Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he tell that she didn’t want to know anything that would make it harder to forget this child?
And what was he even doing here? He’d shown no real interest in this baby, other than claiming ownership. He’d avoided her the last month and now he wanted to go nursery shopping? What was that about?
‘Unless you don’t want to tell me,’ he prompted.
She put her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes. ‘Breast cancer,’ she said finally. ‘By the time they found it…’ She squeezed her lids tighter together, but this time there was no denying the pain or the tears that squeezed out, suddenly right back there, back at the restaurant and the celebration they’d all assumed it was.
‘Mum treated us all for Christmas lunch, said she’d won some money on Lotto and wanted to splurge. She shouted us all—Shayne and me, his parents, even his sisters and their partners. I think she loved the idea of having a big family around her for once.’ She paused. ‘We’d never had a Christmas meal out before. It was such a treat to eat in a real restaurant. Everyone was wearing party hats and pulling Christmas crackers. It was the best Christmas we’d ever had.’
She dragged in air. She should have realised how tired her mother had looked, even as she’d so valiantly smiled and laughed and joined in. She should have noticed the shadows under her eyes and how little she had eaten herself while everyone around her was feasting. ‘Mum made it a special Christmas for everyone. Until we got home and she confided to Shayne and me the truth. That she was dying. That she had only weeks to live and there was nothing anyone could do for her. The only thing she wanted more than anything was to know that her daughter would be taken care of.’
She took a deep breath, praying for strength to finish. Somehow she needed to finish, if only to explain how she could marry someone who could let her down so badly. ‘We’d only been going out three months by then—when it came down to it we barely knew each other—but Shayne, to his damn credit and his eternal damnation, got down on his knee and proposed right then and there in front of her and what could I do? What could I say? I knew it was crazy and reckless but how could I say no to someone who wanted a dying woman’s wish to come true? We were married a month later next to her hospital bed. Mum was my matron of honour.’
She dropped her head into her lap, one hand covering her mouth to cover the sobs she could no longer contain. ‘We lost her the next day.’
Grief took her then. Grief for her loss. Grief for a well-intentioned but hasty and ill-conceived marriage. Grief for a lost mother and all those lost years. And then she felt his hand around hers, and this time it wasn’t sparks she felt, but warmth and a jolt of connectivity as his fingers squeezed hers, his thumb stroking the back of her hand until the car jerked to a stop and he hauled her bodily against him. She tried to fight, she tried to push herself away, finally giving in when she knew she had no energy for the fight. No hope.
‘She was the reason I was born at all!’ She turned her head up to him through the curtain of her tears, uncaring of her swollen eyes and the mess she’d made of her face. ‘My scumbag father wanted me aborted to avoid the responsibility of having a child. My grandparents wanted me aborted to avoid the shame of an illegitimate grandchild. My mother refused them all. She left everything and everyone she had once loved to protect me.’
Her sobs racked her slender body and he pulled her closer, surprised how easily, how comfortably, she fitted against him, how right it felt holding her.
She made another futile attempt to push away again but there was no way he was letting her go. ‘I’m making you all wet,’ she protested, and still he clung on.
How could he let her go? Because suddenly he understood. Suddenly it all made sense. He had never understood before why she had taken the stance she had, why she had refused her husband the solution the clinic had offered and that Shayne had demanded.
She herself had been given the opportunity to live.
So she would not take another’s life.
And he didn’t want to let her go.