Kate Walker - Rafael's Love-Child

‘You can’t know anything about me—who I am or what I am—so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m just not that kind of woman.’

‘You may believe that you were not that sort of woman—’

He bit off the sentence swiftly, but not quite quickly enough. Serena pounced on that revealing change of tense.

‘Were not?’ she repeated shakily. ‘Were? What does that mean? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?’

But he wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead he turned to where little Tonio still lay, sleeping peacefully.

‘I have to leave,’ he said, not even attempting to hide the fact that he was deliberately ignoring her anxious questions. ‘Tonio will need feeding…’

‘No! You can’t do this to me! I won’t let you!’

The sidelong glance he turned in her direction was one of supreme indifference. I can do exactly as I wish, it declared, as clearly as if he had spoken. And you can do nothing to stop me.

Oh, couldn’t she?

Just as Rafael looped the handles of the carrycot over one strong hand she slipped past him, heading for the doorway and positioning herself just in front of it.

‘I mean it!’ she declared, praying that her vehemence hid every sign of the uncertainty that nagged at her.

‘Serena…’ Her name was threaded through with a note of ominous warning, one she knew she would be wise to heed, but she couldn’t bring herself to give up the fight so easily.

‘No. I won’t let you go until you tell me. It’s my life, I have a right to know!’

No, defiance was the wrong approach. It was only hardening his resolve. She could see that in the set of his jaw, the cold light in his eyes, the way they had narrowed, dangerously assessing. Hastily she rethought her plan of campaign.

‘Rafael, please… ‘ she cajoled, carefully adjusting her tone, making it soft and pleading, totally unlike the challenge of moments before.

‘Serena, don’t do this… ‘

Are you sure you know what you’re doing? a small, nervous voice questioned at the back of her mind. Are you sure that you really want to know?

‘No!’

Stubbornly she pushed the weak thoughts away, refusing to let them take root. If she gave in to Rafael now, if she let him go without answering her, then she would have lost her chance for ever. If he defeated her once, he would always be able to do so again.

‘Please—you don’t know what it’s been like! I’ve lain awake at nights trying and trying to remember, but it’s all just a blank—a big, gaping black hole where that day should be. Can you imagine how that feels—how frightening it is?’

‘Madre de Dios!’

Rafael dropped the handles of the carrycot and raked both hands through the shining luxuriance of his black hair in a gesture so expressive of burning exasperation that Serena couldn’t hold back a smile at the knowledge that she was getting through to him at last.

‘You will regret this.’

It was a flat statement of fact, not a threat, and that was what firmed her resolve, making her even more set on continuing.

‘I’ll regret it even more if I don’t find out what you’re talking about. This is my past—my life! How can I ever hope to move on, go forward, if I don’t know what’s behind me?’

Rafael’s only answer was another outburst of explosive Spanish, but at the end of it he flung up his hands in a gesture of defeat.

‘All right, you asked for it! And perhaps it is best that you know the truth. That date you gave… ‘

‘It wasn’t right? I was unconscious longer than I believed?’

‘On the contrary. In all but one detail the date was perfectly correct. The right day, the right month…’

‘But…’ She had to force the word out in a hoarse, tight-throated croak, because it was obvious that there had to be a ‘but’.

‘But it was a year early.’

‘Early? I don’t understand.’

‘The date you gave to the doctor was the right day, right month last year. And you are not twenty-three, but twenty-four. The accident, the injury to your head, left you with partial amnesia. It’s not just the last few days that you can’t remember. You’ve lost a year of your life.’

YOU’VE lost a year of your life. A year of your life. A year.

The words Rafael had flung at her formed a tormenting, thudding refrain inside her skull whenever she wasn’t thinking about anything else.

And she had too much time to think. Nothing held her attention; nothing distracted her from the appalling fact that she could not manage to come to terms with.

In the daytime she could try to read, or watch television, but inevitably she had found it was impossible to concentrate. She would find that she had been staring blankly at the screen or a page on which not a single word had registered, and all the time those impossible, incredible words had swung round and round in her mind, beating at her brain with a bruising sense of horror. But the nights, in the silence and the darkness, were much, much worse.

You’ve lost a year of your life.

How was it possible? How could this have happened? More importantly, why had it happened? How could she simply forget about a year that she had lived? How could something wipe out twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days of her existence, destroying it and leaving not a trace of anything behind?

‘No!’

She cried the word aloud in an attempt to drive away the demons of fear and panic that seemed to prowl around her, hidden in the shadows, tormenting her.

She wouldn’t give in to this, she vowed. Wouldn’t go down under the waves of horror that threatened to engulf her. She would fight them with everything at her disposal. Her past couldn’t stay buried for ever. Her memories would have to emerge some day, and she would do everything she could to make sure that day came just as soon as possible.

Not that she had much to go on. Her few belongings were no help. The clothes she had been wearing at the time of the accident had been ruined, but she was assured that they had been strictly anonymous, inexpensive chainstore items, with no distinguishing marks on them at all, ditto her shoes. And the small, battered brown leather handbag that had been picked up at the crash scene held only a purse containing just a few pounds in cash, a comb, a packet of tissues and a key. That was all.

‘If only there’d been a diary, or something with an address on it!’ Serena had wailed when Dr Greene had assured her that nothing had been taken or hidden from her.

‘It’s been left exactly as it was handed to us, I’m afraid. The police have investigated that address in Yorkshire that you gave us, but it turned out to be a dead end.’

‘No help at all?’

The doctor shook her dark head, grey eyes sympathetic.

‘I’m sorry, no. It was just one bedsit out of a dozen or so in an old house that’s usually rented out to students. Apparently when you lived there everyone who shared the house with you was in their final year. They’ve all moved on, far and wide, and very few of them even bothered to leave forwarding addresses.’

‘And Leanne?’

Leanne was someone she’d remembered. A friend from her student days. Her best friend.

‘I went to university late, because my mother was so ill,’ she’d told the doctor, sadness clouding her eyes at the memory. ‘She had ovarian cancer and I postponed my starting date because I wanted to stay at home and nurse her. So I was twenty-two when I started my course. It seemed that everyone else was so much younger than me, and I didn’t really make any friends until I moved into Alban Road. That was where I met Leanne.’

‘You said she’d emigrated to Australia?’