‘I knew your father would take good care of you,’ Neysa explained earnestly. Too earnestly.
She had known nothing of the sort, and neither had she tried to find out. For all she knew Amy might have been dumped in an orphanage. She’d had no way of knowing that Elaine—the woman who had taken Neysa into her home and trusted her with her young son, the woman Neysa had betrayed in such a heinous way without one word of remorse—had raised Amy as her own.
Amy had spent seventeen years hoping that it had been shame which had kept Neysa away. That she’d acknowledged that what she’d done to the Green family had been so great a sin that she couldn’t bring herself to face Elaine and say sorry.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
At least her father had been genuinely remorseful. Her mum had promised her that. He’d acknowledged the terrible deed he’d done and had spent twenty-seven years trying to make amends for it. One mad weekend alone, without his wife and with a hot young woman parading herself around the house before him... He’d been too weak not to take advantage and he’d paid the price every day of his life since.
Looking at her birth mother now, Amy couldn’t believe her mum had been able to love her the way she did. Amy was the image of Neysa. Every time her mum had looked at Amy’s face she must have seen the image of the woman who had betrayed her and the living proof of her husband’s infidelity.
How could Amy even be in the same room as this woman? Neysa hadn’t cared that she’d almost destroyed Amy’s mum—her real mum...the woman who had loved her every day of her life from the age of two weeks.
And she’d been scared that her mum secretly wanted to get rid of her? Never. Not her loving, generous mum.
The waiter returned to the table with their food.
Amy waited until he’d laid everything out before getting to her feet and hooking the strap of her handbag over her shoulder.
‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ she said slowly. ‘I want no part of your life. I wanted to see you. And now I have.’
‘You are going?’
‘I shouldn’t have come. Goodbye, Neysa.’
Leaving her birth mother open-mouthed in shock, Amy made her way out of the hotel and into the warm spring street brimming with tourists.
She stood for a moment, breathing in the sweet scent. She hadn’t found a single place in Agon where the air didn’t smell good. And yet an acrid odour lingered around her from her encounter.
Breathing heavily, Amy raised her eyes to the sky and thanked whatever benevolent being that was up there for allowing Neysa to abandon her.
Who would she be if she’d been raised on Agon under Neysa’s narcissistic hand? If she’d grown up with Leander? If she’d lived without Danny and Neil’s fierce protection, her mum’s loving guidance and her dad’s silent but constant presence?
And she thanked Helios too. His interference had allowed her to put to bed one of the biggest questions in her life: who had made her?
That ‘who’ was someone she had no wish to see again. But at least she knew that now. Thanks to Helios she could move on and stop wondering what if...?
As she thought his name her phone buzzed. It was a brief message from him, checking that everything was okay. Her darling Helios was on a state visit to America and had still found the time to think of her and send her a message.
But how could she be okay? she thought as she replied, saying that she was fine and that she would explain everything to him later, when he called. Which he would. He called her every night when he travelled abroad.
How could everything be okay when very soon she would have to say goodbye to the one person who did make everything okay?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
AMY CARRIED ON as best she could over the next few days, never letting her smile drop or her shoulders slouch. She was determined that no one looking at her would have reason to suspect that she was suffering in any way.
The entire island was aflame with gossip following the confirmation of Helios’s engagement to the Princess. Naturally this enthusiasm was tripled in the palace itself. Everywhere she went she heard excited chatter. It had got to the stage where, even if she didn’t understand what was being said, she imagined it was all about the forthcoming wedding.
The date had been set. In six weeks and one day Helios would marry. It was going to happen sooner than she had thought. She had forgotten about all the work for the wedding that had been going on behind the scenes. Helios had wisely never mentioned it in any of their calls.
Other than in the privacy of her apartment, the only place she found any crumb of solace was amongst the staff in the museum. Whereas the visitors—whose numbers were daily in the thousands—kept up a non-stop commentary about the wedding, the staff took a different approach. They knew Amy had been Helios’s lover. Everyone had known. So when she was in the same room conversation was kept as far away from matrimony as it was possible to get. But she caught the pitying, often worried glances that were thrown her way.