‘No, she’s not coming back into our lives and messing things up, OK? Even if she does move back here. Lexi is our daughter. But you’ve got to face up to the facts, Freya. Elisa is Lexi’s birth mother and you always knew that at some point, she’d want to get to know her properly. We agreed on an open adoption. Make it easy and quick, that was our motto, remember?’
‘But it’s so soon—’
I can feel the tears pooling in my eyes. Dan sees them and he pulls me close to him. Normally, his touch can soothe me but not tonight.
‘On the basis of the past, I thought Elisa would never be interested and eventually, one day in the future, when Lexi was older, anadult,she’d want to meet Elisa properly and talk to her.’
I had all this planned in my head: Elisa would still be feckless, possibly really, really wrinkly as the sins of a lifelong aversion to suncream had caught up with her. Lexi would come back and tell me what a wonderful mother I was.
In the best version of this fantasy, Elisa looked about twenty years older than I did, reeked of cigarette smoke and desperation, and asked for a loan.
As I said, my inner bitch, Mildred, is inventive.OK,I’minventive.
Dan’s almost rocking me now and I can smell thatend-of-day combination of the hint of aftershave and Dan’s own scent.
‘Lexi’s just a child now and is so impressionable,’ I say finally, reverting to the real world. ‘Plus, Elisa is possibly the worst role model on the planet. Do nothing in school. Party your way through your late teens and have a child so you can ignore her. Have I left anything out? Exactly what did you see in this paragon of womanhood, anyway?’
I have asked him this question before and he’s never been able to give me a satisfactory answer.
‘You know,’ he sighs, ‘it’s hard to say. We were young, I was a bit of a nerd.’
‘You weren’t a nerd,’ I say loyally, ‘you were just quiet, and a late bloomer. But you were alwaysgood-looking.’
He grins. ‘Thanks, honey,’ he says, ‘but when we were at school, I was quiet and I didn’t go out much. I stayed at home all the time, which pretty much qualifies you for being a nerd.’
‘And now, you’re one of Ireland’s hottest economists,’ I add. ‘So if that’s what nerds turn into, then, I ought to tell all our children to hang around nerds. Because nerds turn into nuggets of gold.’
Dan laughs and kisses me.
‘Do you think they’ve gone to sleep?’ he says, hopefully, a glint in his eyes.
I somehow manage a grin. ‘Sex, sex, sex – is that all you think about?’
‘Not all the time, no,’ he says, scratching the back of his head. ‘The male of the species is possibly more interested in sex than the female,’ he goes on. ‘It’s evolution, we need to spread our seed.’
Which brings me back to Elisa. I know I’m like a dog with a bone, but I can’t help it.
I’ve asked him this scores of times but I try it another way: rephrase it. Because I have to know.
‘I still can’t understand how you hooked up with Elisa. Was she different then, less pushy, less airheaded, lesslook at me, I’ve lots of money and it’s Daddy’s?’
For a second Dan stares into the distance. In fairness to him, he doesn’t say,not again, Freya.
‘It wasn’tLove Story, Freya, I’ve told you endlessly. I don’t know how we ended up dating those few times,’ he says with a sigh. ‘We were immature and I’d known her at school, well sort of known her, I mean she wouldn’t have really known me, because as I said before ...’
I interject. ‘Yeah, nerd: got it.’
‘Exactly. When we met up again I was with a group of guys in town. You’ve heard this story so many times,’ he adds, exasperated.
‘I want to hear it again,’ I say, ‘in case I missed something important.’
Dan laughs and pulls me properly onto his lap. He goes to the gym, cycles, swims, which is just as well because you need to be strong to haul me around. ‘You didn’t miss anything important. We just partied. Myself and the guys were on a roll then because being smart was suddenly cool. I’d written a few articles, Kevin was beginning hisstart-up: we were on thaton-lineOnes To Watchlist and Elisa wanted to play outside her normal group. She was fed up withtrust-fund babies and the jocks. We were the clever guys who were out of college then, or doing masters or PhDs, different from her normal crowd who were all suddenly boring now school was over. Peaked too early, while we’d finally stopped being the dorky kids with glasses and it turned out that having our heads in books all the time meant we were going places,’ he adds with some pride.
‘Plus, I had my James Dean leather jacket and that may have swung it in my favour. We dated for three weeks. OK? Three weeks. It was never serious. I guess I was flattered that she was interested in me, right? None of her crowd would have looked at me and my pals at school.’
‘So you get a rich chick with benefits and date theex-?coolest girl from school?’ I say.
He ignores that. ‘I wasn’t dating anyone and we hooked up.’
