Caroline Anderson - With This Baby...

‘That’s not why I’m here.’

No, it wasn’t. He was here because she’d given him very little choice, and all these smiling pleasantries were just exactly that. Any second now, she guessed, the gloves would be off.

She fished the teabag out of his mug, dunked it up and down in her own and wished, for the hundredth time that day, that she’d got milk. She’d tried some of Jess’s formula in it, but it hadn’t been the same, and, anyway, she was running out of that, too.

She turned to face him, mugs in hand. ‘So, where do you want to start?’ she asked, taking the bull by the horns.

‘I’d like to see those photographs.’

‘Ah.’

She set the mugs down in front of him and turned away. She hated looking at the photos. They weren’t sordid, thank God, but they were intimate—hugely intimate, emotionally revealing. Things no one should see except the participants—things Amy should have taken with her to the grave, locked up in her heart.

Still, he’d been there, so it hardly mattered if he saw them, did it? She didn’t have to look again and upset herself with the painful images of her sister with this undeniably attractive man.

She went to the study and pulled out the packet of photos from the bottom drawer, and gave them to him.

‘Here.’

He took them, opened the envelope and eased them out, a strange expression on his face. Cradling her tea, she watched him as he sifted through them slowly, over and over again.

Then, without a word, he put them away in the envelope and looked up at her, his eyes curiously sad.

‘You’d better sit down,’ he said, and she sat, wondering what it was that had put that look on his face. Had he loved Amy? Was that it?

It wasn’t, and if she’d had a lifetime, she couldn’t have guessed what was coming next.

‘The man in those photographs isn’t me,’ he said. ‘It’s my twin brother.’

She stared at him blankly, then laughed. ‘Oh, very good. How clever—except, of course, that Amy called you Patrick. And now you’re going to tell me he was also called Patrick?’

Patrick—this one—shook his head. ‘His name was Will. He sometimes used to pretend to be me—a sort of prank we used to play as kids, except he apparently never grew out of it. He died a year ago, in Australia.’

‘Died?’ she echoed, and her hopes crumbled to dust. There was no way he’d pay for his brother’s child, and so she’d have to sell their home and move, or at least sell the barn, and Amy’s debts would eat up so much of that.

‘Tell me—what date were these taken?’

‘It’s on the back of the envelope,’ she said woodenly. ‘March, I believe.’

He turned the packet over, and nodded. ‘That fits. I wondered if it would. I was away—in Japan, on a contract. Will was using my flat for a week—and apparently masquerading as me. It must have been then. So, tell me, when was the baby born?’

‘Two weeks before Christmas.’

He nodded, then he turned his head slightly and studied Jess in the pram.

‘She doesn’t look like him.’

‘She’s very like Amy.’

He nodded again, and let out a quiet sigh. ‘I wish she’d looked more like him—a sort of reminder. That would have been nice.’

‘You could always look in the mirror,’ she said, and his mouth kicked up in a sad smile.

‘Not quite the same. Still.’

He stood up. ‘I’ve got something for you—I’ll just get my jacket,’ he said, and went out to the car.

She followed him, propping herself up in the doorway and watching as his long legs ate up the path. The dogs were playing now, having a tug of war with one of Pepper’s knotted bones, and he paused to ruffle their coats.

They wagged at him and carried on, growling and pretending to be fierce, and after one last pat he straightened up, pulled open her car door and reached in for his jacket.

As he closed the door, it bounced open again, as she’d known it would.

‘It does that,’ she told him, going over to yank the handle and bang the door. ‘It’s a knack you have to acquire.’

He flinched and muttered something along the lines of not in this lifetime, and she stifled a laugh. Poor baby, he’d really had to slum it! Oh, well, it would do him good—let him see what she was up against. She could do with all the sympathy she could get, the way things were panning out.

They walked back to the house, past the broken little tractor with its drooping cutting deck, past the barn with its door hanging half-open on rusty hinges to reveal the strimmer that had gone on strike over the winter and steadfastly refused to start.

She wondered what else could go wrong, and decided she didn’t want to think about it. She had more than enough to think about—like the fact that it seemed he wasn’t Jess’s father after all, although proving it could be tricky, because, of course, the DNA would match if he and his brother were identical twins. If that really was his brother in the photos and not him, then they were like two peas in a pod.

And, of course, because of that it would be the easiest thing in the world for him to pass off his child as his brother’s, now that Will and Amy weren’t there to argue the case. It would absolve him of all responsibility. How convenient.

And yet he didn’t seem dishonest.

She gave a silent snort. Like she was such a good judge of character! She’d let Amy hoodwink her for years, bleeding her dry in one way and another and now leaving her with Jess to bring up, safe in the knowledge that, of course, she, Claire, the sensible one, would do the right thing.

So he could be a liar and a smooth talker, quite easily, and how on earth would she know?

Oh, rats. It was too confusing, too involved, too difficult to deal with. She didn’t want to doubt him, but now it was there in the back of her consciousness, this insidious little doubt, niggling away and destroying her peace of mind.

Not that she had much of that these days.

‘Here,’ he said, pulling an envelope out of his jacket pocket and handing it to her as they went back into the kitchen. She eyed it warily.

A letter from a solicitor threatening her with legal action if she revealed the photos? A cheque—no, she didn’t get that lucky.

‘It’s the information about the DNA lab,’ he told her, putting her out of her suspense and puncturing the last little bubble of hope. ‘They’ve got my profile on record. The instructions are all in there. You just have to take the baby to the GP for a cheek swab, and get it sent off to them with the enclosed covering letter and the cheque that’s in there, and then they run the test. It should match if she’s Will’s daughter—and that’s definitely Will in the photos.’

‘How do I know that?’ she asked.

His brow pleated. ‘How do you know? Because we’re identical.’

‘Exactly. So how do I know it isn’t you?’

He stared at her, clearly taken aback. ‘Me? I’ve told you, I was out of the country.’

‘I’ve only got your word for that.’

‘It’s usually good enough,’ he said drily, and if she hadn’t known better, she would have said he sounded hurt. Then he went on, ‘Anyway, it’s easy. Apart from the passport stamps and minutes of the meetings I attended in Japan, I haven’t had my appendix out—unlike Will. And there’s a scar in the photos.’

And before she had a chance to say anything, before she could challenge him or express her scepticism, he tugged his shirt out of his trousers, hitched a thumb in the waistband and pushed it down, revealing a taut, board-flat abdomen without so much as a crease in it. ‘See? No scar.’

Her shoulders dropped. Well, at least she knew he was telling the truth. There was no way a surgeon’s knife had ever scored that skin. She dragged her eyes away from the line of dark hair that arrowed down under that dangerously low waistband, and looked back up at him.