“That’s the easy part.”
“So, the hard part?”
“I’m going to take Alice to her father afterward—as we agreed.”
Nikolas looked up. “That does surprise me. Why?”
Ben shrugged. “She sacrificed her child for a good life. For lunches and fucking clothes and—”
“Ben. No. That is what you believe of your mother.” Nikolas raised his eyes. “Benjamin, I am so sorry, you are seeing parallels here that do not exist.”
Ben’s eyes widened. “No! She—” He couldn’t continue.
All the confusion of the case came flooding out, all his suppressed pain, the connection he’d felt to Alice from the very first day—because Nik was right, that washismother. She’d left him with his father so she could have a better life. He pushed his chair away from the table, blindly heading to the door and privacy. He felt a hand seize his arm and another catch him around his neck, and he was pulled into a tight embrace. They didn’t speak for many minutes. Ben wasn’t used to being outwardly emotional, and Nikolas certainly wasn’t used to dealing with emotion, but they both coped remarkably well, mainly because the embrace turned to kissing, and Ben’s repressed tears flowed on the intense pleasure of feeling Nikolas’s lips kissing them away. Before they knew it, they were unbuttoning shirts, shrugging off jeans and finding skin. Nikolas utterly refused to lie down on the kitchen floor, so they had to take it to the bed, and by the time he had Nikolas pliant and welcoming beneath him, Ben had recovered from his emotional meltdown. He brushed his thumb over Nikolas’s cheekbone and kissed him again. Nikolas held the back of Ben’s neck and murmured around the kissing, “Do not blame the mother too much, Ben. She has kept the girl safe this far. I believe she has been trying to leave him for sometime, but no one will help her.”
Ben stopped kissing him. “She should just leave!”
Nikolas shook his head sadly, eyeing Ben. “Life is not black and white.”
“Yes. It is. It can be.”
“No. It isnot. If she leaves, the child’s whole life changes. No private school, no ballet, no riding lessons, no nice house. Everything changes. Is that better for her?”
“Yes! She’d be safe!”
Nikolas closed his eyes. “Ben, such things as this Jeremy would do…sometimes there is no one to help, and the child has to learn to adapt, to hide in the shadows…” He opened his eyes and sighed. “But that was another child. He learnt too well, perhaps.”
Ben was still fixated on his own thoughts and hardly listening to Nikolas. He rolled off. “You don’t want me to take her to her father? Isn’t that where we came into this case?”
“I do not know. I am confused by this, too. If he suspected this man Jeremy, why not help the wife and daughter together? It strikes me that he may be taking Alice more to punish his ex-wife than he is concerned by the girl’s welfare.”
“Shit! I wish we’d never taken this case. In fact I wish we’d give up this whole line of work. Why are we doing it? We could both do other things.”
“Oh, this will be interesting.”
“You could…crap, I don’t know. Be a translator! There you go.”
“This is true. You could be a dog walker.”
“Thanks. You could run a riding stable.”
“Death first. You could be a model.”
Ben smiled. “Aftershave?”
Nikolas raised an eyebrow. “I was hoping for underwear.”
“Oh, God, all right. She stays with her mother. But what’s to stop her bringing another man into the house? She’s…needy, Nik. She’s weak.”
“Ben, she had the right to try and find a good life for herself—your mother. Don’t blame her too much. Don’t let it cloud your whole life.”
“Don’t blame her!” Ben punched the pillow and Nikolas winced. “I was eight, Nik. I came home from school one day and all her things were gone. Dad came home from work and found me there. I didn’t speak a word for six months. I ran away every chance I got to look for her. I never believed she’d gone voluntarily. I thought she’d been taken. I thought if I gave up looking she’d be in just…the next place. Eight, Nik, I was eight, climbing out of my window at night to look for her! My dad died of a broken heart. He never even got to see me join the army.”
“I know, Ben. I know all this.”
“And you tell me not to blame her?”
“Yes. It is sad. I know this for you. But she may not have been to blame so much.”
