Jack sighed and leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, Cara, I really am. But this is some revenge, keeping Sophie a secret all this time and not telling me about her. Arriving on my doorstep with no warning.’
Did he expect her to feel sorry for him? ‘Are you seriously telling me that you hadn’t heard I was pregnant?’
‘There might have been a comment or two. Someone who’d heard something. But, you know, we weren’t together by then.’
The familiar anger began to bubble in her stomach. Who was he trying to kid? Cara might not have gone to university like him, but she damn well wasn’t stupid. ‘You know it takes nine months to grow a baby, right? She was born nine months after we split. It’s not difficult to do the maths, Jack.’
Jack reddened. ‘I just heard a rumour. I wasn’t about to sit down and get the calculator out. Call me naive, but I would have assumed that you would tell me if I had a daughter.’
There was a part of her that wanted to vent the rage she’d kept inside for the last five years. But she had to keep it together. Focus on the plan. When she spoke again, her voice was purposefully softer and empty of blame. Looking down at her hands and then up through her eyelashes, she bit her lip. ‘I suppose I foolishly hoped you would find out somehow. Would come and find us.’
Jack came to sit beside her on the sofa. He’d never been able to bear it when she cried. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey, come on. Don’t get upset.’
She wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist. Crying on demand was a very useful skill. ‘I’m fine. I just want to get past this. I want you to accept Sophie. Get to know her.’ She looked into his eyes. ‘She’s your daughter.’
Jack didn’t look away this time. ‘If I’m honest, I had wondered before now if you’d gone through with the pregnancy. The lads teased me about it when we heard but then it just kind of got forgotten. I should have called you to check.’ He paused, seemed to be searching for the right words to say. ‘I knew the moment I saw you that she was mine.’ As he finished speaking, he froze and looked over her head.
She followed his gaze to the sitting room door, where Rebecca stood looking at them, still in her coat.
He stood up and moved to help her take her coat off. ‘Hi, love. I wasn’t expecting you home so soon.’
Rebecca shrugged him away. ‘I can see that. And I wasn’t expecting to find out you lied to me when you said you didn’t know you had a daughter.’
10
Rebecca
The silence in the room almost pulsed with tension. Vaguely aware of Cara – head down as she made a hasty retreat upstairs – Rebecca kept her eyes fixed on Jack. Her whole body trembled with an explosive cocktail of fear and anger. ‘You knew you had a child, Jack? You knew?’
Jack walked slowly towards her as if she was an unexploded bomb. ‘I didn’t say that, Becca. You came in at the end of the conversation. If I’d known, I would obviously have done the right thing.’
‘Obviously?’ she fired. ‘There is absolutely nothing obvious about any of this.’
He tried to reach out to take her arm but she took a step back. He held his hands aloft in submission. ‘I know, I know, I’m so very sorry that—’
‘You’re sorry? Sorry?’ She was tired and shocked, and the reality of a child and an ex-girlfriend and a side to her husband that she’d never known, was crashing around her ears. ‘I don’t even know who you are right now. You are the man who won’t let me kill spiders. The person who persuades me to let his friend’s brother’s son crash in our spare room for a fortnight because he’s spent the last of his student loan. Who told me—’ her voice started to waver, her throat constricted, but still she waved him away when he reached out ‘—who told me I was so much better than I thought I was, that I could trust you, that you were…’ A sob escaped from her throat. It was so infuriating to cry when she was so angry, when she wanted to tell him exactly how scaldingly furious she was right now.
Jack still stood in front of her. ‘I don’t know what else I can say except that I am so incredibly sorry, Becca.’
She saw tears on Jack’s face too and that just increased the anger in her gut. ‘You should be more than bloody sorry! It’s not fair, Jack. I don’t want children. I’ve never wanted children. I’ve had years of people telling me I’ll change my mind. Giving me patronising nods. Thinking I had some part of me missing somewhere. But I don’t. I just don’t want children. And you said you didn’t want children either.’ She held up her hand to stop him from interrupting. ‘And then, last night, I find out that you have a child. You have a child that you knew nothing about. And do I shout and scream? No. I do not. I try to be a good person. I try to be calm. It’s not his fault, I tell myself. He’s as shocked as me.’
Jack clasped his hands in front of him as if he was praying. ‘I was shocked. I didn’t—’
She held up her hand again. ‘And tonight, I find that, no, you weren’t as shocked as me because, hey, actually, you might have had an inkling but you decided not to look into it. It wasn’t important to you that there might be a woman out there raising your child.’
He opened his mouth but the flash of her eyes made him close it immediately.
‘To be honest, I can’t even get into that right now because my head won’t let me take it in. Right now, I have to consider the fact you have a child in your life, and – if I want to stay with you – I have to accept that there is a child in my life too. I’ll be honest with you, if you had had a child when I met you, I would have stayed away because – for me – a child is complicated. It’s messy. It’s not what I want.’
Her whole body was trembling. It was like delayed shock. Jack’s face was ashen as he reached for her again but she flicked him away, her throat so tight she could barely speak. They’d never argued like this before. She hated confrontation and she hated losing control. There was too much in her head, her heart, she couldn’t work out where she was going with this. What the hell was she going to do? ‘I can’t… I just can’t speak about this now. I’m going to bed. Seeing as the spare room is occupied, you can sleep down here.’
The next morning, Rebecca stayed in bed uncharacteristically late, even for a Sunday, trying to wrap her mind around everything that had happened since Friday night. Before she spoke to Jack, she wanted to have a plan, a list of questions, an agenda. He’d brought her coffee in bed and mumbled that Cara had made an early start this morning and gone back to her old flat to collect her things. After last night, she probably wanted to get there and back before they changed their minds about letting her stay. When he’d tentatively suggested a roast lunch at the local pub, Rebecca had opted instead for the sushi restaurant on the other side of town. Jack hated sushi.
The sushi restaurant had the advantage of side-by-side seating: easier to avoid looking at him. His pitiful face would only provoke her further. For five minutes, they both sat and watched the coloured bowls circulating past. Rebecca focused on tearing the paper from her chopsticks. ‘Remind me again how you and Cara got together.’