The Midnight Estate #7
and furniture and various items she deemed essential, but Marie had politely accepted all of this and set it untouched into
one of the spare bedrooms in the eastern wing. He’d tried to talk to her about this but she just kept telling him she didn’t
feel ready and there was plenty of time.
Silas sighed heavily and reached for the envelope from the lawyer back in California. Inside was a large cheque and a letter,
advising him that both his mother’s apartment and his childhood home had found buyers. The last item in the envelope was a
photo of his mother’s and sister’s graves.
When he’d asked for a photo, Silas assumed that seeing it would give him some closure. He hadn’t realized back then that someone
else would be walking around using Maeve’s name as her own. Not in a million years had he imagined that he’d lose his sister
only to immediately adopt a replacement in her place.
“Silas,” Mae said suddenly. She’d thrown open his study door without knocking, maybe for the first time ever. He dropped the photo to his desk and he shot to his feet, startled.
“What is it?” Her face was blanched with pain and she was squeezing her hands into fists, then releasing them, over and over.
“Mae?”
She suddenly gave a groan of pain and stumbled forward until she was leaning over his writing desk. Silas swore under his
breath and moved to gingerly touch her back.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked her when the groaning eased and she straightened, panting for breath and pale
as a ghost. She avoided his gaze. “Marie!”
“A few hours,” she whispered. Silas looked at her and she started to cry. “Since yesterday. Yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning?”
“It only started getting bad a few hours ago.”
Silas shoved the paperwork from the lawyer beneath his notebooks. He slid his arm around her waist and led her to the door.
“I don’t want to go the hospital,” she whimpered. “I don’t want them to take her away. I know I told you I wasn’t sure I could
raise her but I can, Silas, I can. I already love her. Please don’t let them take her from me.”
“Don’t worry,” Silas muttered. “I’m going to take care of you both.”
“But I don’t understand,” Christine said a few days later. Silas was sitting with her at Meg’s kitchen table. Ernest was lying
beneath the table, playing with a metal truck. “Why did the baby come so early? Is she really okay?”
“The doctors said it was just one of those things.” Silas shrugged. He’d just returned from the hospital, where he’d visited Marie and her new daughter. “And Mae was just lucky that the baby was on the large side. She’s early but she’s doing fine.”
Christine gave him a look then, and he knew that she had seen through their lies about the timeline of Marie’s baby’s conception
and birth. It didn’t really matter—Christine would be the last person to judge Mae for enjoying her marital bed before her
wedding night. Silas could personally vouch for the fact that Christine herself had done the very same thing.
The lie he didn’t want Christine to see through was the other one he’d told her—that there were complications, and the little hospital in Forbes
had immediately sent Mae an hour and a half away, to the larger maternity unit in the regional city of Orange.
Christine did know a few nurses at their local hospital, but the town wasn’t so small that she knew all of them.
He was hopeful she’d never learn that Marie had never actually attended the Forbes hospital at all.
“And you’re sure we can’t go over and meet the baby in the maternity ward?” Christine asked, for maybe the tenth time, as
she was desperately keen to meet her new niece.
“Like I told you,” Silas said, as patiently as he could manage. “They said no visitors yet. I’ve been sneaking in but only
because she doesn’t have anyone else here to keep an eye on her. I’ll let you know when that changes.”
And that would be when she was released to come home.
“She called the baby Cynthia, you said on the phone?”
“That’s right. Cynthia Maeve.”
“She gave the baby her own name as a middle name?” Christine frowned. “How unusual.”
Silas felt his throat tighten, just as it had when Marie first told him what she planned to name her daughter. I owe my life to her, it’s only right.
“It’s a family name,” Silas said, as lightly as he could manage.
“And what was Maeve’s husband’s name?”
Silas had been expecting this question. Everyone knew the husband’s name was the default surname for a baby.
“It was West,” Silas said. The first name that came into his head all of those months ago. “But baby Cynthia will go by our
family name.” Christine raised an eyebrow and Silas did his very best to avoid the question in her gaze. “It’s just that Aaron
died so soon after the wedding and Maeve didn’t think to get the paperwork sent over in time. She had to fill in the birth
certificate on the spot so this was just easier than explaining.”
What Silas didn’t tell her and would never tell her was that as far as the nurses and the doctors at the big hospital were concerned, Marie was not a widow but a wife,
and her husband, Aaron Winslow, had been right there by her side, ready to sign the birth certificate on the spot. Just as he’d hoped, a nurse had very briefly
glanced at “Maeve’s” brand-new Australian driver’s license when she first arrived, but there were no further requests for
identity documentation from her, and none from him.
Silas was almost an afterthought in the whole process, just there to coo over the baby and to sign “his” name on the birth
certificate. It made it all the more maddening to Silas that if he hadn’t been there, the absence of a husband would have been massively problematic for Marie and baby Cynthia.
He was exhausted by the lies and frankly might never recover from the fright he got when Marie started shouting that she needed to push, a full ten minutes out from the Orange hospital, but so far, the ruse had worked.
When the staff at the big hospital questioned why they’d driven an hour and a half, instead of ten minutes, Silas lied and said they’d been in the regional city visiting a friend when Maeve started having contractions.
Just then, Ernest stood and excused himself, saying he was going to play in the yard. Christine cleared her throat.
“Silas, I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” she said quietly. “For a long while, actually. It’s just that you and Mae seemed
to take forever to get over that rotten flu so I put it off and then she told us she was pregnant and . . . honestly, there
just hasn’t been a good time.”
“What is it?” He frowned. He wanted to believe she was about to tell him she was coming home, but her tone was so heavy and
so strained. “Chris?”
“I think . . .” She drew in a breath. “Oh, Silas, I’m really sorry but . . .”
It wasn’t as if he thought his marriage had been repaired. Silas wasn’t a fool; his wife had moved out of their home and she’d
been gone for six months. He knew that wasn’t a great sign. But they saw each other every few days; they were still warm and
friendly with one another—perhaps even more since she’d moved out than they had been that last year of their marriage.
“You’re my soulmate,” she said, very gently.
“And you are mine.”
“But . . .”
“How can there be a but after that sentence?”
“I love you and I always will but we cannot be married to one another—not now, not in the future. You have a very full inner
life, Silas.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“That was a compliment, not an accusation. You are wholly self-contained in a way that very few people are. You don’t need the validation of others to feel happy. You are generally unmoved when people are unkind to you. But you also experience the real world through your work.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I remember looking over at you as I held Ernie for the first time right after he was born and you were miles away,” she said
softly.
“I was thinking about you! About him!”
“You were thinking about the emotional wealth in the moment. How you might mine it for a book one day. You were narrating the scene for yourself. Wondering how does this fit into my character arc? You are never really anywhere unless you’re in one of your stories.”
Silas opened his mouth to protest, but he couldn’t deny that she was telling some kind of truth. He was even taking mental
notes on that very conversation because Christine was so articulate and passionate and beautiful even as she broke his heart.
The moment was too perfect for real life. Silas felt right away that it deserved to be captured in a story.
“Chris, I never meant to hurt you,” he said helplessly.
“I know, sweetheart. That’s what’s so awful about this. You’re who you are and your needs are your own. I would never want
to change you. But I won’t live alongside you, miserable and increasingly resentful that you’re only a part-time spouse to
me. Not when I can live on my own and be perfectly happy.”
“But Ernest . . .”
“. . . will live with me most of the time. I was thinking weekends could be yours eventually. He’s still spooked by that nightmare he had at your place a few months ago, but that’ll pass and in time he’ll sleep there Friday and Saturday nights.”
“Where will you live?”
“Mum’s getting older. We’ll stay here and care for her.”
“This house is so small, Chris.”
“We’ll renovate it then. We’ll figure it out.”
“Please tell me we’ll stay friends,” he choked, throat tight.
It wasn’t enough but it was all he could think to ask for in that moment.
“You will be my best friend and the love of my life until I die,” Christine whispered unevenly. “I’m divorcing you because
I need for us to stay friends.”
Silas went home after their chat. He went into his study and picked up his pen, opened his notepad, tried to lose himself
in the new book he was working on. When that failed miserably, he decided that Chris didn’t mean what she’d said. He would
never accept this. No, he would simply work on her, woo her again. He would find a way to change her mind.