Chapter 16 #2
She stopped walking and squeezed her eyes closed against a wave of hopelessness.
The spectre of his offer was there, before her, an offensive shadow of what she wanted.
It was like being offered fat-free, dairy-free, sugar-free chocolate, when the real thing was right in front of you, covered in glass.
She could see what she wanted, but it was beyond reach.
A tear slid down her cheek, catching her off guard.
She dashed at it quickly, blaming pregnancy emotions.
“Ellie, are you talking to me?”
She frowned, pulling the phone from her ear and staring at the screen, then stifling a curse. This was the last thing she needed.
“Aaron,” she said, pulling it back to her ear. “I thought you were someone else.”
Silence crackled down the phone line.
“Look, Ellie,” he said on a sigh. “I spoke to your mother.”
Elodie felt a spark of disbelief. Had her mother really phoned Aaron after they’d left? She knew they were close. Aaron was like a son to her parents; she understood that. But they were still her parents. Their loyalty should have been to her. “She called you?”
“No. She mentioned, the other day, that you were coming home. I…called. To see how you were.”
Elodie closed her eyes on a wave of emotions too complex to navigate. “You could have called me.”
“I didn’t know if you’d answer.”
That was a fair consideration. If she’d seen it was Aaron just now, she might have screened the call. “I’m not sure we have anything left to talk about.”
“I want to see you.”
She opened her mouth, her heart twisting painfully. Another vision of counterfeit chocolate slid into her mind. So close to what she had once wanted, but now, not. “We’re leaving for Italy tomorrow.”
“Where are you now?”
“In London,” she said, without thinking.
“I can come to you tonight.”
She pressed a hand over her stomach, a feeling of helplessness washing over her.
Exhaustion was seeping into her bones. She looked around, a little disorientated.
It took her a moment to get her bearings, and then she turned, slowly walking towards Raf’s home, an ache beginning to spread from low in her back.
“That’s silly. It’s a long drive.”
“It’s worth it.”
Irritation was like a whip at her aching spine. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Face to face is better.”
“It’s really not.”
“Ellie, come on. You’re saying you won’t even give me five minutes?”
A tear slid down her cheek. “That is spectacularly unfair,” she pointed out. “You’re the one who ended things between us—,”
“I panicked. I wasn’t ready.”
“After almost ten years together? Four of them engaged? After I’d paid tens of thousands of pounds of my savings on wedding deposits for services we never used? You weren’t ready?”
Something panged in her stomach. A sense of hunger.
She’d picked at her mother’s biscuits, that afternoon, but their day had been too busy; she hadn’t eaten enough.
Even as she reassured herself, something was blaring in the back of her mind.
Worry started as a whisper, but moved quickly through her veins.
“I messed up.”
“What are you saying?”
“I made a mistake. I let the best thing in my life go, like it didn’t matter. I put you through hell, and you’re still in hell. Your life is messed up, and it’s my fault. I want to fix it.”
She stopped walking then, staring straight across the street. She was just a block or so away from Raf’s huge house. She sucked in a breath that tasted of the London street. “What do you mean?”
Did he really think her life was messed up? Did her parents? Is that what they talked about? Were they feeling sorry for her, after today’s visit?
“It means I want to marry you. Right now. We still have the license, we can do it this weekend. Just our families, you, me. Just like we talked about, right in the beginning.”
She started to feel dizzy, her skin clammy. It’s just panic, she told herself. Nothing serious. But she started to walk again, gripping the phone tightly, as though holding it was a talisman against anything awful happening.
“I can’t think about that right now.”
“Let me come to you, Ellie. We can meet at that Italian restaurant you always wanted to go to.”
But never had, because Aaron didn’t like garlic.
She squeezed her eyes shut, the past rolling towards her like an inescapable wave.
She needed to get back to Raf’s. When she’d left there over an hour earlier, it had been out of a desperate need to run away and clear her head.
Now? His home was her sanctuary, the place she needed to reach to know everything would be okay.
“I can’t talk right now, okay? I have to go.”
“Meet me at nine o’clock, Ellie. Please.”
“Don’t come to London. Promise me. It’s not worth it.”
“You’re worth everything. Everything.”
She disconnected the call before she could sob, or scream, down the line.
He heard her at the front door, a muffled curse and the sound of fumbling, so he gathered she was swiping her key fob and not having success. He cut through the corridor quickly, opening the door inwards. “Elodie, you’re back.”
But her skin was pale, covered in a sheen of perspiration. While it was a warm day, the sun was low now, and she wasn’t over-dressed.
“Excuse me,” she said, moving past him quickly, towards the stairs.
“Can we talk?”
She glanced over her shoulder and said something inaudible, her mobile phone clutched tightly in her hand.
“Elodie?” He didn’t mean his voice to sound so sharp.
He didn’t mean to sound angry with her. He wasn’t.
He was angry with himself, the whole situation, and he couldn’t fathom why, let alone articulate it.
But if they sat down and talked, looked into each other’s eyes, he knew the truth of their situation would wrap around them both, bringing calm to the storm he’d created with his marriage proposal.
“Can you give me a minute?” she muttered, but he heard her clear as a bell.
He stared after her retreating back, torn between following and doing as she’d asked.
Ultimately, of course, he opted for the latter.
He could have strong-armed Elodie into marriage from the beginning, except he hadn’t wanted to.
Not necessarily because the tactic had been abhorrent to him, but because he hadn’t wanted to get married again.
At any point, though, he could have pushed his hand, reminding her that he would fight for total custody of the baby unless she agreed to live with him. Marry him?
But he’d never wanted to force her to do anything that wasn’t right for her, and with regards to marriage, that felt particularly important. He’d already fundamentally changed the direction of her life by getting her pregnant. Wasn’t that enough?
“Raf!”
It wasn’t just the volume of her cry, though that split through the house like a bomb siren.
It was the tenor of her voice, the panic he heard, that had him breaking into a sprint, before he could even contemplate what was happening.
He took the stairs two at a time, turned the corner to where he’d heard her voice—her room.
Not his, he noted, in the back of his mind. But that didn’t matter.
“Elodie?”
She appeared at the door, her face even paler.
“I’m bleeding, Raf,” she whispered, but she might as well have hammered the words into his skull.
It was like a kaleidoscope of his past, his present, his fears, his trauma, all winding together, forming one awful, suffocating rope.
But that thought was only a fraction of a second.
His action was to reassure Elodie, who looked as though she were about to pass out.
“It’s okay,” he said, when he didn’t feel anything close to that.
He picked her up more gently than he would a two-day old, lifting her against his chest and staring down at her heartbroken face with something shifting inside of him that was impossible to contain.
“It’s okay,” he repeated, as he walked carefully down the stairs and towards the garage.
“It’s not okay. I shouldn’t have gone walking. I shouldn’t have left the house. I shouldn’t have—,”
“Hey,” he squeezed her hip lightly. “This isn’t your fault.”
If anything, it was his. He shouldn’t have upset her. He shouldn’t have pushed her. God, he hadn’t been treating her with any consideration of the pregnancy. They’d made love, travelled, lived like two normal people. He hadn’t done enough to protect her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, shaking her head, as tears fell from her eyes.
He didn’t want to hear her apology, he just wanted to get her to the hospital and one way or another, no matter what happened next, to be by her side to pick up the pieces from this.