‘Of course.’
‘I’ll call you with dates.’
Celia got to her feet and picked up her bag, and as Marcus walked her to the door she found herself wondering if he really was as on board with this as he claimed. There was something about his lack of emotion, the way he’d agreed with her so swiftly, that didn’t feel quite right. She’d have thought he’d question her thought process a bit more, and the fact that he hadn’t made her faintly uneasy.
He opened the door and she stopped. Turned to him and, dismissing the little voice inside her head questioning why she’d want to challenge him when his agreement suited her so well, said, ‘Marcus?’
‘What?’
‘Do you really think we’re doing the right thing?’
The look he gave her was firm and resolute and wiped away all her doubts, even before he nodded and said, ‘Absolutely.’
NINE
But Marcus knew that he’d lied. Unwittingly perhaps, but he’d lied nonetheless, because he didn’t think they were doing the right thing at all.
Sitting with Celia in his kitchen and talking it through, he’d been convinced that going along with whatever she wanted was the only course of action he had any right to take.
But the conversation had clearly opened some kind of cupboard in his head into which he’d stuffed everything he’d told himself to block out because she’d left and within minutes his head had filled with everything he’d not allowed himself to think about.
As a result, thoughts had been ricocheting round his brain for the past three days, messy and jumbled, but all pointing to the conclusion that he thought they were making a mistake.
He couldn’t explain it. He shouldn’t want a child. His current lifestyle—which he worked hard at and enjoyed—wasn’t conducive to one. His arguments for terminating the pregnancy had been extremely valid, and God knew all the reasons Celia had put forward were ones he could understand.
Then there was the indisputable fact that he didn’t want to be tied to anyone, least of all someone who had a problem with the way he lived—and what greater tie was there than a child?
And finally there was the deep-rooted fear that history would repeat itself and he wouldn’t make it past his child’s seventeenth birthday, and dread of the possible fallout from that.
Yet all he had to do was see a mental image of him holding his child in his arms and something inside him melted. When the mental image of Celia holding his child in her arms came to him, he melted even more. And as he wasn’t someone who melted, ever, the feeling was both bewildering and alarming.
Rationally he knew that if she had the baby his life—and hers—would become horribly complicated and messy and fraught with tension. There’d be logistics to sort out, all kinds of obstacles to negotiate and endless arguments over decisions that would have to be made.
But none of that seemed to be of much importance.
Instead, whenever he thought about having an actual child he was assailed by memories of his own childhood. The love and attention his parents had lavished on him. The days out. The walks, the trips to the zoo, the beach. The holidays. The happy little unit they’d been before he’d hit adolescence and become a normal moody teenager.
Logically he was aware there must have been tough times and his childhood couldn’t have been hearts and flowers every second, but all his memory chose to focus on were the happy ones.
Logic also told him that his and Celia’s situation was about as far from the situation into which he’d been born as it was possible to get, but that didn’t seem to matter. He wanted to be the kind of father to his child
that his father had been to him. He wanted to be the kind of father who lived to see his child grow up. He wanted to be a father full stop. As they emerged from the clinic where they’d just had an appointment with the doctor to whom Celia’s GP had referred her the feeling he had that what they were doing was dreadfully wrong was even stronger.
The sight of all those children’s drawings papering the walls of the waiting room—which seemed so insensitive it had to be deliberate, as if testing the strength of the decision made by the people who’d wait there—had practically torn his heart out.
When they’d gone into the appointment itself and the ultrasound had shown a heartbeat, all he’d been able to think through the fog in his head was that that tiny little fetus was his child. His child. A weird kind of force had slammed into him, something that was instinctive, primal and surely had a lot to do with evolution, making his entire body shake with the strength of it.
And when the doctor had explained the procedure she recommended, his stomach had curdled and his chest had felt as if it had a band around it, squeezing tighter and tighter until he felt as though he could barely breathe. By the time she was through he’d just wanted to drag Celia the hell out of there.
Not that Celia had seemed in any way as affected by the appointment. She’d sat there, a bit pale, yes, but calm and composed, asking questions in a cool voice that suggested she was still as sure as she’d ever been and wasn’t suffering anywhere near the kind of mental turmoil he was.
But what could he do about it?
He’d told her he was fine with the decision she’d made. He’d convinced himself it was the right thing to do, and he still stood by that. With his head, at least, which knew that he had to be fair and not put her in an even more difficult position.
His heart, however, was wondering if he could let her go through with it without at least telling her how he felt. If he could live with himself if he didn’t at least mention it.
With the battle still raging in his head, he held the door to the street open for Celia and then followed her out. He spied a pub across the road and thought that never had he seen a place more welcome.