They would be the longest hours of his life.
Turning up the collar of his jacket, he walked out of the building, only to find an army of paparazzi waiting for him. He pushed his way through them, hardly knowing where he was going. He wanted to be with Cassandra and the baby, but he knew that he didn’t deserve to stay.
‘No comment,’ he flared when the photographers chased him down the street.
‘Is it a boy?’
‘Will you make him your heir?’
‘Will you marry your gardener?’
‘What did you buy her for Christmas, Marco—or have you already given her your best?’
Normally, he would stand and fight, but he had no fight left in him, and to a chorus of cruel laughter he kept on walking. It was just past four in the afternoon and already winter dark. He walked on past his car with no idea of where he was heading. Realising they’d get no response from him, the following pack dropped away. The streets were full of last-minute shoppers carrying unwieldy packages, and while he could slip through the scrum with relative ease, the reporters with all their equipment soon got left behind. He turned his mind to practicalities. That seemed to help. He would have security put in place for Cassandra and the baby. Pulling out his phone, he made the arrangements and walked on. Store windows were ablaze with Christmas cheer, but he felt numb—until a young girl and her boyfriend danced out of a large department store and the boy flung his scarf around the girl’s neck.
‘Here, take mine,’ the boy insisted as they laughed happily into each other’s eyes. ‘I don’t want you getting cold.’
‘What about you?’ the girl demanded, tightening her hold on the scarf.
The boy brought her close. ‘I don’t need it. I’ve got my love to keep me warm.’
He couldn’t believe he’d been gripped by such a cheesy display, and for a moment he couldn’t understand why, but then he remembered, and tears stung his eyes as he retraced his steps back to the store. Ducking inside the brilliantly lit warmth, he bought the warmest and most colourful scarf he could find. ‘Yes. Gift-wrap it, please.’ On the surface it didn’t seem much, but the scarf was a vital link to him between the past and what had happened today, and some sane—or maybe it was insane—part of his brain wanted desperately for it to mean something to Cassandra. She was his life.
Cassandra was his only preoccupation as he left the store. He couldn’t believe he’d walked out of that hospital ward, leaving Cassandra and her baby in the care of strangers. As he strode along he had to tell himself that she was in good hands. That fierce midwife wouldn’t let anyone get past her. But leaving them still wasn’t right. Dealing with the enormity of birth and the creation of life had proved him to be emotionally inadequate. Wasn’t it time to do something about that? For over twenty years he had pushed the past away, but now he had the scarf and a link to the past that made sense to him. He could only hope that it would make sense to Cassandra.
It was slippery underfoot and bitterly cold. Snow was feathering down, and the wintry conditions reminded him of the night when his eight-year-old self had been thrown out into the street with his mother. He had been freezing cold, and she had stopped to take off her scarf so she could tie it around his neck. So she had cared for him. He tightened his hold on the package from the store, and then he remembered staring back at the house where the man who had turned out not to be his father—the man he had loved with all his heart—had turned his back on him without even saying goodbye.
Was that what he’d just done to Cassandra? The thought appalled him. Far from avoiding the past, he had invited it back and had given it a home in his cold, unfeeling heart.
He stopped walking and found himself on a bridge. Looking down at the oily water, he watched its steady progress to the sea and accepted that life moved on, and he must move with it. Tucking his hands beneath his arms for warmth, he headed back to his car.
* * *
No one stayed in hospital for long after the birth of a child unless there were complications, and Cass’s experience of birth had been straightforward. Her little boy was healthy, and it seemed no time at all before Cass was in a cab on her way home with a newborn baby in her arms. Her child. Her son. Her Luca. She had given him an Italian name for the father he so closely resembled—particularly when he frowned like this—though in Luca’s case it was probably wind rather than general alienation from the world and everything beautiful and gentle and remarkable in that world.