Christ, had he been up front with her aboutanything?
“As far as I was concerned, the ring was yours now, and there’s no way I was handing it over just because some—”
“It was me,” Terri injected then, and Rachel turned to look at her, unaware that she’d since crept back in. “I helped Ethan get it back that time he was here. I knew that Gary wasn’t prepared to own up, and I couldn’t let you—”
Gary took a step forward. “Hey, there’s no proof that it was ever even—”
“Save it, Gary,” Rachel spat. This was all becoming more hurtful by the second. To think that all along, the people she cared most about were plotting and planning behind her back, and in the most patronizing ways. “Don’t say another word to me, any of you. Stop trying to make excuses for your actions. You are all liars. All three of you.”
Ethan reacted as if he had been slapped. “Rachel…” he began.
“I’m glad you got your ring back,” she told him jadedly, “and that it’s finally on the right person’s finger.” She gave a withering glance at Gary. “No thanks to you.”
With that, Rachel walked out of the kitchen, straight through the dining room of her beloved restaurant, and didn’t look back.
Chapter 54
The following evening, Ethan landed at Heathrow, his heart heavy. He walked through the airport as if in a trance, Daisy at his side.
He thought again about Vanessa and Brian and wanted to take his so-called friend and tear him limb from limb. Talk about betrayal. But of course, that wasn’t the only secret Vanessa had been carrying, something that much to his humiliation, he’d discovered from Daisy.
During all that hullabaloo at the bistro, when his daughter had mentioned something about a baby and explained about what she’d found, Ethan hadn’t known what to think. So when Vanessa had returned to the table and Daisy in turn muttered something about going off to the ladies’ room, he knew it was the first thing he had to ask, even before discussing Brian.
Her eyes were still red-rimmed from crying and her face pale, but when he broached the question, her skin turned so white, it was almost translucent.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking rather like she had when Gary had accused of her of being in the taxi in New York.
Like a rabbit caught in headlights.
“It’s a simple question.” His voice was hard. “Why was there a pregnancy test in our garbage?”
“What?” She looked at him, her eyes unsure. “How did you—”
“Is there something else I should know, Vanessa?” he demanded.
She shook her head, her eyes downcast and her face defeated. “No. I thought there might be. With the U.S. time lag, I thought I might’ve missed a pill, but—”
“Contraception? I was under the impression that you couldn’t have children.”
But Ethan realized now that this too had been a smoke screen.
In fact, when he thought about how Vanessa was so professionally dogged about getting what she wanted, he wondered why it had never crossed his mind that she might do the same in her personal life.
She had played him all along, played on his gullibility.
“Why, Vanessa? Why did you agree to marry me, knowing that our relationship was built on lies?”
“I don’t honestly know,” she replied, tears in her eyes. “I did—do—want to marry you. I never wanted to go through the whole childbirth thing, and I suppose I thought that with Daisy, we were a ready-made family. I wouldn’t need to be a mum as such, and nobody would expect me to replace Jane. Not that I could have anyway,” she added, her tone bitter.
“How dare you?” Ethan said, his tone hardening.
Whatever he’d thought before about Daisy’s crazy notion about the ring not fitting, perhaps she’d been onto something all the same.
Vanessa stood up to leave. She took the ring off and placed it on the table. “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I do love you and Daisy. But you were never truly going to let me in.”
Now, Ethan thought about what she’d said and wondered if there was any truth in it.She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness.
Obviously not enough.
