The Midnight Estate #3
color was already fading. She looked painfully young, and it struck Silas that in some ways, he had a child under his wing
in Marie, rather than another adult who needed some assistance.
“How old are you?” he asked her, but as soon as the words flew out of his mouth, he realized it was an especially odd way
to greet someone first thing in the morning.
“I just turned twenty,” she said, raising her chin. So she was a full ten years younger than Maeve. He was glad he hadn’t
known the age discrepancy for sure when he smuggled Marie onto an international flight with Maeve’s passport.
But that settled it. He’d come up with an idea overnight, but it was almost as crazy as the steps they’d taken together so
far, and he’d spent the whole morning trying to talk himself out of it. But she was twenty years old, for God’s sakes. He couldn’t just abandon her.
“Are you feeling better today?”
“I slept well,” she said. “I don’t know how, considering my life is basically over.”
“Let’s keep in mind what’s important—he’ll never find you. Not here, in Australia.”
“I’m not even sure he knows Australia exists,” she muttered. “But where am I going to go, Silas? I can’t rely on you forever.”
Over breakfast, he laid out her options.
“You’re twenty years old and you’re pregnant. You’re married, yes, but Maeve wasn’t. So we don’t have a wedding certificate
with your new name on it.” He dropped his voice. “I don’t want to scare you, but something you need to keep in mind is that
here in Australia, young women who find themselves pregnant often do not have a lot of choices.”
“Wh-what does that mean?” she whispered. Silas noticed she was twisting the rings around the fourth finger on her left hand.
“They call them mother-and-baby homes. The women stay there for the duration of their pregnancies and I’ve heard that the
babies are taken, sometimes right after birth. They’re then adopted into other families whether the mother likes it or not.”
“I don’t even know if I can raise this baby on my own,” Marie said, her eyes filling with tears. “Maybe it would be for the best if someone else cares
for it.”
“What will be for the best is if you have time and space to make that decision for yourself,” Silas said before carefully
adding, “but if we aren’t very careful here, you could end up in one of those homes, Marie, and then the choice will be made
for you. We can’t let that happen. There’s another option, but I’m just not sure . . .”
“Please. Just tell me what I should do.”
“I’ll take you home with me,” he said, and her eyes widened.
“But won’t your wife—”
“And there’s something I haven’t told you. Christine and I going through a rough patch. So the truth is, even if you come back to Forbes with me, she won’t be there. She’s been staying with her mother, a few minutes’ drive away.”
“Oh.”
Her voice was so small that Silas was tempted to leave it at that—but through those long hours overnight, he had already realized
that Marie had no real choice but to come with him, to travel across the mountains and to his country home. He had to be honest
with her.
“I can’t lose her, Marie. I just can’t. She’s my whole world. And I am worried that if I bring you home to live with me—which
I am happy to do as I suspect it’s the best option here—there will be unintended consequences for the both of us. We have
to proceed very carefully here.”
“What does that mean?”
“People will think it’s improper for us to stay together because you are not my wife. My wife might think it’s improper for you to stay with me. Unless . . .”
“Unless?”
“Christine never met Maeve,” he said. “She’s only ever seen a very old photo of her that I had with me when I first came here,
and that was taken when we were children.”
“You can’t lie to your wife, Silas,” she whispered. “I can’t ask you to do that for me.”
“I’m asking you to do this for me,” he admitted heavily. “My marriage is a mess, Marie. I suspect it’s a mess of my own making and I need time to figure that
out. I can’t risk going home to her right now and telling her that I want to fix things, but in the same breath, announcing
that I happened to bring a beautiful young woman from America with me and I’m moving her into my house.”
“But once you do reconcile, she’ll be so angry . . . !”
“Once you’ve had your baby—”
“Once I’ve had the baby?” she repeated, shocked. “Silas, you’ve already flown me across the world, now you’re talking about supporting me for months!”
“There’s no way forward for you here without me supporting you for months, except those mother-and-baby homes, and I won’t
let that happen to you. I didn’t rescue you from the frying pan only to throw you into the fire!”
They sat in the restaurant at the hotel and talked for over an hour, but there was just no other solution to be found. And
so, they piled their suitcases back onto his VW, and turned the car towards Forbes. Marie would continue to use Maeve’s name
for the foreseeable future, and Silas was going to have to help her convince the world that she was a widow.