Emily stands firm

It was strange to hear her voice again. Ross had finally found a number on which he could contact Emily. He felt out of control as she briskly suggested a time and a place to meet, at her uncle's house. The call was ended before he could ask if the girls would be there.

I've got two more daughters, Ross thought, awed. Suddenly the number of children he had had just doubled. Two little girls, already about five. They had grown up, somewhere else, with experiences he hadn't known about. They might even be at school now. He had so much to learn about them. He wondered how they would react when they saw him and whether it would be easy to establish a relationship. Sure, he was a stranger to them but then they did have genetics in common. There must be some connection they could make, purely by reason of blood.

He knew it was irrational, but he wondered how they could have existed all this time and he not know of it. He had no colleagues in London that might know anything about Emily or his connection with her. There was no-one to report back anything strange. Hiding them was something Emily could not have gotten away with if she had been a native New Yorker. New York might be big, but you kept running into people you knew all the time. Someone would tell someone and it would be known.

How that would have affected the rest of his life was unknown. Maybe they would have gotten back together. But if she had been a native New Yorker, there would have been no rush to get married. They would have just carried on dating, getting to know each other. They would have been more careful about contraception.

At the house, the cousin who had thrown him out of his apartment, all those years ago, let him in. They glared at each other.

'Oh it's you again. Emily's running late, you'll have to wait,' he said, showing Ross into the front room. 'You'll excuse me if I don't join you.'

'Excused!' Ross said. After another mutual glare, he was left alone.

For ages.

'I've been waiting nearly an hour!' Ross said angrily when Emily finally arrived. Alone.

'I'm sorry, I'm sure my aunt will time her relapses more considerately next time if I ask her nicely,' Emily said. 'I've just come from the hospital and I'm not feeling in the mood for this.' She looked tense.

'Your aunt's ill? I'm sorry,' Ross said, chastened. 'Is she going to be okay?'

'No. She's dying. It will happen soon I think and then I'll be going home so there'll soon be no danger of running into me by accident,' Emily said, sitting down and crossing her legs.

He was silenced for a moment while he absorbed this, and he looked at her curiously. When he'd known her, she'd been bubbling with enthusiasm, spontaneous, impulsive… He had never given this any thought before but in a sudden rush of insight he realised that perhaps she'd been like that because she wasn't at ease with herself or her place in the world. The contrast with the way she looked now was striking, the reason he'd had that insight at all. Now she looked settled. She was staring back at him steadily and he wondered for a moment what she was seeing…

Then he remembered he wasn't there for a social chat and neither was she.

'Why didn't you tell me about our children?'

'After what happened between us, I never wanted to see you again,' Emily said. 'I don't particularly want to see you now, but it's been unavoidable.' He stared. She'd hated him that much? But that wasn't quite right.

'You rang me, just before you got married. You did want to see me. You could have told me then,' he said. She could have told him at any time since then.

'Oh that call? The one you didn't return?' Emily asked. 'I didn't want you to be influenced by my pregnancy. If you wanted me back it had to be for me, not because you felt you had a duty. I wasn't going to be your private charity. You didn't ring back, so that really was the end of it. The next day, when I gave myself to David, I gave him the children too.'

'You had no right to do that!' Ross exclaimed.

'I had every right,' Emily said. 'He loved me and he wanted to be a father. And I knew he would be a better father than you.'

'That's outrageous,' Ross said, 'I'm a good father to Ben, you know that. How can you say that?' This was just one insult after another. She'd seen him, hadn't she? She knew he loved Ben. How dared she say that someone else would have been a better father than him? He was too angry to stay seated and he started pacing the room. She stayed seated, apparently undisturbed.

'You would only ever have been a part time father, like you are to Ben, and my girls deserve more than that,' Emily said.

'Part time?'

'Our marriage was over Ross, what do you think? I was never going to come back to New York,' Emily said, 'So you'd only ever have been an occasional visitor in their lives. You'd made it clear that you would never move to London.'

'You know why,' Ross said. He wanted to be a good father to Ben, that was why.

'Yes I do.'

'You could have come back to New York, I'd have supported you,' Ross said. 'We might not have stayed married but we could still have lived together to bring them up. It wouldn't have been charity, just the right thing to do.'

'You think I could live with a man who doesn't love me?' Emily asked. Maybe he was romancing, Ross thought, it had all been far too late by then for them to live together on any terms. He couldn't now imagine how his friends would have taken it, and how could he have formed any relationship with Rachel with Emily living in the same house, Emily who blamed Rachel for everything in the first place. In fact the idea really didn't bear thinking about.

He would have had to support Emily in separate accommodation where she wouldn't be in contact with Rachel or any of the others. How he could have afford that was another question…

'It would have been horrendous. I'd have been on my own, away from my parents and all my friends,' Emily said. 'I would have had to give birth in a foreign country where no-one cared about me,' she said.

'I would have cared.' She gave him a look.

'Please stop insulting my intelligence,' she said witheringly.

'I'm not, I would have been there,' Ross said.

'There for me, like you were at the wedding, with your mind on somewhere else, wishing you were somewhere else, wishing that the woman who was giving birth was someone else?' she said with mockery. She shook her head. 'What a wonderful experience that would have been for me,' she said sarcastically. 'Part of what made giving birth the amazing experience it was, one of the best days of my life, was having the people I cared about there, my family and friends — and David.'

'Oh the wonderful David!' Ross said, upset. It seemed that the wonderful David had everything.

'Yes,' Emily said quietly. 'You don't know how wonderful.'

'So you just gave him my children.'

'When I married David, I gave him my undivided loyalty. That phone call was the last time I ever looked back,' Emily said. She twisted her wedding ring around the finger.

'But they are not his children,' Ross said. 'Here they've got me, an aunt, grandparents.'

'They've got all those, on my side and his, both sets living in the same country,' Emily said.

'But his side are not related to them, they can't care about them as much.'

'Blood isn't everything.' Thoughts of Monica's children and how much she and Chandler loved them stopped him going further with this argument.

'I want to see my daughters,' Ross said at last feeling fed up with Emily and her arguments. That was all that mattered now.

'You can't.'

'You can't stop me,' Ross almost shouted. 'I want to see them right now!' Emily replied steadily, not the slightest bit disturbed.

'My husband has taken them home.'