Danielle Steel - Honor Thyself

“What happened to the baby?” she asked in a strangled voice, looking up at him. Some things were still lost for her, although there was so much about it that was coming back now.

“You lost it. A boy. You were almost six months pregnant. You fell off the ladder, decorating the tree at Christmas. I tried to catch you, but you fell right past me. You were in the hospital for three days, but we lost him. Chloe never knew you were pregnant, but Anthony did. We explained it to him. He asked me if we were going to get married, and I said we would. And then my daughter died and Arlette had a nervous breakdown and begged me not to. She threatened suicide, and you had lost the baby by then, so our getting married wasn't as pressing. I begged you to understand. I was going to resign in the spring, and by then I thought Arlette could survive it. I needed more time, or at least that was what I said.” He looked at Carole then with mournful eyes. “In the end, I think you did the right thing.” It killed him to say it. “I don't think I'd ever have left her. I meant to. I believed I would, but in fact I just couldn't. That, or my job. I didn't retire for another six years after you left Paris. And I'm not sure I could ever have left Arlette. There would have always been something, some reason why she wouldn't let me leave her. I don't even think she loved me, not as you did, or as I loved you. She just didn't want to lose me to another woman. If you'd been French, you would have put up with it. But you weren't. It all sounded like lies to you, and some of them were. I just didn't have the courage to tell you I couldn't do it. I lied to myself more than I did to you. When I told you I'd divorce her, I meant it. I hated you for leaving me. I thought you were being cruel to me. But you were right to do it. I would have broken your heart in the end, even more than I did. The last six months were a nightmare. Constant fights, constant crying. You were devastated after you lost the baby. So was I.”

“What finally did it? What made me leave?” Her voice was a whisper.

“Another day, another lie, another delay. You just got up one morning and started packing. You waited till the end of the school year. I'd done nothing about the divorce, and they were asking me to do another term in the ministry. I tried to explain it to you, and you wouldn't listen. You left a week later. I took you to the airport, and neither of us could stop crying. You told me to call you, if I got divorced. I called, but I never got divorced, and I stayed on in the government. They needed me. And she did too, in her own way. She didn't love me, but we were used to each other. She felt I owed it to her to stay with her.

“I called you several times when you were back in L.A., and then you stopped taking my calls. I heard you had sold the house. I went there to look at it one day. It nearly broke my heart when I remembered how happy we'd been there.”

“I went to see it that day, before the bomb exploded in the tunnel. I was on my way back to the hotel when it happened,” she said, and he nodded. It had been a place of refuge for both of them, a haven, the love nest they had shared and where they had conceived their baby. She couldn't help wondering what would have happened if she'd had his child, if he would have finally divorced his wife. Probably not. He was French. Frenchmen had mistresses and illegitimate children. They had done it for centuries, and nothing much had changed. It was still acceptable, but not to Carole. She was a farm girl from Mississippi, no matter how famous she was, and she didn't want to live with another woman's husband. She had told him that right from the beginning. “We never should have started,” she said, looking at him from where she lay with her head on the pillow.

“We had no choice,” Matthieu said simply. “We were too much in love with each other not to.”

“I don't believe that,” she said firmly. “I think people always have choices. We did. We made the wrong ones, and we paid a high price for them. I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever forgot you. I didn't get over you for a long time, until I met my last husband.” She remembered that clearly now.

“I read that you got married, about ten years ago,” he said, and she nodded. “I was happy for you”—and then he smiled ruefully—“and very jealous. He's a lucky man.”

“No, he isn't. He died two years ago of cancer. Everyone says he was a wonderful person.”

“That's why Jason was here. I wondered why.”

“He would have come anyway. He's a good man too.”

“You didn't think that eighteen years ago,” Matthieu said, looking irritated. He wasn't sure she would have said the same about him, even today, that he was a good man. In her eyes, he hadn't been. She had said so at the time. She said he had lied to her and misled her, and was a dishonest, dishonorable person. It had cut him to the quick at the time. No one had ever accused him of that in his life, but she was right.

“I think he's a good person now,” Carole said about Jason. “We all pay for our sins in the end. The Russian girl left him by the time I left Paris.”

“Did he try to come back to you?” Matthieu was curious about it.

“Apparently, he did. He says I didn't want him. I was probably still in love with you at the time.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Yes, I do,” she said honestly. “I wasted two and a half years of my life with you, and probably another five getting over you. That's a long time to give to a man who wouldn't leave his wife.” And then she thought about it and wondered what had happened. “Where is she now?”

“She died a year ago, after a long illness. She was very sick for the last three years of her life. I'm glad I was with her. I owed her that. We were married forty-six years in the end. It wasn't the marriage I would have wanted, or the one I thought I'd get when I married her at twenty-one, but it was the one we had. We were friends. She was very elegant about you. I don't think she forgave me, but she understood. She knew how in love with you I was. I never felt that way about her. She was a very cold person. But she was a decent, honest woman.” So he had stayed, just as she'd always thought he would. And even he had said she'd done the right thing by leaving. She had the answers now, the ones she'd come to Paris for. That it had been too late for her with Jason, by the time he came back. She no longer loved him, and she couldn't have stopped him from marrying the Russian supermodel. She had no choice there, and by the time she did, she didn't want him. She didn't even want him now. It was too late. And all she would ever have been to Matthieu was his mistress. He would never have left his wife until she died. Carole felt she understood that when she left Paris, which was why she had. But it was only now that she knew it was the right decision. He had confirmed it to her, which was a gift of sorts, long after the fact.

A lot of it had come back now, some of the events, and too many of the feelings. She could almost taste her disappointment and despair when she had finally given up and left him. He had very nearly destroyed her, and her career. He had even disappointed her children. Whatever his intentions had been in the beginning, or his love for her, he hadn't been honorable with her. At least what Jason had done, no matter how awful it had been for her, had been up front and honest. He had divorced her and married the other woman. Matthieu never had.

“What are you doing now? Are you still in government?” she asked.

“I was until ten years ago, when I retired and went back to my family law firm. I practice with two of my brothers.”

“And you were the most powerful man in France. You controlled everything then, and you loved it.”