KIM LAWRENCE: Santiago's Love-Child

‘But I never heard you exchange a cross word.’ A still-sceptical Rachel gave a mystified frown.

‘There were cross words,’ Lily admitted, recalling the constant sniping and recriminations. ‘But we were past that. The fact is, I think we were both too apathetic to argue by the end.’

‘That’s so sad.’

Lily, whose own throat closed over with emotion, could only silently echo the sentiment. ‘I suppose we were a classic case of two people who grew apart, not together.’

A stunned Rachel exhaled a gusty sigh and shook her head, visibly struggling to come to terms with these calmly voiced revelations.

‘I knew straight off that Olivia wasn’t like the others.’

It wasn’t until the designer bag Rachel had been reaching into to switch off her phone dropped from her nerveless fingers, the contents spilling unheeded over the floor, that Lily realised that she had voiced her thought out loud.

‘“The others…!” Gordon had affairs?’

Lily met her friend’s dazed eyes and admitted awkwardly, ‘Two that I know of. There might have been more,’ she added in an abstracted voice. Almost certainly were.

Rachel released a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t believe any of this!’ She shook her head as if to focus her thoughts. ‘And you knew…?’

Lily nodded.

‘Did you care?’

The flash of her blue eyes lent animation to Lily’s pale face. ‘Of course I damned well cared!’ It had been deeply humiliating, but Gordon had always been filled with remorse afterwards…They mean nothing to me, Lily.

Rachel grimaced. ‘Sorry. I still can’t believe that you never said a word.’ Rachel shook her head in disbelief. ‘I’m your best friend.’

Lily’s hands lifted in a fluttery, helpless gesture. ‘It felt disloyal to talk about it and Gordon begged me not to tell anyone. Can you imagine what Gran would have said if she’d found out, and after she had loaned him the money for that car…?’ She stopped and angled a questioning glance at her best friend. ‘I suppose this sounds big-time weird to you?’

Rachel didn’t deny it. ‘And then some!’

‘And you think I’m totally pathetic?’

‘Well, it’s not as if there were children and—’ She broke off, a stricken look of horror written on her fair-skinned face. She leapt out of the chair and perched herself on the arm of the chair the other girl occupied. ‘Oh, Lily, I’m so, so sorry.’

Lily shook her head and smiled reassuringly. ‘No, you’re right, there weren’t.’

‘But you couldn’t have completely given up the marriage; you tried for a baby?’

Lily fixed her cornflower-blue eyes on her friend’s face and shook her head. ‘No, we didn’t.’

‘So it was an accident.’ Something that Rachel couldn’t identify flickered at the back of Lily’s eyes. ‘I’m not saying you weren’t pleased,’ she amended hastily. Nobody who had seen Lily in those early months could have failed to see she was delighted at the prospect of becoming a mother.

‘It’s the happiest I’ve ever been,’ Lily admitted.

‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I think he’s a total bastard to leave you when you were pregnant.’

‘I hadn’t slept with Gordon for almost a year before I got pregnant.’

THE silence that followed this barely audible announcement stretched until, finally unable to bear it, Lily begged, ‘Say something.’

‘You and Gordon…you mean Gordon wasn’t the father!’

‘Obviously not.’ Lily, her eyes closed, passed a hand across her face. She was unable to meet her friend’s eyes. ‘Nothing you can say could make me feel more wretchedly ashamed than I already do,’ she choked.

‘What I’m going to say…Oh, Lily, you don’t really think I’d pass judgement, do you?’

Lily heard the hurt in her friend’s voice and her head came up. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did,’ she said miserably. She began to rise, but had not managed to get to her feet before Rachel grabbed her by the shoulders.

‘You can’t drop a bombshell like that and walk away, Lily,’ she protested, still looking totally gobsmacked. ‘I want to know everything.’

‘There’s nothing to know.’

‘Nothing! You had an affair. You got pregnant. You, of all people. That’s not nothing in my book. I can’t believe that all this time you didn’t say a word,’ she reproached. ‘Who…?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Are you still seeing him?’

Lily involuntarily inhaled as Santiago’s dark, classically featured face appeared in her head.

‘Do I know him?’

The words dragged Lily back to the present; she willed herself not to glance towards the open newspaper. ‘No, and I’m not still seeing him.’

She didn’t add that she was pretty sure he’d cut her dead if he ever did see her, not that that was likely considering the different worlds they lived in.

If things had gone differently she supposed they would have had to meet…? A man had a right to know if he was a father. Very conscious of the leaden weight of misery in her chest, she wondered what his reaction might have been if the baby had survived, and she had told him.

It was possible he might not have wanted to have anything to do with a child conceived by accident, but if he had she supposed they would have had to hammer out some sort of arrangement. Now, though, the speculation was pointless; she’d never know, and neither would he.

‘It was a holiday romance, that was all, a fling…’ She took a deep breath. ‘It meant nothing.’ She’d told so many lies and half-truths that another one couldn’t matter and if she said it often enough she might even start believing it.

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