Jackie’s jaw moved, but no sound came out. She had gone white. And then she wrenched herself free and stumbled out of the garden on her high heels, gaining speed with every step.
For a man who lived his life in the shallows, Romano experienced the unfamiliar feeling of knowing he’d gone too deep, said too much, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. There wasn’t a quip, a smart remark, that could save the situation. He was in open water and land was nowhere in sight.
Jackie had disappeared along the path and into the small patch of woodland that hid the sunken garden from the island’s shore.
The path. The one that led down to the beach.
Oh, hell.
He sprinted after her, even though he couldn’t rationalise why stopping her from bumping into Jack and Lizzie was so important. In his mind she deserved all she got. He told himself he was speeding after her to stop her putting a huge dampener on the wedding and ignored the pity that twinged in him every time he thought of how much she would hate anyone—especially her adored older sister—to see her in such a mess.
It didn’t take long to catch her up, only twenty steps away from where the trees parted and she would have a full view of the shingle beach.
‘Jackie!’ It wasn’t quite a shout, wasn’t quite a whisper, but a strange combination of the two.
She faltered but didn’t alter her course. He was closer now and put a restraining hand on her arm, spoke in a low voice. ‘Not that way.’
All of her back muscles tensed and he just knew she was getting ready to let rip, but then they heard a rumble of low laughter from the direction of the water’s edge and she jolted in surprise.
‘This way,’he said, as quietly as possible, and led her through the trees in the opposite direction, heading for the narrow tip of the island, away from the house, where they would be less likely to be disturbed by wandering wedding guests. They reached a clearing with a soft grassy bank and she just seemed to lose the ability to keep her joints locked. Her knees folded under her and she sat down on the grass with a thud.
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ she said, enunciating each word carefully. ‘You don’t know…’
It took Romano a couple of seconds to realise she was continuing the conversation she’d walked out on as if no time had passed. And that wasn’t the only strange thing that had happened. He no longer wanted to erupt. He didn’t know why. Maybe he’d experienced so many strong emotions in the last half-hour that he’d just run out, had none left. He sat down beside her.
‘So tell me what it was like.’
He knew his request didn’t sound exactly friendly, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
She kicked off her shoes and sank her bare feet into the grass. Even the shade of her toenails complemented her outfit. So Jackie…
She hugged her legs, drew them up until she was almost in a little ball, and rested her cheek on her knees. Her face was turned in his direction, but her eyes were glazed and unfocused.
‘I wanted to believe you’d come,’ she said in a voice that reminded him of a little girl’s. ‘I wanted to believe that it would all turn out right, but I truly didn’t think it was ever going to happen.’
Another nail in the coffin. Another confirmation from her that he was a loser. He ought to get angry again, but there was something in her voice, her face, that totally arrested him.
Honesty. Pure and unguarded.
It was such a rare commodity where Jackie was concerned that he decided not to do anything to scare it away. He needed answers and she was the only one who could provide them.
‘Mamma was so cross when I told her I was pregnant that I thought she was going to break something.’
One corner of his mouth lifted. Yes, he could well imagine the scene. It wouldn’t have been pretty.
‘She insisted that adoption was the only way. How could I argue with her? I couldn’t do it on my own.’
‘What about your father?’
She snorted. ‘He might be a blue-sky-thinking entrepreneur, but he’s smart enough to do what Mamma tells him to do.’ She blinked, looked across at him as she lifted her lashes again. ‘I don’t think he knew what to do with me. He’s good with big ideas and balance sheets, but not so great with the people stuff. I think he wanted the problem to just go away. It was as much as he could manage just to let me go and live with him until the baby was born.’
Romano didn’t say anything. He’d always thought of Jackie as being just like him—a child of a wealthy family, secure in the knowledge of her place in the world. He’d even envied her the sisters and the multitude of cousins compared to his one-parent, no-cousin family. His father hadn’t been perfect, but he’d always shown him love, and that had made Romano too sure, too cocky, when he’d been young, but he realised that Jackie had never had that.
One loving parent—however unique he might be—had to be better than two clueless ones. His father would never have forced him to do what Jackie’s parents had made her do. Yes, her mother had been the driving force, but her father had to take responsibility too. He’d let her down by omitting to stand up for her, to fight for her, to do anything he could to make her happy. That was what fathers were supposed to do.
That was what he was supposed to do now.
Jackie lifted her head from her knees. ‘Once I was too big to keep it a secret any more, Mamma packed me off to London to live with Dad, and you know what?’ She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and took a long gulp of air.
‘What?’ he said softly. No longer was he trying just to keep her talking, aiming to get dates and times and details from her. He really wanted to know.
‘When I went to live with him, he never even mentioned my pregnancy, even though I was swelling up in front of his face. He just…ignored it. It was so weird.’ She shook her head. ‘And when I came home from the hospital without…on my own…the only emotion he showed was relief.’
She hugged her knees even tighter and rested her chin on top of them. He could see her jaw clenching and unclenching, as if there were unsaid words, words she’d wanted to say to her father for years, but never had.
She’d been so young. And so alone.
He didn’t have a heart of stone. He would have been a monster if he couldn’t have imagined how awful it must have been for her. And she’d only told him bare details.
There wasn’t anything he could say to change that, to make it better. For a long time they sat in silence.
‘What was it like?’ he finally said. ‘The day she was born?’
Jackie frowned. ‘It rained.’
He didn’t push for more, sensing that the answer he wanted was coming, he just needed to give her room. The sun had started to set while they’d been in the clearing and, through the trees, the sky was turning bright turquoise at the horizon, and the ripples on the lake glinted soft gold. The temperature must have dropped a little, because Jackie shivered.
Not a monster, he reminded himself, and pulled his jacket off and draped it around her shoulders. The sleeves hung uselessly by her sides.
When she spoke again, she went on to describe a long, complicated labour that had ended in a distressed baby and an emergency Caesarean section. All the half-formed ideas of cute newborns sliding easily into the world were blown right out of the water. Real birth, it seemed, was every bit as traumatic as real life. And she’d done it all on her own, her father away on a business trip and her mother still in Italy keeping up at the façade, lest anyone suspect their family’s disgrace.
‘What