“Did she say anything at all?” He directed the question to both the doctor and nurse.
The nurse shrugged. “I wasn’t here.” She flipped the page and frowned. “Ah.”
“Ah?” Fiero lifted one single brow.
“There’s a note here from the crèche.”
“The crèche?” His mother was English, he’d attended Oxford and then Yale. His command of the language was as good as a native speaker and yet he wondered briefly if he misunderstood.
“A two year old boy – Jack Gardiner – was admitted at the same time as Miss Gardiner.”
Everything exploded through his mind all at once.
A little boy – Elodie’s boy. A two year old boy belonging to Elodie. Realisation grew inside of him slowly, but there was doubt too. Surely this couldn’t be his child? There was no way he’d been a father for over two years and not known it. Right?
The strength of his memories, the hurt they carried, caused him to groan audibly. Memories of the precious baby he’d loved and lost, the son his wife had delivered, the son who’d been born without breath. The baby they’d lost.
His throat felt raw, as though it had been
scraped with razor blades.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Elodie had a son, a two year old boy, but it didn’t necessarily follow that the child was Fiero’s.
At his lack of reaction, the nurse’s eyes beetled together. “The crèche is open until eight.”
Fiero shot a glance at his wristwatch. It was six. “Where is it?”
“Second floor, ward F.”
He nodded, and pierced the nurse with an intense stare. “Stay here with her while I’m gone. Do not leave this room.” Used to giving commands and having them be obeyed without question, he didn’t see the look of surprise on the nurse’s face, because he swept from the room without a backwards glance.
His walk was determined, his need for answers, his sense of disbelief making his stride longer, his bearing somehow more intimidating, more intense than usual. There was a fierceness to him, an energy that would have struck fear into his rivals’ hearts – into anyone’s heart.
He scanned a map as he passed it, purely to assure himself he was moving in the right direction, jabbed the lift and the doors sprung open almost immediately.
A fluorescent light flickered in the corridor when he emerged a moment later.
He walked quickly, but at the doors to the crèche, he paused for a moment, gathering his breath. He knew he was on the edge of a precipice, that there was potentially someone within this small room in this publically funded hospital who could change his entire life.
Without another moment’s delay, he pushed the door inwards.
A young man with a face covered by acne and a head topped with pale straw-coloured hair lifted his eyes to Fiero.
“Here to pick up or drop off?”
Fiero looked beyond him, to the few children in the brightly-coloured room. There were two girls playing with Lego in the corner, building a tower high into the room. They were young, perhaps five or six. There was a boy, dressed as a cowboy, making a gun with his fingers and skipping around the room as though he rode a horse.
And then…there was another little boy sitting in the corner building a car track, sliding the pieces together with an obstinate determination that was instantly familiar to Fiero.
Fiero stood, transfixed, his body radiating the same tension it had upstairs, but for a wholly different reason now.
As a boy, he’d been winded, once. At Villa Fortune, his grandparents’ home in the Tuscan hillside, he’d been running too fast through the olive grove and hadn’t noticed the rock in front of him. His toe had connected with it and he’d been sent flying – the impact had whooshed all the air from his lungs. He’d laid on the ground, staring up at the azure blue sky, olive leaves whispering overhead, and he’d been incapable of movement, not even of drawing breath. He had simply laid there, stars in his eyes, pain in his chest.
He felt that now, right down to the tightness beneath his ribs. He stared at the little boy and a thousand and one emotions slammed into him, but anger was chief amongst them, anger and disbelief.
There was too much to feel, too much to remember. Alison’s pregnancy, their stillborn child who had looked so much like this child. His pulse fired and a sweat broke out on his brow. Panic flooded his veins. Fiero – renowned for his control and lack of emotionalism – felt overwhelmed by feelings in that moment. The pain and grief he and Alison had endured had ended years ago – but it never really went away, did it? The sense that he had somehow failed her, failed their unborn children, that there’d been something wrong with him.
And now he was looking at a little boy who – surely – must be his son.