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“Sixteen months ago.”
Her eyes shifted across the room, anxiety making her tetchy. Nothing had changed, except for a single photograph that now sat on the grand piano. She did a double take, and then moved towards it on autopilot. A little girl with dark curls and dimpled cheeks was smiling from the frame, her eyes so familiar that she could have sworn, at first glance, that it was Charlotte. But there were differences too. This little girl’s face was rounder, her cheeks fuller, her lips not quite as cupid’s bow in shape.
“Is this – do you –?” She couldn’t quite get the words out. Did Gray have another child? Another daughter?
“My niece, Amelia.”
“Your niece.” She picked up the frame, unbidden, running her finger over the little girl’s face. “How old is she?”
“That was taken a little after her first birthday, four months ago.”
“When’s her birthday?”
“March third.”
“Wow.”
He was silent.
“Charlotte’s birthday is March tenth.”
“Charlotte? I have a daughter?”
His voice was raw, hoarse, the emotion of his question making all her guilt tumble through her anew.
“Yes.” She whispered the admission, replacing the frame and turning to face him.
“Sixteen months ago, you had our daughter, and you didn’t tell me.”
The accusation in his sentence was obvious, so too the disappointment.
“For the reasons we just discussed. You made it patently obvious you don’t want children. I thought I was doing you a favour.”
“By concealing my child’s existence from me?”
“By saving you from having to take on a role you clearly didn’t want.”
“Please, save me the Saint act. You didn’t want the complication of sharing our child. You cut me out of her life knowingly. How can you live with what you did?”
She flinched, his take on it stinging more than she’d expected.
“I tried to tell you, once. I called. You reiterated everything you’d said when we broke up. You told me it was over, that you’d already moved on. Can you honestly blame me for deciding to raise her myself?”
“To punish me?”
“To protect her.”
“From me?”
“From your lifestyle,” she said, meeting his eyes with no shame now. The more they argued, the more the ground beneath her became solid, and she felt that her decision-making at the time had been sound. “From your desire not to be a parent. Why should she live with knowing that she was unwanted?”
“Don’t cast me in the same role as your father, Abigail. I’m nothing like him.”
She flinched, again. His words cut to the centre of her soul. Secrets she’d shared with him in a time of intimacy were now being flung back at her during an argument, to score points, and the wounds were great.
“Aren’t you?” She pushed. “He was a wealthy businessman who left my mom to struggle on her own, who’d flit into my life for a weekend here and there, when it suited him, without warning or notice, unpredictable, and most importantly, unable to be counted on. He was the king of disappointments and broken promises, a man who had more interest in pursuing his own social life and business successes than he did in being a parent. In what way do you differ?”
“That is spectacularly unreasonable, given I’ve known of my child’s existence for about seven minutes.”
