Which meant he had no choice. He was just going to have to become more involved. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t survive the odd encounter with Angelina for his baby’s sake. And he might as well start with organising the nursery.
‘Do you have a list?’ he asked as he steered the car onto the road.
‘A long one. Not that you need everything now. Some things can wait.’
‘Best to get it all now,’ he said. ‘Rosa will be too busy with the baby afterwards.’
‘Rosa is going to be looking after the baby? Does Rosa know that?’
‘It was her idea. Do you have a problem with that?’
She tried to suppress her objections. It wasn’t her place to be concerned with how he intended to manage the care of a new baby with the hours he worked. But still… ‘Rosa would do anything for you and you know it. But she already does so much. How’s she supposed to manage the house and the cooking and a new baby?’
He glanced sideways at her. ‘I thought you were happy to walk away. Why should you even care what happens after you’re gone?’
‘I don’t care,’ she huffed, tired of the direction the conversation was taking, blinking against the sun emerging from behind the dark cloud responsible for the last rain shower and now slanting through her window. ‘You do what you like.’ She tried to tell herself she didn’t care. But he couldn’t be serious, surely? There was no way he could expect Rosa to do all she did and lumber her with a new baby as well.
She tugged on her seat belt, releasing some of the tension so she could angle herself away from the sun, already intent on turning the damp road to steaming. She idly rubbed her belly with her free hand. She was more and more aware of her growing bump now and what it did and didn’t like. Humidity it didn’t.
She wasn’t big by any means, but the changes in her body were a revelation. Every day she seemed to notice something new, a slight change in her shape or the fit of her clothes as her bump grew and her waist thickened.
‘So who would have looked after this baby if it had been yours?’
She swung her head around. ‘Me, of course.’
‘But you never wanted a baby. That’s what you told me.’
So what if she didn’t? ‘Is this actually relevant to anything?’
He shrugged, looked in his mirrors as the lane in front blocked up and smoothly changed gears and lanes in one fluid movement.
‘Why did you marry him?’
‘Did I miss a clause in that agreement I signed? The one that said you were entitled to know my deepest and darkest secrets, along with my most stupid mistakes.’
He flashed her a smile that made her bones turn to jelly and made her glad she was sitting down. He never smiled at her. He avoided her. And when he couldn’t avoid her, he tolerated her. He didn’t smile. ‘Clause twenty-four, sub-clause C. You must have missed it.’
‘Fine,’ she said, still wilting under the combined effects of the sun and one devastating smile. ‘In that case, it was my mother’s fault.’
‘You’re blaming your mother for you marrying Shayne?’
‘Yes. No. Well, sort of. We hadn’t been going out long when we learned she was sick. He was good to me then—good to us—and my mother wanted to see me settled before she died. Wanted me to have the whole white wedding she’d never had. Shayne seemed keen.’ She shrugged. ‘It was the least I could do, under the circumstances.
‘And it was okay. For a while.’ She turned her head away. ‘You know the rest.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting the pain and the prick of tears and wanting to hide her face before that happened, but surprisingly neither pain nor tears arrived. She exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief. Good. So maybe she was over feeling sorry for herself. Just as well, because by the lack of response, it looked like nobody else was interested. ‘So that, in a nutshell, is the whole sad story. Are you asleep yet?’
‘Not likely. Tell me, how did your mother die?’
She looked around, searching the high street shops lining the road, wanting a diversion if not an escape and wondering if it was fair to blame all her discomfort on the humidity. How far was this baby shop anyway? And why was he insisting she even do this? She didn’t want to buy things for a baby she’d never know. She didn’t want to lie in bed at night and imagine it lying in a tiny bassinet she’d chosen or wearing precious little outfits she’d selected.