Chapter 10
After a fitful sleep, Peyton woke the next morning with the craving to eat everything in her pantry trumping the dire urge to empty her bladder. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken with biological matters taking such urgent precedence.
Usually she had to fight herself out of a thick shroud of grief that seemed to pounce in her sleep, steel herself to face the day for McKenzie’s sake. But this morning she was so hungry none of that registered.
She would have eaten the sheets had she been tied to the bed.
Even the yammering knowledge of her pregnancy that had kept her tossing and turning all night paled in comparison to her hunger. She felt like a grizzly bear coming awake after a long winter’s hibernation.
The doorbell rang as Peyton passed it and she checked her watch. Seven-thirty. A little early for her parents to be here. McKenzie, unusually, was still sound asleep. Peyton had checked on her twice already.
Opening the door, she was greeted by the sight of Valentino standing there with bloodshot eyes and his hair looking as if it had been raked rather than styled.
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him to leave – she was too hungry to go another round – when she spied the brown bakery bag under his arm.
‘Oh, God.’ She whisked the bag off him at the same time a waft of yeasty goodness reached her nose. Her mouth watered. ‘Come in,’ she ordered, turning on her heel as she opened the bag and the aroma of warm, freshly baked croissants hit her olfactory system.
Peyton was in the kitchen, tearing chunks off a croissant and stuffing them into her mouth, when Valentino joined her, lounging casually in her doorway.
She wasn’t sure if it was the morning light or the sugar rush but despite his red eyes and dishevelled hair he looked pretty good there in his dark trousers and crisp white business shirt, sans tie and open at the throat.
‘Sit.’ She gestured to the stool opposite as she stuffed the last piece of her croissant into her mouth. She turned and retrieved some plates from the cupboard behind her and placed a croissant on each one, pushing his towards him.
She nodded at the side counter. ‘Coffee percolator if you want one.’
He grimaced. ‘Not even if I was dying,’ he said dryly.
Peyton laughed. She actually laughed at the disdain on his face. ‘Snob.’ And then she tore some off her second croissant and devoured it. ‘God, this is good.’
She sighed deeply as she licked her fingers, Valentino’s gaze turning liquid hot as he stared at her mouth and the wet glide of her fingers. The heat poured over Peyton like a physical caress, which only seemed to make her hungrier.
‘Your appetite has returned, I see.’
‘I’m so hungry,’ she admitted, around another mouthful.
‘Pleased I could be of service. I’ll bring more.’
Peyton should tell him not to, but she was too engrossed with the third croissant to really concentrate on what he was saying. Grabbing it off the plate, she brought it to her lips before abruptly realising it wasn’t hers to devour. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. This is yours.’ She placed it back on the plate.
He chuckled. ‘Take it.’
‘No, no.’ Peyton shook her head even as the flaky pastry called to her like a mermaid luring sailors onto the rocks.
Picking it up, he offered it with a smile. ‘I wouldn’t dream of depriving you, bella.’
Peyton was salivating so hard she gave him a pass on the bella. ‘I’m being super greedy, aren’t I?’
Valentino shook his head. ‘I could watch you eat all day,’ he murmured, and passed the croissant slowly beneath her nose. ‘Besides, you’re eating for two now, remember?’
Peyton made a grab for the pastry on his second pass. Not even the reminder of her predicament, their predicament, overrode her stomach’s demands.
Maybe the decision she’d made in the night made everything a little easier.
She sank her teeth into it, the flakes of soft, velvety pastry melting as they hit her tongue. She sighed again and shut her eyes. ‘Mmmm.’
When Peyton opened them again, it was to Valentino offering her some paper towel and saying, ‘We need to talk.’
Valentino almost groaned as her pink tongue ran thoroughly back and forth over her lips, swiping at the pastry flakes clinging to their wet contours before dabbing at her mouth with the towel like a proper society matron.
Like she hadn’t just done a good impression of sexy cookie monster or licked her lips like a porn star.
How was he supposed to have a serious conversation when all he wanted to do was feed her the rest of the croissant with his teeth?
‘So,’ he said, trying to rest his thoughts and get the ruckus in his underpants back under control. ‘The baby. You said you needed time to think. I don’t know about you but I’ve thought of little else since yesterday afternoon.’
Nodding reluctantly, she murmured, ‘Same.’ Her gaze dropped to the paper towel she was fiddling with and Valentino got a very bad feeling. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually, her voice low as she lifted her gaze, finding his and locking. ‘I just don’t think I can have this baby.’
A white-hot spike stabbed into his temple, and Valentino opened his mouth to protest but she cut it off with a placating gesture of her hand. ‘Please, just hear me out, okay?’ She slipped off the stool. ‘I want to show you something.’
Valentino followed Peyton into the living room, his anger simmering. If she thought he would sit by and let her decide the outcome for their baby then she was sorely mistaken. He would not let another woman take another child away.
‘Sit,’ she ordered.
He sat and watched her, his thoughts swirling and brooding inside like a gathering storm. She opened a cupboard beneath some bookshelves and pulled out what appeared to be a photo album. Standing there for a moment, she ran her forefinger over the front cover before returning to sit by his side.
Her hands trembled as she passed him the album, her fingers lingering as if clearly reluctant to surrender the object. Her eyes found his once again. ‘I’ve never shown this to anyone before.’
Valentino nodded. He could see her qualms swirling like fog in her big grey eyes, and he felt her resistance when he tried to take the album. Her struggle was painful to watch and he could see it took a lot for her to finally let it go.
‘I’m honoured,’ he murmured.
His gaze fell on the window cut out of the cover. It was a close-up of a tiny baby with blue eyes and crisscrossed with tubes and wires. The only way to even tell the gender was from the tiny pink knitted cap. The little girl was clasping an adult finger in the foreground that dwarfed her hand.
‘This is Daisy?’
Peyton nodded. ‘Yes.’
Valentino hesitated. Even though she’d yielded the album to him it felt like he needed to ask her permission. ‘May I?’
She took a shaky breath and nodded and Valentino opened the cover. He did it slowly, reverently, recognising how precious it was to Peyton and grateful that she had entrusted him with these painful memories.
The first page was a picture of Daisy again all wired up in a humidicrib. The caption beside it told Valentino that she was four hours old.
‘They were twenty-seven-weekers, yes?’
Peyton nodded. ‘Daisy was eight hundred and fifty-nine grams. McKenzie was twelve hundred.’
Ah. That explained a lot. Premature babies born under one kilo had the odds truly stacked against them.
Valentino flipped slowly through the pages, taking great care to linger over each photo with the reverence it deserved.
Every picture chronicled Daisy’s battle and ever-increasing medical support.
The pages were pale pink and decorated with pretty stickers, silky ribbons and baby-themed cut-outs.
Every effort had been made to present Daisy as a baby, a precious gift, cherished and loved.
‘It’s a beautiful album,’ he murmured.
‘My mother made it for me after…’
Valentino didn’t push her to complete the sentence. ‘She obviously took a great deal of care with it.’
‘Mum’s very good at craftwork. She does all her own stationery and cards.’
Towards the end, the pictures became more medicalised until there were more tubes than baby. ‘She had several chest tubes, I see.’
‘She kept blowing pneumothoraxes towards the end. Her chronic neonatal lung disease was so bad they’d maxed out all their treatment options. They just… couldn’t ventilate her.’
Valentino didn’t say anything. What was there to say? It must have been agony to watch. In fact, it was written all over Peyton’s face in the photos of her holding Daisy. The album wasn’t just a timeline of Daisy’s life but a startling map of Peyton’s grief.
‘They withdrew treatment?’
‘Yes. She’d suffered so much.’ The anguish in Peyton’s voice, even after three years, sounded incredibly raw. ‘We couldn’t ask any more of her.’
The ‘we’ soon became evident as Valentino turned to the second to last page. A photo of a blond man looking down at Daisy, his hand resting against her ever-present woollen cap, gave him pause. ‘Your husband?’
Peyton nodded. ‘Arnie.’
‘When did he…’
‘Two days after Daisy’s funeral.’
Valentino gripped the edges of the album. He’d been given the Cliff Notes version of Peyton’s backstory by Alessandro and Nat but the scumbag leaving two days after he’d buried his child had not been covered.
How could he do that? How could he walk away from his grieving wife and his other little girl? What kind of a man did that?
‘Do you have contact with him? Does McKenzie see him?’
Was that one of the other factors that Peyton had to consider? Was she still carrying a candle for him? Surely not? But they’d both been through a profoundly shattering experience together and, he assumed, they had loved each other at some stage.
And misery did make strange bedfellows.
Peyton snorted. ‘The only correspondence I’ve had from Arnie since the day I begged him not to leave has been through his lawyer during the divorce settlement.’