exhausted she couldn’t even weep? What would she have given to see him standing there, a support, a second hand, anything to help take away some of the weight of being a single parent?
But when she’d heard the lawyer—the assistant, as she now knew—dismiss her claims as one of the many women who had called Dimitri, she’d realised that she hadn’t known Dimitri at all. The disbelief and incredulity in Tsoutsakis’s
