Chapter Ten
It was a sledgehammer to Poppy’s chest.
‘You thought if you told me… I’d die?’
He looked at her for a tense, silent minute. ‘What worried you about telling your mother the truth?’
‘I wasn’t worried the truth would kill her.’
‘But you were,’ he rejected. ‘Not about causing her physical death,’ he conceded. ‘But the death of everything you were clinging to by not revealing your father’s secret. You were scared, Poppy. Scared the truth would hurt all those you cared for.’
Her heart stuttered.
Was he scared?
‘You were worried,’ he continued. ‘Worried if you revealed it, the world you were trying to hold together would crumble. So you held it together any way you could.’
The little girl inside Poppy who had wanted to tell her secret to someone, so she wouldn’t be alone.
He understood why she’d done what she’d done. However selfish her choices had been, he didn’t diminish the difficulty of those choices. But it didn’t explain his.
‘But you weren’t close to your dad,’ she countered.
‘I certainly wasn’t. His death, it would have changed…
nothing.’ She sucked in a loud, shuddering breath.
‘I’m sorry, that sounds so horrible. He was your dad, but he wasn’t.
Not in any way that meant anything, Konstantinos.
Not in a way that would have affected us. ’
‘I was worried, for you. So much death, Poppy. It had surrounded us. The threat of it. And then the reality of it,’ he admitted, and his emotive honesty, it rounded her eyes. Lowered her jaw.
He was scared.
‘I didn’t have a close bond with…him, but you were sick—fragile. I wasn’t prepared to risk another death—the proximity to it—would have broken you.’
‘You think I’m breakable?’ she whispered.
‘Not when we met,’ he replied. ‘But you changed… After…’ His neck corded. ‘I saw your fragility then.’
‘I was grieving.’ A soundless sob clung to the inside of her throat. ‘It would have changed you, too, if you’d accepted Isaak was part of our lives.’
‘He wasn’t. There was nothing to accept,’ he said again as if it was a mantra. A coping mechanism to trick his brain to respond to the repeated statement. As if he was making himself believe it was true. As if Isaak’s short time in their lives hadn’t affected them.
It had.
Her chest burned. ‘How can you be so…cold?’
His jaw ticked. ‘He was gone, Poppy.’
Poppy stared at him. His eyes not vacant, but haunted.
Was he haunted by their son, too? The what-ifs and maybes of what could have been?
Secretly, beneath his public and personal persona, did he hurt too?
Had she missed the signs? Her brow furrowed.
There had been no signs. A shadowed look meant nothing. Did it?
‘You just carried on as if life was normal. As if nothing had changed,’ she said prompting him to change his mantra. Prompting him to be honest.
‘Nothing had changed, but you refused to move on from a situation that didn’t exist any more,’ he dismissed, as if her grief had been nothing. But it had been everything. Grief had riddled her bones, and yet he…
He was pure stone. Impenetrable. Immovable.
‘How can you sit there talking about our son—Isaak—as if he didn’t change everything? As if he didn’t change us?’
His shoulders rose. Exposing the hard lines of him. His unbreakable body. Not an ounce of fat. Just muscle and sinew. Strong. Powerful.
She wasn’t like him. Her body was soft, and she was all too aware of that softness now. The juxtaposition of her body—her internal self—compared to his.
‘My mother’s death broke me,’ he confessed.
‘Inside I was a mess. My father didn’t let the mess spill out.
He made me keep it hidden. My grief. He thought that would make me strong.
And he was right. If I hadn’t panicked when my mother walked into the sea—I could have saved her.
If I didn’t love her, I would not have gone into the water after her.
If I had kept my emotions—my feelings—out of the situation I could have saved her.
I had to be strong when he died. I am strong, Poppy, because I do not feel.
I do not love. Because when life hurts—I know I can be strong for you.
I was strong when Isaak died, because you couldn’t be.
Because you felt too much,’ he said. ‘I did my duty. I did it all because you couldn’t,’ he continued.
‘You were just like my mother, and I… I needed to protect you as I hadn’t protected her. ’
Her eyes rounded. ‘What?’
‘My mother, she was always so sad. Sad about…everything. Her mental health…her mind…it was broken. She didn’t function.
She couldn’t care for herself. She could not brush her hair.
I brushed it. She would not eat. I fed her.
And you…seeing you so broken, Poppy. I wouldn’t let you disappear completely as she did. ’
She shifted, brought her bottom to the edge of the cushion and glared at him. ‘I wasn’t broken, Konstantinos. I was depressed. A medical condition I got help for. Help I no longer need.’
‘But you did need it. Help I couldn’t give you.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. She wasn’t ashamed of the deep depression she’d fallen into. ‘But I also needed you to be there for me, and you put me in another bed—on the other side of the monastery. You left me alone, Konstantinos.’
His gaze flicked to hers and held. ‘You pushed me away before the pregnancy was even deemed a risk.’
‘We both struggled with the news of the pregnancy, Konstantinos,’ she admitted. ‘I’m aware of the gulf between us… It started then, but it came from you, too. You distanced yourself from me.’
And it had started the day she’d told him about Isaak.
Three times she’d taken the pregnancy test before she’d told him.
She’d watched the pink lines appear, and turn from a faint pink to an almost vivid red.
And those red lines had slashed through the foundations of their relationship.
Torn them in two, until they had stood alone, so far apart from each other, and from what they had been.
Friends.
She’d started to prep for Isaak’s arrival—rounding corners, placing guards in front of marble fireplaces.
He’d watched her planning and executing changes to the monastery with narrowed eyes.
He’d stopped coming to bed with her growing bump.
He’d stopped talking to her.
He’d stopped wanting her.
Their friendship had failed because it was only based on the good times. It wasn’t a friendship at all if it couldn’t hold up with the strain of reality, she realised.
‘I was there for you,’ he continued, ‘in the only way I could be useful. Emotions…they only confuse things. Make people irrational. My mother… I didn’t know it when I was a child.
I thought it was just…her. But she was depressed.
Sick. My presence didn’t help her. She needed a doctor. She needed more than me.’
‘That’s how you knew I needed help?’ she asked. She’d thought it was just grief that kept her in bed, or staring unseeing out of the window. It had been Konstantinos who had called the doctor.
‘I recognised the signs.’ His chest lifted with a sharp intake of breath. ‘But I did not abandon you,’ he rejected. ‘I employed people. Everyone you needed. You were never alone. All the help you required was at your disposal.’
Her bottom lip trembled. ‘I needed…you,’ she confessed, because she had. Despite their rules. No emotions. No love…
‘You didn’t want me close. You wanted to focus on the baby. I provided everything for you to do it safely. And then when he was gone you were different, and I didn’t know how to help you. Other than to be strong for you.’
‘I couldn’t tell you how I felt because you didn’t want to hear it. You never did, and I didn’t know how to tell you I was lonely. So lonely with you standing right beside me,’ she admitted raggedly.
Konstantinos radiated tension. Every line of his body a tightly coiled spring.
‘I wasn’t what you needed to recover. I employed people,’ he continued. ‘People who could help bring you back. People who hadn’t been called for my mother. They helped you.’
Was that what he’d been afraid of? Had he dealt with his grief through action? Had he buried his loss—his pain—trying to fix her? Had he been afraid that if he’d stopped, he’d crumble?
Action, planning for the birth of her son, it had given her strength. Momentum. Even on bedrest, the planning hadn’t stopped. Her mind had been in action. But when Isaak died…
She’d crumbled.
‘But when I found out about my father, it wasn’t a decision I took lightly not to tell you.
’ His hands clamped together. ‘But you could barely speak,’ he continued thickly.
‘You were barely alive… The past gives us choices, Poppy. We can use what happened to us before—in the past—to make different choices. But if we choose to do things differently, we must respond accordingly. We must demand different outcomes. And I demanded it would not be the same with you. It would be different.’
‘Different?’
‘My mother, she committed suicide.’
Her eyes blew wide. She knew that his mother had died. She knew it had just been his father, when Konstantinos was a teen, but she hadn’t known that.
‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that.
Her…suicide.’ She shook herself. Tried to clear her mind, focus in on what he was telling her and why.
But she couldn’t understand it. All these words he said that had nothing to do with them.
‘But what does your mother’s death have to do with you not telling me about your dying father? ’
‘It has everything to do with it. Just as you running from me—away from our marriage—had everything to do with yours.’ He dipped a too tight shoulder. ‘I was responsible for my mother. I knew she couldn’t help it. It was my job to protect her. Even from herself.’
‘That was your dad’s job.’
‘He wasn’t there. I was. I watched my mother walk into the sea and I couldn’t save her.’