Page 14 of A Nine-Month Deal With Her Husband

He looked at her quickly before returning his eyes to the road. ‘Ah, I inherited my father’s house close to Ingólfur Square.’

Her mum and his dad had been friends and Millie vaguely remembered Jon’s house. It was, if her memory was right, built of grey stone and Jon always boasted that it was one of the older houses in the city. ‘I remember the hallway had lots of wood,’ she told him.

‘That’s the one. I did quite a bit of remodelling. The wooden panelling is gone, but I kept the original parquet flooring and renovated the kitchen and bathrooms,’ he explained.

She really hoped he left the garden alone. She’d built fairy houses in the small backyard and imagined that butterflies perched on the rims of the moss-covered urns.

‘At some point, I have to do something about the garden, but it’s been way down on my list of priorities,’ Benedikt explained.

‘Do not touch the garden,’ she told him, sounding fierce. For some reason, she could see her little boy climbing the thick branches of the tree near the wooden gate, looking for Huldufólk, the country’s version of elves. She imagined a little girl building and decorating a house from sticks and stones on the stone flags so one of the hidden folk families could make it their home.

She saw his eyebrows shoot up and waved her hand away. She was projecting her desire for children on to him and felt heat in her cheeks. ‘Sorry, it’s your garden and you can do what you want with it. I loved it, though. I thought it was magical.’

‘Are you sure you are remembering the right place?’ he joked. ‘The one with the cracked flagstones and the slippery moss paths?’

‘That’s the one. I don’t ever remember seeing you there.’

‘I only visited my dad a few times when I was a kid.’

Millie half turned to face him. ‘Did you ever come to our house?’

He tapped his finger on the steering wheel. ‘Once, twice maybe. Magnús didn’t like your mum bringing work home. And he and I didn’t get along.’

‘Join the club,’ Millie muttered.

‘I do remember a barn and Jacqui telling me about her animals.’

‘Mum and I were both crazy about animals,’ Millie replied, smiling. ‘If anything was sick, pretty much anywhere within fifty kilometres, it ended up in our barn. It drove Magnús mad.’

The animals took up Jacqui’s attention, just like Millie and her business did, something Magnús hated. He’d wanted her mum all to himself, all the time. No wonder she was terrified of being controlled.

‘Magnús frequently threatened to have the animals put down. I spent so many nights wide awake, worried that the rabbit or horse or pig we’d just rescued wouldn’t be there in the morning.’

Benedikt’s expression darkened. ‘Really? Man, he was an unfeeling sod.’

That wasn’t the worst of it. ‘The week after Mum died, that’s exactly what happened. I came home from school and all the animals in the barn had been removed. He told me they’d been relocated, but he wouldn’t tell me where they were. I’m convinced he had them put down.’

Those animals had been a distraction from her grief, a connection to her mum, and Magnús had ripped them away from her, she explained to Ben. She wasn’t sure why she was telling him this, maybe it was because he knew, and didn’t like, Magnús. Because he understood the reasons behind her hatred for her stepfather.

Ben’s jaw tightened and she knew he was angry for her. So was she. She was so angry for the vulnerable girl she’d been.

‘What else did he do?’ he asked. ‘I know there was more.’

He was right. Magnús hadn’t had a sliver of sympathy for her in the weeks and months after her mum’s death. It had been such a desolate, lonely, awful time. ‘Oh, he wouldn’t let me have any input into her funeral and he insisted on white lilies at the funeral when he knew her favourite flowers were gerbera daisies.

‘Soon after the animals left, I came home to find strangers packing up my mum’s clothes,’ she said. ‘I called him and screamed at him, told him that there were things of hers I wanted, that he had no right to ask strangers to pack up her belongings.’

‘He told me not to be hysterical, she was gone and the sooner I got used to the idea, the easier it would be for him. I was becoming tiresome, he told me, and he was sick of seeing my long face day in and day out.’

‘And this was how many weeks after she died?’ Ben asked, horrified.

‘Two? Maybe three?’

‘What a complete moron,’ Ben stated. ‘I never suspected any of this, Millie.’

‘Why would you? You were a part of Mum’s working life,’ she replied. She played with the hem of her jersey, knowing she could be more candid with Ben than she could be with anyone else. He had known her mum well.

‘To the world, my mum was this independent, incredibly strong woman, but nobody knew how much Magnús tried to control her. He hated anything that took her time away from him and resented the attention Mum gave me. If you weren’t fully focused on Magnús, he thought you were ignoring him.’

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