“I can’t remember.” Her laugh was an uncomfortable sound of desperation.
“I had been blindsided. I had just found out I had a two year old daughter.”
“I know,” she squeezed her eyes shut. “When I see you with her, I can’t believe I ever kept it from you. I can’t believe the decision I made.” Her words rung with sincerity. “I am so sorry for what I did. You deserved so much better.”
“Hey,” he reached over and put a hand on her leg. “Stop talking like that. We both made mistakes. We’re here now, together, and we’ve got Milly.”
“Yes.” She nodded, but the future was an enormous void of confusion. What were she and Cristiano to one another? Two people who’d fallen in love, broken up bitterly, and now faced the prospect of a lifetime in one another’s lives because of the child they shared? What if he wanted to leave? What if he met someone else? What if he fell in love with another woman? What if he had more children with someone else? The thought turned Ava’s heart to stone in a way that nothing else could.
“I think we need to make a plan for how to handle all this.”
“Do you now?” His words were droll, his manner amused.
She nodded. “Yes. We need some ground rules so that we don’t get hurt again. We can’t put Milly through it. And it would be easy for us to get confused and thin
k we wanted something else from each other … maybe even to believe that we’re in love with each other.” She glossed over the way that idea sledged ice into her blood. “But this is just about Milly, isn’t it?”
“You tell me.”
She turned to face him, but looked away again just as quickly. “If there was no Milly, and Tom Berry hadn’t got married and asked you to be his best man, you wouldn’t be here now. Even if there had been the wedding, you would have come and gone.”
He expelled an angry breath. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. We’ll never know what might have happened in an alternative universe. We only know what we have now. How we feel now.”
“And how do we feel? How do you feel?” She forced herself to be brave and ask the question that was burning inside of her.
“I feel like … I see you with Milly and I think you are the best mother in the world. I see you with her and I feel so proud of her, and what we created together. I look at Milly and I think I want ten more of her. I want to make babies with you until we are covered in yoghurt and laughter. I want to be with you this time. To see your stomach get round and to see life grow inside of you.”
Ava’s breathing was hard and laboured. She couldn’t get any air into her lungs. She was shaking her head, and she begun to whisper, “No. No. No,” over and over again, until Cristiano stopped speaking. Then it was just a desperate incantation of negatives filling the room.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when she’d finally stopped speaking and had her head pressed back against the bed. “I cannot lie to you. Why would I? We have a perfect daughter. Why stop there?”
“God, Cristiano, please just shut up!”
He stared at her and felt just as much pain as he had the first time they’d argued. Ava Henderson could inflict hurt on him unlike anyone else.
“I’m not having any more children.” She opened her eyes and turned her face to stare at him. Her expression was the bleakest, most messed up thing he’d ever seen. “Not with you. Not with anyone. Milly’s it for me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The silence was a third person in the room. It hovered between them, enormous and impossible to ignore. It was heavy with question and doubt. Finally, Cristiano pushed it aside. “Was it so terrible for you?”
She shook her head, her brow furrowed. “No.” It hadn’t been. For the most part, pregnancy had been a dream.
He frowned, obviously not comprehending her reticence.
“Milly isn’t enough of a reason for what you’re suggesting. I mean, Milly is our daughter, and we both love her. We’re both committed to raising her. But having one child together doesn’t mean we should launch into having more. It doesn’t make us a family.”
“What?” He pushed off the bed and stared down at her, his advantage unfair given her immobilised state. “You’re kidding me?”
She stared down at the mince pie on her lap. “Do I look like I’m kidding you?”
He suppressed the curse that had come to his lips. He didn’t understand, but that only meant he needed information. He’d made the mistake of jumping to conclusions with Ava in the past; it had never served him well. “I told you how I feel. What I want. You didn’t. What do you want, Ava?”
She cleared her throat. “I …” She closed her eyes. “I …” What she wanted? She wanted what he did! More children. A future with him by her side. But by choice, not obligation. And how could she expect him to stay when she could never give him more than Milly? “It’s exactly the same as before,” she said darkly, her eyes focussed on the bedspread.
“What is?” He sat at her feet, and put a hand on the normal-sized, uninjured ankle.
“I can’t give you what you want. No more so now than I did then.”