"You don't do anything under false pretences," Ric replied, utterly sure of himself. "Don't I?" Connie asked him. "Well, not most of the time, no, I don't. But I can't allow you to go on feeling the way you do about me, without having told you a few things first." "I'm well aware that you're not perfect, Connie," he told her with a smile. "You have the ability to verbally rip people's skin off that on a regular basis goes way too far. Jess was right, you are as manipulative as Sam, though you're far better at it than she ever was." "And that's a good thing?" Connie asked, slightly bemused at the complementary tone in his voice. "Well, if you're going to do a thing, at least you usually have the decency to do it properly." Connie's lips twitched into the ghost of a smile. "Even I usually managed to see straight through what Sam was trying to achieve." "There was so much of me that I kept from Michael," Connie said regretfully. "That half the time I wonder if that was why our marriage failed. There was so much that he didn't know, things that he would have run a mile from knowing." "Connie," Ric said to her tenderly. "Just because Michael never once attempted to see behind the mask you wear day in day out, doesn't mean I will automatically do the same." "I know," Connie protested. "But I don't want to lose what we have now, because it's far too precious to me to throw it away in a moment of complete insanity." "Connie, I promise you, there isn't anything you could tell me that is any worse than putting the family's next week's food money on a horse which then promptly lost." Connie laughed bitterly. "I'd say that being the reason why your baby died was far higher in the stakes of bad parenting, wouldn't you?"
There was a long, very charged silence. "I'm sorry," Connie said quietly. "I didn't mean it to come out like that." She tried to wriggle away from him, to put some space between her and the man who must now loathe her very presence. But Ric put out a hand to stop her, touching her arm and gently pulling her back to lie against him. "Tell me what happened," He invited softly, seeing that this wasn't something she could easily talk about. "I was a bit, what you might call wild when I was sixteen," She began hesitantly. "Got involved with entirely the wrong group of people. There wasn't much I didn't try from various narcotics to different sexual positions. When I discovered I was pregnant, my father threw me out. I suppose that for him, it was the last in a very long line of straws. I kept using, even though I knew I was pregnant. I'm not sure why, except that oblivion seemed to be far more preferable to actual existence. I spent different nights with different men, though quite which one of them was her father is anyone's guess. I was doped up on coke when she was born, which meant that she was withdrawing from everything under the sun. She only lived a few hours, and I didn't even give her a name. I did absolutely nothing for my daughter, but she did one thing for me, she made me grow up. I can't ever forgive myself for being the reason why she died, because I don't deserve to be forgiven for it. Michael always thought that I wouldn't have children because I didn't want to ruin my career, but what he doesn't know is that I couldn't ever go through that again. Connie Beauchamp might be as strong as an ox when dealing with most people, but not when being forced to face her one, real failure."
Ric lay with her in his arms, listening to the words of bitter torment that poured from her lips. Her ruthless desire to be strong, her absolute determination not to be weakened by anyone was now explained. She had been right not to confide this event to someone like Michael, as he would no doubt have used it against her in some way, in private if not in public. But Ric couldn't think badly of her. She had been sixteen, that most vulnerable of all ages for such influences as she had been coaxed to endure. "Connie," He said quietly, tilting her face up so that he could look her in the eye. "Nothing, about what you have just told me, makes you a bad person." "Don't be ridiculous," She said disgustedly. "Of course it does." "Connie, tell Zubin what to think by all means, but it won't work on me," He told her with a smile. "I don't think any less of you, not in the slightest." "Well, you should," She told him belligerently. "We've all made mistakes, some of us huge ones," He told her seriously. "And though it often means very little, we have both tried to make up for them. I personally think that you've made a far better success of this than I have, but that's not an argument I'm willing to have with you right now. Connie, underneath all that bitterness and steel that you wear like a designer dress, there's this soft, warm, loving woman that I think I am getting to know. That's the part of you I see when I look at you, not the armoured exterior you show to nearly everyone else." Connie had never heard words like this addressed to her, because Michael had never gone in for the verbal way of showing his feelings for her, if he had really had any in the first place. Yet here she was, lying in Ric's arms, being told how inwardly beautiful she was as well as on the outside. Could she believe it? Could she really take any of his words seriously? Only time would tell.