‘I thought about you often you know. I never forgot about you. Sometimes I thought I’d built it all up in my head to be more than it was. It was one night after all, over so quickly it was impossible to know whether it meant more.’
‘It did. It always did.’ His fingertips almost reached out to touch hers, but he drew them back at the last minute. ‘Did your parents never ask you who the father was?’
‘They did. When I discovered I was pregnant I’d been seeing a guy over there – only two dates, but it was easy enough to let my parents assume that the baby was his and that he’d done a runner.’ When he opened his mouth to ask the obvious question she quickly added, ‘We never slept together so I knew the baby wasn’t his. But my parents didn’t know that. And it stopped any questions and let me deal with things in my own time. I imagined what it would be like to tell you – and yet I couldn’t do it. We barely knew one another, and then …’
She was right on that. They hadn’t known one anotherwell enough to trust in each other and take the painful journey of what happened together.
‘Time went on and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to let you know, but I had to protect myself and Jonah. We’d begun to set up a life in Canada and I felt happy for the first time in a long while. Eventually I heard you’d got married and that made me back away from telling you even more. I knew that if you were married, you could have kids, and this woman who lived in a whole other country might destroy your happiness that you deserved so much. I wasn’t thinking straight, I really wasn’t. It was more about survival in the short term than anything else. That night at sea shocked me, realising that in the blink of an eye our lives could end just like that. I was anxious all the time, I was worrying about doing little things like driving to the mall in case I crashed, or going for a run on my own in case I was mugged. Everything worried me on a totally different level.’
Adrian tried to let the information soak in. ‘I was more about short-term survival too. Yeah,’ he nodded when her expression questioned his claim. ‘I was in a bad place for a long time, and if you’d told me back then I’m not sure how I would’ve dealt with it.’ Would it have made a difference to his life if he’d known about the baby? Could he have stepped up from the start? He felt sure he could. But he’d have hated for her to try, for him to let her down when he couldn’t handle more than he already was. The thing that would’ve been worse than not knowing he was a father would’ve been failing at being a dad. Failing her, failing their son.
‘I should’ve given you the chance.’
Adrian felt his chest rise as he took a deep breath. ‘We can’t change history.’
‘No, we can’t.’
He looked over at Jonah who was laughing with Molly. ‘I fell for you that day in the library and then every other moment we had since.’
Maeve looked over at her son – their son. ‘I’m glad we made him.’
That had Adrian smiling for the first time since he’d laid eyes on her outside the café. ‘I’m pretty glad we did too.’
‘He’s obsessed by the water.’
‘I know.’
‘Thank goodness he also somehow got an instinct for safety. If he hadn’t taken that buoyancy vest …’
Adrian put a hand over hers and gave it a squeeze and she looked down at the skin-to-skin contact. ‘But he did. And he’s here. Enjoying more brownies.’
Maeve’s gaze hovered between his eyes and his lips. ‘He’s here.’ And then she turned to face her son again, the fingers on her other hand wiping away another tear. ‘We’d better be careful with those brownies, he’s had so many. He might pull another stunt just to get those treats.’
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t.’
And it felt better than good to be using ‘we’ in a sentence, as though they were parents, together. Which of course they were.
It was taking Adrian a while to get his head around it. A dad. A father. A son.
A family.
‘I’m so sorry, Adrian.’ Maeve’s voice shook.
‘You’ve said that so many times. And I know you are.’His look told her that they had so much to talk about, but that for tonight the important focus was Jonah, the fact he was here, sitting and laughing with them all and not lost.
When Leo and Nina appeared in the café Maeve went to hug her son, leaving Leo to talk to his brother while Nina went to the counter to order drinks. Adrian grinned at the sight of Jonah squirming as his mother showered him in kisses.
‘The boat is back at the marina,’ said Leo.
‘Cheers.’ When Adrian took his eyes away from his son and Maeve he found Leo smiling at him, his eyes twinkling with disbelief.
‘He’s yours, Adrian. I can’t quite believe it.’
‘Youcan’t? How do you think I’m taking it?’
‘Knowing you?’ He gave Adrian’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘Like a man.’
Adrian’s smile was closely followed by a frown. ‘She kept it secret for so long.’
