Page 36 of His Best Mistake

“Only for a moment. I don’t any more.” She continued looking at him for a second, then whipped round to resume her packing and Jack snapped out of his trance to process every enormous thing he’d learned in the last thirty seconds about her.

God, she was incredible, he thought, running through what she’d told him. Brave, resilient and simply bloody amazing. The way she tackled her issues… She didn’t duck from what life threw at her. She didn’t wonder what the point of everything was or find herself stuck and helpless. If she landed in trouble or got into a mess she looked for a way out and took it. Her approach was practical and upfront and he envied it. Admired it. Admired her and liked her.

Whereas she clearly felt quite the opposite about him. And why wouldn’t she? She’d put her own fears aside to make things easier for him, but had he done the same for her? No. Because of some deep-seated need to stay safe by keeping his distance he hadn’t given her a chance. He hadn’t allowed this to work.

But he could, and he should, because this wasn’t about him any more. It was about their child, who was as lucky to have Stella as a mother as he was that she hadn’t given up on him sooner. He’d never discussed the details of that terrible week with anyone outside his family, but Stella sort of was family. She deserved to know.

Taking a deep breath, Jack braced himself and said, “Stella.”

“What?”

“Stop.”

Something in his voice – he didn’t know what – made her do as he asked. He watched her freeze, straighten, then slowly turn back to him.

“Mia and I met when we were at school,” he said flatly, keeping his eyes on her, keeping solely to the facts. “We got together the night of her seventeenth birthday and started dating. She went off to Oxford; I moved to London. We made it work. God knows how in retrospect but we did. We eventually got married around the same time I set up my company and we were happy. The following January I went to New York for a week-long conference. Mia was fine when I left. I didn’t know she was pregnant. She didn’t even know she was. She was so busy at work.”

“What did she do?” asked Stella, her expression giving absolutely nothing away although her voice was maybe a fraction less harsh than it had been.

“Marketing. For a hotel chain.” He cleared his throat and rubbed a hand along his jaw. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’d been away for a couple of days when she mentioned on the phone that she had stomach pains and had been vomiting. I told her to go to A&E, which she did. They diagnosed gastroenteritis, gave her some painkillers and sent her home.

“Two days later, though, the pains weren’t getting any better. In fact they were getting worse, and she was just about to go back to A&E when she had a heart attack. At work. She was ru

shed to hospital and they carried out an emergency operation but she had another cardiac arrest while that was happening. I flew back as soon as I found out what was happening, but by the time I got there she was on life support. We decided to switch it off the next day. Tests showed that she’d been seven weeks’ pregnant. It had been ectopic.” He stopped, waited again for the wave of grief and guilt that didn’t come, then concluded, “And that’s it, in a nutshell.”

“How do you feel about it now?”

Jack tensed. He didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. But how could he not? “I’m not entirely sure,” he said, his throat tight. “I should have been there. I’d vowed to support her in sickness and in health and I didn’t.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“On an intellectual level I know that.”

“And on an emotional level?”

“I’m conflicted.”

For a long time Stella said nothing, just looked at him as if trying to peer right into his soul while his heart thumped and his blood rushed in his ears, and God he hoped she didn’t probe any further because he truly didn’t know what to say. But then her face softened and the tension gripping her eased and eventually, to his utter relief, she said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You can drive me to Norfolk in the morning.”

*

Thanks to a remarkably empty M1, the journey to the village of Little Snoring, where her parents lived, took only two hours, so by the time they got there Stella had had more than enough time to absorb the events of yesterday afternoon.

At the clinic she’d been so disappointed by Jack’s refusal to talk, so angry, she just hadn’t been able to let it go, even though her common sense had told her to tread carefully. How much more careful could she have been? She’d been tiptoeing round the subject for days. And shouldn’t she know? Wasn’t it really rather important to understand the man who was going to co-parent her child?

She hadn’t stayed angry with him for long, however. When he’d told her what had happened to his wife, her heart had practically broken for him. What he must have gone through. The grief, the pain, the sheer effort of getting through the days. The struggle he still clearly had with it all. While she’d had her cottage to escape to when things were bad, what did he do? Where did he go? It sounded like he hadn’t got over his wife’s death at all, and what he’d been through, what he was obviously still going through, certainly put her own hang-ups into perspective.

In the two hours since they’d left London Jack had been quiet, reflective even, very possibly thinking about his wife and she wondered if he regretted telling her. She hoped he didn’t, because it seemed as if some of his tension had eased and it felt like something between them had shifted and settled.

Stella was feeling similarly reflective, only for her it was due wholly to the upcoming visit. She wasn’t sure why she wanted to tell her parents about the baby. They were unlikely to be even the slightest bit interested, yet they had to know at some point. And somewhere deep inside her she harboured the tiniest hope that they might turn out to be better grandparents than parents, even though she knew it wasn’t a scenario she should waste too much time dreaming about.

Nevertheless, as she pointed out the sign to the village and Jack turned off the main road and onto the narrow lane that led to her parents’ house, nerves started fluttering around inside her. What would she find? What would they say about the baby? What would they think of Jack?

“This is it,” she said, her mouth desert dry as her heart began to pound. “Right here on the left.”

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