Walking away from Ellie had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do in his life. He’d felt it had broken something inside that could never be repaired. And when she’d told him she was pregnant, and he couldn’t go to her...
The nights he’d lain awake on his hard bunk and thought of her; the fantasies he’d had of his dream life, where they could be a family...
But the dreams had been just that. Fantasies. He hadn’t been able to go to her. He’d been in no position to be a husband or a father.
He’d lost his family. He’d lost Ellie.
He thought of her now, out in the sparse little sitting room she called home. She’d changed after work, into faded jeans and an old windcheater. She looked tired. Worn.
He’d thought he’d had to cope with trauma. How much more had she had to deal with?
Felix was deeply asleep. He touched his son’s face, tracing the cheekbones. His son who looked like him. But who also looked like Ellie.
Back in the kitchen, Ellie was waiting for him. She’d cleared the dishes and was standing with her back to the sink, hands behind her back. She looked...trapped.
‘Marc, I’m sorry,’ she managed. ‘I should have told you that I kept him.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ He wasn’t sure where to go with this. There were accusations everywhere.
‘You didn’t want him.’ But she shook her head. ‘No. That’s unfair to you. At the time, neither of us wanted him. We were kids. The pregnancy was a mistake, Marc, as was our marriage. We should have known that it was never going to work. Our backgrounds were so different it was impossible.’
‘If it hadn’t been for the war...’
‘And if it hadn’t been for my mum’s illness...’ She shrugged. ‘But even without, there were responsibilities. You never told me how important your role was at home. And maybe I didn’t tell you how much my mum needed me.’
‘So when did you decide to keep him?’
She tilted her chin, like a kid facing the headmaster. Defiant.
‘I came back here after you left,’ she told him. ‘As I told you I had to. Mum’s lung transplant had failed. She loved the freedom the transplant gave her, the illusion of health, but she didn’t take care. She refused to follow the doctors’ instructions and maybe I can understand why. For the first time in her life she felt healthy and she made the most of it. Until she crashed. Then, you knew I had to put my studies on hold to care for her. When I found I was pregnant, life became even more impossible.’
He remembered. He’d received the email after a day coping with massive trauma wounds, when he was so exhausted the words had blurred.
Ellie was pregnant.
What could he do? Where he was, he couldn’t even phone her.
But the email had been blessedly practical. She couldn’t support a baby and care for her mother. She still—eventually—wanted to study medicine. There were so many good parents out there desperate for a baby, she told him, so the logical answer was surely adoption. Did he agree?
He’d felt gutted but there seemed no choice but to accept her decision. The war looked as if it would drag on for years. Ellie would have to cope on her own, so what right did he have to interfere?
‘So I was back here and pregnant,’ she told him. ‘Mum was totally dependent. I had your funds which kept us, but there was no way I could go back to university. University, our marriage, they seemed like a dream that had happened to someone else. Mum seemed to be dying and the pregnancy hardly mattered. When I thought about the pregnancy at all, it was just a blanket decision that adoption was the only answer.
‘Then, when I was thirty weeks pregnant, Mum was so bad she had to be hospitalised. And one of the nurses asked if I was looking after myself—if I’d had my check-ups, my scans. It was the first time anyone had asked, and it sort of shook me. So the nurse got bossy. She sent me for scans and the radiographer told me to take a few deep breaths and relax. And I lay there and listened to my baby’s heartbeat, and suddenly it was real. I was having a baby.’
‘Our baby,’ he said softly.
There was a long silence. Our baby. How loaded were those two words?
‘I think that was in the mix too,’ she whispered at last. ‘Yours and mine. What we had...it was good, Marc.’
‘It was.’
‘But I was still planning on adoption,’ she told him. ‘I remember lying there thinking, He’s real. He was conceived out of love. He has to go to a wonderful home. And then the radiographer’s wand reached his feet.’
‘Which were clubbed.’
‘I could see them,’ she whispered. ‘I could see how badly they were clubbed. And of course I’d done two years of medicine. I knew what he’d be facing, but I also knew there was the chance of more.’
Marc did too. Of course he did. Club feet were sometimes associated with other problems. He thought them through and they weren’t pretty. Trisomy 18 syndrome. Distal arthrogryposis. Myotonic dystrophy. The chance of each of those was small, but real.
‘I know it’s only twenty per cent of cases,’ she told him. ‘Club feet are usually the only presenting condition, but that was enough. I lay there and watched his image and thought, Who do I trust to look after my baby? Because suddenly he was my baby. And there was no need to answer, because by the time I walked out of that room no one was going to have the chance.’
He understood. He hated probing more, but he had to have answers. ‘So you decided to keep him—but you also decided not to tell me?’
‘How could I? I’d been following the situation in Falkenstein. I’d seen the war shattering your country. I’d even seen you on the news, working in a field hospital, talking to reporters of the struggles you were having after so many months, with the international community losing interest, with winter coming, with so many homeless. I knew you felt guilty about me anyway, so why hang more guilt on you? You’d agreed to adoption so why not just let you think he was adopted? What’s the difference, Marc, between someone unknown taking care of our son and me?’
‘For a start I would have funded you.’
‘I didn’t need funding. You sent me two years’ income and paid the rest of my university fees. You insisted I keep that. What more could I ask?’
‘That I care for my son!’ The shock, the frustration, the rage that he’d kept at bay all day suddenly vented itself in those six fierce words. He slammed his fist on the table so hard that the salt and pepper shakers toppled and rolled to the floor.
Neither of them noticed.
His rage was so great he could scarcely contain it, but it wasn’t rage at Ellie. It was rage at himself.
He hadn’t enquired. He hadn’t followed up.
What sort of low-life left a woman with a baby and didn’t find out how she was—for nine years?
‘Marc, you did ask,’ Ellie whispered, and her response shocked him. It was as if she guessed what he was thinking. ‘You rang after Felix was born.’
He remembered the call.
He’d spent the night operating in a field hospital after yet another bomb blast had shattered lives. He’d come back to his quarters to find the email, telling him that he had a son. He’d driven for hours to the nearest place there was reception, trying to put a call through. When he’d finally reached her, Ellie had sounded tired, spent, but okay.
‘He’s a beautiful little boy, Marc. You can be proud. He’ll have a good home, I promise. Yes, I’m okay and amazingly Mum’s okay too. She’s had another transplant and this one looks like it’s taken.