Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Flora
One word, or at least a name, Sophie. That was all it had taken for Maurizio’s words and sentiments to come crashing down.
Watching him leave the car, leaving me behind him and approaching her had been hard.
Even harder had been watching them hug, seeing the couple they had once been, although their contact and affection was platonic rather than romantic, of that I was sure.
However, nothing could have prepared me for the children waking up a few seconds later to see their parents together and their excited cries of Mummy and Daddy were like daggers to my heart.
I couldn’t wait to be away from them. All of them.
My hasty exit involved a stumble from the car, the rubbing of my nerve induced sweaty palms down my thighs and an introduction to Sophie.
I don’t know how I might have expected Maurizio to introduce me, but this is Flora, the children’s nanny was not it.
I pushed down the voice in my head pointing out that those words were factual, accurate, no more, no less.
Instead, I told myself that the children’s nanny was all I was.
Maurizio’s kisses, words, and everything else we’d shared were long forgotten in that moment, perhaps forever.
I had never met this woman before. Her contact with the children had been non-existent, then infrequent and over the last few weeks, or even a couple of months, it had become a little more regular, but of course all arrangements were between Maurizio and her.
There was no need for me to know or be involved in any of that because it really was nothing to do with me, and yet, in this exact second, even that felt like the sudden unveiling of a red flag before my eyes, taunting me.
The children had run around their parents as if they were some kind of attraction or national treasure, which I suppose they were in their eyes.
That is when I noticed that at Sophie’s feet was a bag.
A suitcase. She had come home but where did that leave me, me and Maurizio?
That really was my cue to leave and with words I couldn’t remember, I began my departure, not stopping until I was running for the back door to my home, not the front door I imagined entering the house by just a matter of minutes before everything changed.
I had barely made it through the door when the first of my tears began to fall.
My phone was already in my hand and I was hitting my sister’s name on the screen.
Straight to voicemail. I didn’t want to startle her with a sobbing, messy message, so simply hung up and followed up with a quick text to the effect of ‘nothing important, catch you later’.
With Maddie out of the equation, I considered my friends, Bea and Carrie would be otherwise occupied after the baby shower and as if my hands had already got that memo, I found Ash’s name on the screen but before I could hit call, there was a knock on my door, the one from the house.
I reasoned it would only be one person until I prepared to open it and then panicked in case it was Sophie, but what would she want with me?
Would she want to introduce herself? Talk?
Warn me off? With a deep breath and nausea washing over me, I pulled the door back, revealing Maurizio.
He stood, gorgeous as ever even with the expression of concern he currently wore.
“Hey.” He was already stepping forward, preparing to enter. “Are you okay?”
It was obvious that I wasn’t, and I assumed my face was a little tearstained.
“You’ve been crying.”
“What do you want?” The authenticity of the impatience in my voice surprised me but the truth was that if he was coming to dump me or at least cool things between us, I needed to remain composed, and this was how I stood the greatest chance of achieving that.
“Hey,” he repeated, reaching for me. “This changes nothing between us regardless of what you’re thinking.”
“How? How can it not? Your wife has come home.”
“Ex-wife.” He corrected, as if that was the issue here.
“You’re divorced?” Okay so maybe that was an issue if I was hung up on that technicality too.
“Not yet—”
An exasperated growl leaving my mouth was my interruption not that Maurizio saw it as such.
“I have filed for divorce and Sophie has engaged her own solicitor to represent her. So, we are divorcing, we will be divorced, and it shouldn’t take long because we are both in agreement with it.”
“Why is she here?” At any other time, listening to him speak about his marriage being over and legal steps being taken to officially end it would have been music to my ears.
What did that say about me? I answered my own question and hoped I’d done so in my head and not aloud.
Because you love him. I sure as hell wasn’t going there or sharing that particular nugget of information with him.
Hell, I was brushing it under a carpet in my mind and had no plans to ever uncover it.
“For the children. She has been a mess. She knows that’s no excuse for isolating herself from them and she has been doing better with contact of late.”
I stared, astounded that he thought that was any kind of adequate explanation. “Why is she here, with a suitcase?”
“Ah . . .”
And there it was.
“She’s going to stay for a while, to reconnect properly with the children, and we need to go through some things regarding the divorce and the division of assets and the children.”
“And she can’t do that from whatever rock she’s crawled out from under?” I sounded a bitch and I didn’t care.
“You have nothing to be jealous of, Flora, this changes nothing between us.”
There was no prepared reply to that in my head and even as I opened my mouth, I was unsure what I was going to say, but then no words were spoken, not by me anyway.
“I have to go, the children are waiting, but once they are in bed, I can come up and we can chat.”
“The children and Sophie.” I stopped short of uttering the words your wife although they were on the tip of my tongue.
“The children,” he replied and reiterated with a much firmer tone.
A nod was my only reply.
“I’ll come back, okay?”
Another nod, and then he turned and left, leaving me alone with an entire catalogue of conflicting thoughts and feelings as well as more tears.
The seconds dragged into long minutes and they in turn stretched before me into hours filled with overthinking and an overwhelming sense of nervousness.
Should I call Maddie and talk it through?
She’d probably come down here and kick Maurizio hard in very delicate places for getting me in this state, although it was my own spiralling thoughts of scenarios that weren’t real and the imaginary fallout from them that currently had me crying and panicking.
What the hell was I going to do? There were only two real outcomes from this.
One where I got Maurizio, and one where I didn’t.
I suppose they were the two outcomes from any new relationship, but the difference here was that if I lost him, then I needed it not to be because Sophie got him.
The reality of working here with the children following a break-up now that I’d crossed the line with Maurizio would be bad enough, possibly impossible, but I would not be able to stay here and watch on as he rekindled his marital relationship before my eyes on a daily basis.
Surely, if they reconciled, I would be the last person Sophie would want to be here, in her home, with her children.
My head was spinning while my heart was hammering away in my chest so fast and hard that I swore I could feel it pumping in my veins. I had no clue how long I was going to have to wait for Maurizio to return, but I needed to calm down, even just a little.
We will be divorced and it shouldn’t take long because we are both in agreement with it.
That’s what he’d told me, and I was desperate to believe that, but what if they weren’t in agreement?
What if Sophie wanted to remain married and to live in the same house as her children on a permanent basis?
That was perfectly reasonable, at least the bit about the children anyway.
Or what if she wanted to give the impression of one big happy family.
I had no idea why anyone would want to do that, but my mind continued to create a whole new scenario to freak me out.
So, assuming she pitched the fake, happy marriage situation successfully, would she suggest that Maurizio and I could continue to see one another, perhaps on the understanding that we kept it locked down and behind closed doors?
Would she really expect me to stay on as the nanny by day and be no more than Daddy’s dirty little secret?
“What the hell is the matter with you?” My reflection in the bathroom mirror offered no reply as I washed my hands. “That is not real. That is not happening.”
Pacing back to the kitchen, I grabbed a half open bottle of wine and a glass and poured a drink.
A large one that I settled on the sofa with and called Ash rather than Maddie.
While both of them would listen, Ash was more likely to offer rational advice rather than threatening to cut Maurizio’s balls off.
I retold him the events of the day from arriving back at the house, not that I was sure I made sense, but when I finally came up for breath, his long, loud sigh suggested that he’d gotten the gist of what had happened.
“What does she want? Why is she back here? Have you spoken to Bea in case she has the inside track of this? Sorry, I’m rambling, but this is a real mind fuck!”
I chuckled, not that there was an ounce of amusement in this whole situation beyond the fact that Ash had asked the same questions I had asked myself.
“I have no clue. Hopefully, he will answer some of those questions when I see him later, oh, and I haven’t spoken to Bea, and if you do, don’t say anything, please. ”
“Of course not . . . His pause was barely that as he launched into another question. “What about Maddie, have you spoken to her?”
I explained my earlier call and subsequent message as I refilled my wine glass and checked the clock.
Half past nine, surely Maurizio would be here soon.
If he wasn’t there was a good chance that I’d be drunk.
The children would have normally been in bed by half seven so what was taking so long.
Presumably the children were taking longer than normal to settle due to the excitement of Mummy being home.
Just the thought of Sophie’s name and the word home in the same sentence made my head spin.
“Maybe we can meet up in the week, with the girls, and I might know more about this disastrous turn of events.”
“Yeah, keep me posted and I will round the gang up.”
The rap of a knock on the door startled me, but at least Maurizio had arrived.
“Sorry. I have to go, Maurizio’s here.”
For the second time that night, I opened the door and found the most attractive man I had ever seen standing before me; a smile, warm eyes and dark wavy hair damp from the shower.
He wore grey trackpants with a simple white t-shirt and bare feet that somehow Maurizio managed to make effortlessly glamorous, classy even.