Her laugh sliced into him. “I called your company repeatedly. Oddly enough, no one took me seriously. Or I assume they didn’t, because it took you all this time to turn up here.”
“Whoever else might have turned you away will be dealt with.” Though even as he said that, he already knew what had likely happened. Any reports of pregnancies would have been dismissed by Guglielmo as opportunists attempting to cash in on Pascal’s success. He would never have dreamed of wasting Pascal’s time with empty claims. “But if you had actually turned up on my doorstep, Cecilia,Iwould not have denied you entry.”
She actually dared roll her eyes. At him. “That’s good to know. Should you impregnate me and leave me behind like so much trash again, I’ll be sure to take that tack. I’ll gather up whatever children you’ve abandoned, camp out in your lobby and hope for the best. What could possibly go wrong?”
“What kind of person has a man’s child and fails to tell him?” Something cracked wide open inside him, and it was harder and harder to pretend he wasangrywhen it went far deeper than that. When it felt like a catastrophic fissure, deep within. “It has beensix years.Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“I know exactly what I’ve done, because I’ve been here the whole time, doing it,” she fired back at him, and he had the uneasy notion that she could see that yawning expanse inside him and was aiming straight for it. For him. “You knew where I was. You knew that I was unpardonably naive. You weren’t without experience as you made a point of mentioning more than once. Surely you must have known that anytime people have sex, especially without any protection, there’s the possibility of exactly this occurring. You never inquired.”
“How dare you put this responsibility on me.”
“I will not stand here and listen to lectures from the likes of you onresponsibility, thank you,” she bit out. She moved even closer then, and went so far as to jab a finger toward him—very much as if she’d have liked to put out his eye. “You try being a single parent. All the feedings and diaper changes, the crying for no reason and sudden, scary illnesses. Where were you? Not here, handling them.”
“I could hardly handle something I didn’t know was happening.”
She jabbed that finger again, and it occurred to Pascal that she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by him. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d encountered such a thing. And certainly not from a woman he’d thought was a ghost a few hours ago—and who he remembered as nothing but sweet.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she was saying with more than a little ferocity. “There’s more joy in it than ought to be possible, or the species would have died out. But whatI’mtalking about is keeping a tiny human alive. Whatyou’retalking about is your own hurt feelings because you chose to disappear into the ether and it turns out, there are consequences for that. One of them is the child you helped make.”
He felt pale with that anguish, mixed liberally with fury. “You dare to speak to me of consequences?”
“I’ve lived your consequences, Pascal,” Cecilia retorted. “An absolutely marvelous little boy has grown into a five-year-old as a consequence of your carelessness. And after trying more than enough times, I didn’t keep banging my head against brick walls trying to find a man who didn’t leave behind so much as a telephone number. I decided that I was going to focus my attention on raising my son, instead. And did.”
“Cecilia—”
“I never expected you to show your face here again,” she told him. “I don’t expect you to stay now. You’re acting as if knowing I was pregnant would have changed something, but I’ll let you in on a secret, Pascal. I know full well it wouldn’t have. Why don’t you spare us both the dramatics and just…go away again?”
Pascal really did stagger then. He had to reach out to keep himself upright, gripping the back of the nearest pew.
As if her certainty that he would abandon his own child no matter the circumstances was almost as grave a betrayal as the fact she’d kept this secret so long.
“I told you,” he said, too many memories flooding his brain then. Of the hours she’d spent at his bedside, talking as well as tending to him. All the things he’d told her in return, because his bed in that clinic had felt disconnected to the world. Why not tell a kind stranger every feeling that had ever moved in him? Why not share every story he had inside him? He’d done that and more. How could she imagine that the man who had done so would turn around and leave now? “I told you how I was raised. What it meant to me to be a bastard son to a cruel, unfeeling man… Have you forgotten?”
Her eyes seemed nearly purple then, with what he only hoped was distress. “I didn’t forget. But people say all kinds of things when they think their lives might end, then turn around andlivevery differently, when given the chance.”
“I told you,” Pascal growled. “And you decided to do this to me anyway. To my child. When you had to know it was the last thing I would ever have allowed.”
Whatever distress might have been lurking in her, it disappeared in a flush of temper as her chin tipped up again.
“I stopped caring about what you might or might not allow,” she said with a distinct calm that felt like yet another slap when he could barely keep himself together. “Right about the time it became clear to me that you weren’t coming back, and that I was really, truly going to have to have our baby all on my own. And then carry on raising him. I considered adoption, you know. Because my plan was to be a nun, not a mother.” Her tone was bitter then. “Never a mother.”
Something tickled at the back of his mind, about Cecilia’s stories about her own childhood, but he thrust it aside. Because she’d actually wanted to…
“You wanted to give up your child—mychild?”
Once again Pascal couldn’t force his mind to process that. He couldn’t seem to breathe past it. It was bad enough that he’d come here on a whim to discover that all this time, the woman who’d haunted him through his life in Rome had kept his child a secret from him. But that he could have come back here today, just like this, and never know? Never have the slightest notion what he’d lost?
That fissure inside him widened. And grew teeth.
“Yes, Pascal,” she said. Because she had teeth, too. And they seemed to sharpen by the second. “It was never my intention to have a child on my own. Whywouldn’tI consider adoption?”
Again Pascal ran a hand over his jaw, his scars. Reminding himself that he had survived the impossible before. Surely he would again.
One way or another.
“I suppose you would like me to thank you for choosing motherhood,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. “I find I cannot quite get there. I want to see him.”
He wasn’t looking at her as he said that, and it took him a moment to realize she hadn’t responded. When he slid his gaze back to hers, she had a considering sort of look on her face. As if she was mulling over a decision as she looked at him.