‘Go home, Con,’ Selina said with a gentle pat on his arm. ‘If she hasn’t turned up at work this morning it’s because she’s still at home and she needs you with her. Just one thing, though. If the two of you need an extra day or two to get your heads on straight, let me know so I don’t end up without any staff at all! I’ll need some time to call in favours.’
‘Will do, boss!’ he said with a flip of a salute, suddenly eager to get home. He had no idea why Callie wasn’t answering her mobile phone—unless she’d forgotten to charge the battery again—but Selina was probably right. He’d get home and she would be sitting in the kitchen-diner they’d remodelled together with a pot of coffee and a pile of freshly made toast…no, make that a scattering of crumbs on the plate, because she wouldn’t have sat there looking at hot buttered toast for long without tucking in.
And while she was waiting, she’d be going over in her head exactly what she wanted to say, and as soon as he walked in she would stand there and deliver her little prepared speech the way she always did once she’d weighed everything up and come to a decision….
And all the while he was driving, a little corner of his brain was doing calculations and lining up facts and figures, deliberately cross-checking the tests he’d ordered on the patients he’d seen…anything to stop him trying to second-guess what she was going to say. After all, it was her body so ultimately it was her decision whether to put it through yet another round of IVF…or whether to finally abandon the attempt at having the child she desperately wanted.
The short distance to the spacious home they’d bought when they’d first got married—chosen both for its proximity to the hospital and because they’d thought they would have no problem filling it with children—was long enough for him to recall that it was nearly five months since their son had been stillborn.
In that time they’d both spent far too many nights staring into the darkness, alone with their thoughts even though they still shared the same room and the same bed they always had. Yet, in spite of that surface closeness, in all those weeks he’d been very careful not to let Callie know how much he’d missed the ultimate intimacy of making love with her, their joining not just the sexual one of bodies but of hearts, minds and spirits, too. He’d been determined to wait until she was ready, but she’d only ever shown that she would welcome his attentions once, and with his emotions on a hair trigger with the months of abstinence, that had hardly been an outstanding success.
He’d hoped that his consideration would help to show her how much he cared for her but now he wondered if it might have been a mistake to put a lid on what he was thinking, how he was feeling and what he wanted. If she’d spent all that time waiting for him to make the first move…
He chuckled wryly when he realised that was all too possible. He had been Callie’s first and only lover, and while she was a generous and passionate woman she still remained a little shy about letting him know what she liked and how she liked it when they came together.
‘Let’s hope that today marks the start of a new beginning,’ he said with an expectant lift to his spirits. Selina had seemed to think that Callie had been coming to a decision about something over the last few days, but what that decision was, he had absolutely no idea.
The thought of abandoning that last batch of fertilised eggs to their liquid nitrogen prison put a lump in his throat that threatened to choke him. She’d been so adamant that she wanted the children she carried to be their babies that she’d put herself through misery over and over again before she’d managed to produce enough viable ova.
But, ultimately, it was her choice. Her body would have to go through the punishing hormone regimen to prepare it for implantation, and they knew to their cost that getting pregnant wasn’t anywhere near the end of the road.
‘Whatever she’s decided will be OK with me,’ he said firmly as he pulled into the driveway, puzzled to see that she’d put her car away in the garage rather than leaving it in the drive ready to go to work. ‘Callie is what matters more than anything. She’s my wife and I love her. No one has an absolute right to have children. We have a good, strong relationship and a happy marriage, so a family would have just been a wonderful bonus.’
There was still the possibility of adoption, with so many children needing loving homes, but even though Callie might still be desperate for a child, it might take a while longer before she was ready to contemplate that step. For now, it was time to sit down together and talk…really talk…and to repair and strengthen the bonds that had made the two of them invincible.
‘Callie?’ he called as soon as he let himself into the house, feeling more upbeat than he had in a very long time. ‘Sweetheart? Where are you?’
The silence almost echoed around him with a strangely ominous feeling.
‘Callie?’ He could hear the sharper edge to his voice this time as his feet took him swiftly down the polished hallway along the original floorboards that they’d laboriously refinished. A quick glance in either direction as he passed the open doors told him that she wasn’t in the lounge or the spacious study they shared, or in the formal dining room they only used when they were entertaining.
‘Sweetheart?’ He pushed the kitchen door wide and shuddered when he took in the almost clinical neatness of the whole room. Every surface gleamed and there wasn’t even a teaspoon on the work surface where she always made her last cup of instant coffee before she left the house each day. There certainly wasn’t any evidence of hot buttered toast.
Panic roared through him and in an instant he was racing back down the hall and taking the stairs two and even three at a time in his desperate need to get to their bedroom and the en suite bathroom.
‘She wouldn’t,’ he told himself fiercely, fighting with a sudden nightmare vision of his wife’s lifeless body sprawled across their bed or on the bathroom floor.
It was a heart-stopping body blow to realise that he might have drifted that far away from her. He honestly didn’t know if she’d become so depressed that she might attempt suicide, but he prayed that her deep reverence for life would have prevented her taking that awful step.
‘Oh, thank you, God,’ he whispered as he clung to the door-frame, tears of relief already starting to flow when he realised that she wasn’t there…wasn’t anywhere in the house, in fact.
It took him several minutes to compose himself and a cold facecloth to remove the evidence of his loss of control before he dragged his heavy feet across to slump on the side of the bed.
‘So, where are you, sweetheart? Where have you gone?’ he asked the silent room, with a sudden memory of the laughter that had filled it when they’d been decorating it together, getting more paint on each other than the walls and then having to spend ages under the shower washing each other off…just to be certain there were no spots of paint remaining, of course.
His eyes drifted across to the photograph in the silver frame that graced the dressing-table, searching out the bright, laughing face he loved so much…and found it covered by the envelope propped against it with his own name written across it in her familiar script.
Dread wrapped around his heart as he reached for it, his hand visibly trembling as he pulled the single sheet of paper out and fumbled to unfold it.
There was no heading to the letter. No ‘Dear Con’, ‘Darling’ or ‘My Love’, the way she always began the most mundane of notes. Before he could even focus on what she’d written his heart was breaking to see the marks on the paper where her tears had fallen.
‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to admit that I’ll never be able to give you what you want,’ she said in the frighteningly brief missive. ‘It’s best if I go away so you can start the divorce proceedings. Let Martin know what you want to do. I won’t fight it. Be happy.’
‘No!’ he roared in disbelief. ‘Callie, no!’ And he felt his heart