It all started as a very random idea I had one day, and it has spiralled into something bigger than I could ever have imagined it would. Ash – you know we wouldn't be here without your constant encouragement, occasionally beta-ing and prodding – can't thank you enough for all of that.
Secrets and Lies
Chapter 25
Neela felt the familiarity as a dull blow to her chest – low and aching – but intense enough to steal her breath away. It was like stepping back in time – everything about the building felt the same – it even smelled the same. Everything felt the same except that this was no longer her home and she no longer felt safe here.
She lingered in the hallway long enough to trace her finger over the old, brass mailbox. The only place their names were ever written side by side on brazen display, except for on Mina's birth certificate. To those on the outside, they had been roommates. To those on the inside, lovers. Mina proved that.
Neela stifled a small smile of satisfaction when she realised that the name that had replaced hers was Bret's. She guessed that made sense – he'd spent the most time in their apartment of any of Ray's friends – and she had left Ray in the lurch with rent to pay. At least it wasn't another woman's name, she reasoned, because that would complicate any arrangements they made regarding Mina. Mina needed to get to know her father; any new girlfriend would just confuse matters. Not to mention the fact, she mused, that a new woman would mean he'd moved on.
The last time she saw this building, it was a dark March evening. The 20th if she remembered correctly. He had just headed in to work, so she had taken her opportunity. She had left her key, a note and a cheque for that month's rent on the table, and slipped out the door. Her sensibilities had been firmly in place, even if her heart had been broken. The memory would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic. She always was a head over heart girl, even when she was running away from a broken heart.
Every step she had taken away from their front door that night had felt like she was treading on another piece of her broken heart, but she had kept walking. Now she was walking right back, and 5 years evaporated to nothing in seconds. As she climbed the stairs she was bombarded with a series of images, each more intense than the last. How could she ever have thought this would be easy? She was returning to the apartment where she betrayed a friend, gained a lover, conceived her child and broke a heart. This was the epicentre of the affair; this was her ground zero, where her world had imploded.
The conversation that drove her here had occurred yesterday, after Sam returned from the funeral service. Sam, complete with bloodshot eyes and a grim expression, had taken Neela aside just before dinner. She had explained that she had had a conversation with Ray; but she had avoided mentioning the specifics of what had been said. Sam had only stressed that now might be the time to try and talk to him.
As a result, she had barely slept last night. She had spent a great proportion of the night staring at the ceiling blankly. She reran their last conversation in her head repeatedly – wondered if she would be able to bear that viciousness again, wondered if she was strong enough to cope. Even now, she wasn't sure.
The funeral service had been awful. She had stood there beside Sam and just watched him. All she could think of was how lost he looked, as if hadn't quite shaken the last of his immaturity and he was feeling it heavier than ever. She had wanted nothing more than to give him someone to lean on. He needed someone, but that couldn't be her. Not anymore. That had poured acid on an already damaged heart and left her open to attack.
With Abby's burial, it would be easy to assume that they had shaken off the last of the chains that so tied them to the past. That it would be easier now for them to make a fresh start of things, for the sake of their daughter, but with every step she took she doubted that a little more. What had happened…a lifetime would struggle to heal.
Neela raised a hand to the doorbell, pressed for a few seconds and waited impatiently – eyes down, staring at her shoes. She almost hoped he wasn't in. Then she could just shove the paper under his doormat and run away again – the coward's way out perhaps, but certainly a more appealing one.
The door opened and she swung her gaze upwards, braced herself. The room was hauntingly familiar. She had to blink a few times, the breath caught in her throat, and she was momentarily thrown. He regarded her curiously, but not with any hint of irritation.
"I know I'm not welcome." She opened. "But I had to try. The way we left things - "
Words went unsaid, but their meaning did not. His previous parting shot pervaded the silence between them. After a long minute, he took a step back.
"Come in."
Still feeling mildly dazed, she stepped past him into her old living room. The furniture had been shifted around. There was a new rug under the coffee table. There was a new TV and DVD player in the corner, and some of the pictures had been changed. There was distinctly more clutter about the place than when she'd lived here. Everything looked to be coated with a filmy layer of dust, and she bit back the urge to run her finger over the nearest polished surface and look disapproving. That wasn't her place anymore. It was the same couch, just positioned differently, she realised, feeling her skin burn. Her gaze switched hurriedly from the couch back to him.
The uncomfortable silence lay between them for a few moments. Heat prickled at her neck, and a bewildering sense of comfort and transient happiness washed over her. A happiness she realised now had been confined between these four walls. She glanced over at the hallway, down which lay the door to her old room, and found herself almost completely overwhelmed. This was an emotional hailstorm, and she was getting pelted left, right and centre.
Nowhere she looked didn't she find reminders of the past. It was as if time had stood still, and she had walked right back into their apartment of 5 years ago. That was terrifying. But then she looked at him – older, harder, maybe technically a little wiser – and she knew that time had passed.
"So, when are you heading back?"
It was a casual, almost breezy remark, but he didn't meet her eyes – preferring to focus on a spot in the middle distance over her left shoulder. She sighed before answering.
"Tomorrow." At this word, his gaze snapped onto her instantaneously. She shrugged. "Mina has school, and I've got to get back to work."
His gaze remained on her, struggling to process how quickly this had all turned around. His head was already reeling, and he'd figured that maybe he and Neela would have a week or so to allow things to settle down and sort things out. Tomorrow? He forced himself to focus. If that's how it's going to be, then let's make best. Don't get angry with her again; don't let her leave thinking you're pissed with her.
Sam was right. If he didn't make the effort to get to know his daughter now, he would live the rest of his life regretting it. It was different now he knew that there was another human being sharing half of his DNA out there, different because he knew he never wouldn't feel that – Mina was a part of him now. And he couldn't bear Mina finding him in 10 or 15 years, demanding answers – why hadn't he stuck around? Why had he been such a damn coward? He couldn't damage his daughter the way he himself had been damaged.
"Right."
He spoke for the sake of it, to fill the gap left for his response. Yet another oppressive silence. She shuffled – cursing her emotional inadequacy – and sternly told herself just to say what she had come to say. To be brave now in a way she hadn't been 5 years ago, and to try and mend bridges she had long feared washed away.
"What you said - " She faltered, but he didn't interrupt. "You were right. I did throw away what trust you had in me – and I'm probably not the woman you knew."
His words filtered back to haunt him again.
"I didn't mean - "
"Please. Let me say what I've got to, will you?" She interrupted firmly, knowing that if she didn't let it all tumble out of her now, then it would most likely be locked inside her forever and she didn't think she could bear that.
"Don't ever think for a minute that what I did was easy on me. Don't think that I didn't think of you pretty much every day from the day she was born."
Her lips curled into a sad smile.
"I thought of you pretty much every day before she was born too, come to think of it." Neela finished wistfully. She met his eyes, but the truth there was far too stark to bear. She had walked away. She had left him. The hurt of abandonment in this situation? That was his and his alone to feel.
"I know what I did was wrong. But once I'd gone," The words almost choked her.
"Once I'd gone it was an irretrievable situation. I couldn't come back."
She blinked rapidly, trying not to cry.
"Abby hated me, you were in pieces - " She broke off.
"I chose not to expose my baby to that. I chose to give her the happiest upbringing I knew how." She shrugged, not caring if he believed her or not. "You can't deny her that."
"And as for not being the woman you knew?"
The words had stung her coming from his lips, and so they were instilled with a biting sarcasm she couldn't very well hide.
"Well. No. The woman you knew? She was just a little girl herself, playing at being a grown up. I'm a mother now. I've learned the hard way that I don't come first anymore, she does. I won't – no, I can't – apologise for that."
"You finished? - " The question wasn't angry, or bitter, just firm. She looked up and swallowed hard, nodding gently. "Good. Because I've got a little inner monologue of my own I'd like to share with you."
He drew a long breath.
"I'll be honest – I've done more soul-searching in the last three days than I've done in a very long time."
And slept less too – he reasoned. He sighed. It was true. Since Abby died, and that awful night at the hospital, he could count the number of hours sleep he had had on his fingers.
"Abby dying - " Ray shivered – he had looked Abby square in the eye as she died – and he let her know in no uncertain terms in that look that he wasn't sad to see her go. What kind of a person did that make him? His train of thought returned to Neela with a jolt.
"Well, I thought that would be hardest thing to deal with. But I was wrong." He paused, catching her eye. He hoped he imagined the glisten he saw there. No more tears, Neela, not over this.
"Seeing you again – that was the hardest thing."
His words, dripping with naked honesty, drilled home hard. She remembered the way seeing him again had felt – knowing he was sure to hate her, but not knowing how to hate him in return.
"When you left, damn, it was hard to see a reason to keep on living sometimes, you know? Well, I guess you don't." He shrugged, the hurt written on his face increasingly hard to bear. "You had something to live for."
Neela unconsciously crossed an arm over her stomach. She could barely believe he had just said that. Something to live for? Something that had ripped her from a life where for the first time she was truly happy? She wanted to rage – tell him how she had stood in a bathroom not 20 feet from where they currently stood and watched her life slip away from her – watched that little line appear and change everything forever.
How every damn day after that until she left, she lived in spite of her baby, not for it. How she had had to leave otherwise there was a very real risk of neither her nor the baby making it through. Leaving had been damage control. Damage control, she thought bitterly. How was it that the fallout still felt like a freight train collision?
"I thought you were in the past. My life had moved on, moved past you."
Moved on? The way he was looking at her, she knew he didn't mean it. There was far too much emotion burning there for him to mean it. She wished he'd stop trying to push her away, stop trying to hurt her. This wasn't what this was about.
"I don't mean this to sound cruel, but what did you expect me to do?" He didn't like the bitterness creeping into his voice, and it was stinging her that he could see. "I didn't know where you were, what you were doing, who you were with."
Ray paused, mind racing. In all honesty, it was the who she was with part that had troubled him the most especially in the days just after she left. She said nothing, so only the faint sound of breathing filled the silence.
"To find out you were two and a half hours away raising my child?"
The shock – first of finding out where she'd been for the last 5 years, and then of hearing the words "our daughter" – still had an astonishing clarity and strained his voice to breaking point.
"Not what I expected." Ray finished sarcastically. He stared right into her brown eyes and saw that - consciously or unconsciously – she was crying.
"I got mad, I shot my mouth off and I said some damn unforgivable things. I was angry -" He stopped, corrected himself. "I am angry. But I have a daughter, and I won't walk away from that - "
Her hands fumbled in her jeans pocket, and the movement broke his train of thought. She searched, increasingly frantic, until her fingers caught what she was looking for. The folded piece of notepaper she had put in there before she'd left Sam's.
A shaking hand proffered the note, white paper stark against the dark skin. Ray hesitated – eyeing the paper with considerable suspicion. Her free hand wiped at a stray tear.
"What's this?"
"My phone number and address in Lincoln." She stated matter of factly, betrayed by the quiver in her voice. "I want you to be in her life."
Neela finished, boldly maintaining eye contact. He reached out tentatively and took the paper from her palm. She noted that he was trembling almost as much as she was.
"Come up on your next weekend off, and we can work out something more permanent."
She was running away again. Only this time, it hurt less that returning to find her key and a note – merely reading 'goodbye' – on the kitchen table. It hurt less than the feeling of being completely abandoned by someone he loved. She was running but – he glanced at the paper in his hand – this time at least he had a chance to catch her up.