“Not to me it’s not.”
His lips were grim. “This isn’t about us. It never should have been. Not since I’ve been back. You should have greeted me with this news. The minute I walked in that door you should have told me. Hell, you should have told me two years ago.”
She angled her face so that he wouldn’t see the tears that were streaking down her cheeks. “Should I?” It was a whisper. A husk of a word.
He swore angrily and pushed the car up a gear. He hadn’t been in the Valley for years but he still remembered the roads perfectly. Just as he had her body. He took the turn towards the beach.
“What did you think? That she wouldn’t want to know about me? What would you have told her?”
Ava dashed at her tears angrily. “I … I never knew my dad. I accepted what my mum told me about him.” She shrugged weakly. “I thought … Milly would feel the same.”
His emotions darkened. “You were going to tell her that I didn’t want her? Like your mum told you about your own father?”
“You don’t want her!” She snapped, her tension finally unravelling. “You’re angry now, but that’s just your first reaction. Yo
u don’t like having the choice taken out of your hands but I still think I made the right decision.”
It was preposterous. “That you can defend this makes me want to scream,” he retorted.
“You would have hated it!” She said, almost deranged with the truth of what she was saying. She needed it to be true, or everything she’d felt would fall apart.
“Oh?” He turned the corner again and drove the car into the carpark that overlooked the glistening Indian ocean. Little clumps of grassy bushes lined the shore directly in front of the car, and in the distance, a group of beach goers were lying like dropped skittles, enjoying the sun’s rays.
“You can’t walk away from a child.”
Her words were little shards of torture. He unclipped his seatbelt so that he could shift his weight in the seat to look at her. “You kept this from me because you thought I would walk away from my responsibilities.”
“I know you, Cristiano. You’re not capable of being what Milly needs.”
His laugh was a harsh sound. “You mean I’m not capable of being what you need. You kept her from me because you felt rejected. You did this to punish me, and you’re dressing that up in a way you hope seems noble and selfless.”
She shook her head. “You’re so wrong.” She drew in a deep breath, trying to calm her misfiring nerves. “If you knew about Milly, you might have stayed. But you would have hated me, and I firmly believe you would have come to hate her. You would have been miserable. How could I ask that of you? How could I expect you to sacrifice the life you loved?”
He made a noise of disbelief. “Your story is fundamentally flawed. You came to Rio to tell me, or so you claim. So which is it? Did you want me to know? Or did you want to keep it from me?”
She sobbed. Her chest hurt with the exertion of breathing. “Both. I couldn’t know, with certainty, what was the right choice. Of course I questioned myself. It was Angus who convinced me that I had to at least tell you.”
Accusation was written on his expression. “He knew?”
“Yes, of course.” She ran her finger over the dashboard. “Not at first. When we married, he knew that I loved you. But he said that … he said that he loved me enough for both of us. That he was sure it would rub off on me in the end.”
He said a word in his own language, and judging by his inflection, it was an indictment of Angus. “So he manipulated you.”
“No!” Her laugh surprised her. “You’re so quick to see the worst in everyone. He loved me. He genuinely loved me. You were gone. You weren’t coming back. You’d made that obvious. And our wedding was only a month away. Everything was arranged.” Her words were quivering with emotion. “And I did love him, in just the same way I always had. He is one my best friends to this day.”
Cristiano collapsed back against his seat and focussed on the view.
“So?”
“So we married,” she said slowly. “But I had no idea about Milly then. You and I were always careful.”
“Except that first time.”
“Yes,” she nodded.
He did the arithmetic. “We slept together in February. She was born in September.”
“Very good,” Ava said bitterly, trying to bite back her anger. “She was early.”