Stefanie London - Postcards From New York

‘Why did your mother marry your father if he’d done that?’ It was a question he’d asked himself so many times.

‘Maybe she saw marriage to that brute as her only chance. She was from a well-known family and wouldn’t have wanted to bring such a scandal out into the open.’

Emma moved and wrapped her arms around him, pressing her lips to his forehead. It was strangely comforting to be held by her, to feel her compassion wrapping around him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘For making you go there again.’

‘Maybe I should have faced my father’s mother when I had the chance, asked her why she helped to hide such horrible things from the world. From the outside we must have appeared a normal family. I want to know if she realises that by doing that she trapped my mother and I with an angry bully. Only his sudden death freed us.’

‘It doesn’t mean we shall be the same,’ she said, homing in on the worry he’d had since the moment she’d arrived in New York with the news of her pregnancy. He wasn’t fit to be a father with a past like that, but that just made him more determined to be a part of his child’s life, to be a better father.

‘How can you say that when you only agreed to marriage for the child’s sake?’ He began to build his barriers back again, using all the ammunition he had to push her away. As he spoke he looked into her eyes and saw the flash of pain within them, but buried it deep inside him.

‘Our child was not conceived through violence,’ she said firmly as she touched his face with the palm of her hand, a gesture he wanted to enjoy, but he couldn’t allow himself that luxury.

‘But it most definitely wasn’t conceived out of love.’ He threw the harsh truth at her and her hand stilled.

‘No, it wasn’t.’ The softness of her voice, mixed with sadness, slashed at him harshly. What the hell had he been thinking of, talking about this with her?

She moved away from him, looking like a hurt and wounded animal, and that strange sensation squeezed his chest again. This was getting far too deep for him and he had to put a stop to it right now.

‘I never want to talk of this again.’ Anger boiled over inside him, threatening to spill out everywhere, turn him into a copy of the man who’d terrified him as a child, and she’d done that to him.

Emma looked up at him and he watched her bare shoulders go back as she sat a little taller, her chin lifting in that sexily defiant way of hers. ‘I understand, and we won’t.’

She understood? How could she understand? He wanted to ask her about her childhood, just what it was in her past that qualified her even to say that, but he couldn’t deal with any more emotion. He needed space, time on his own. He strode from the bedroom as the light of dawn filled the apartment, thankful that she hadn’t attempted to follow or ask anything else.

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