Part 9

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They had briefly sat with Callum in the plush seats of the lobby, making sure to gain his contact details before putting him into a paid taxi with promises to talk properly during daylight hours. Throughout it all, Donna had been rather numb, smiling as best she could each time their gazes met, but all she wanted to do was escape to sob her heart out. She knew she would need to do that before dealing with her son's emotional bomb. And she felt no guilt in letting John handle the practical arrangements. Especially when he insisted they make their way up to bed.

The blandness of the hotel bedroom seemed a counterpoint to the heightened emotion in front of him. John stood helplessly whilst Donna paced up and down, tears streaming down her cheeks as she sought to find the words to tell him about her current situation. "Before I see him, I have to explain because this is bizarre."

"Why don't you sit down?" he kindly suggested. "I'll find some tissues." He disappeared into the bathroom and soon returned with a box of tissues and a roll of toilet paper, just in case. He placed them on the bedside table, right where she now sat on the bed. "Do you want some water?"

"No." She shook her head and sniffed loudly. "You must think I'm such an idiot. Not knowing I had a son out there. An eighteen-year-old son. Walking and breathing, being all clever, tracking me down like that."

"No, I don't," he assured her.

"Sit down. You're making the place look untidy," she ordered, so he sat beside her, ready to offer support. "Will this affect our careers, do you think?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "Does motherhood normally ruin singing careers?"

"It does when it's treated like some huge secret like mine was," she whimpered. She raised her tear-filled eyes to plead for forgiveness and understanding from him. "I was only sixteen when I found out I was pregnant. Sixteen! That's nothing but at the time I felt so old. And Mum was so annoyed with me. Livid. She did nothing but rant and rave at me for being so stupid. Who in their right mind gets pregnant at sixteen, ruining her chances, wiping away every single opportunity to be something? She wasn't going to let me throw my life away on some useless piece of scum."

"Is that what she said?" he gently asked, gaining a nod. "What about the father?"

She wrung out another tissue. "He never knew. I wasn't allowed to tell him, let alone see him again. Not that I was keen to. I was well shot of him."

"Why didn't you have an abortion?"

"I was too far gone," she admitted. "Too terrified to tell anyone why I was putting on weight, I tried covering it all up, wearing big jumpers, that sort of thing. And I don't think I could have gone through with an abortion anyway. So, it was decided that the baby would be adopted as soon as it was born. All nicely tucked away, so that Mum couldn't complain."

He wasn't surprised when she began to weep again. But he was surprised that she let him wrap her up in a hug. "Did you get to see him when he was born?"

She nodded against his shoulder. "For a bit. Almost two days."

Her gentle sobs instantly became racking sobs, so he held her closer, cooing soft words of comfort as he swayed her body. But when she wailed, "They took my baby!" his heart broke for her. "Have you any idea what it is like to lose a child? To have that pain and guilt tearing at your very soul?"

After pausing to gain himself, he confessed, "I do. I lost my daughter."

"Daughter?" she echoed. "You had a daughter? I didn't know that. What happened?"

"The joke is, I never even knew she existed until the mother tried to sell her story to the papers," he bitterly began. "Can't say I remember hooking up with her at all, despite the photographs she produced of us together. I was a bit out of it on drugs at the time." He gave a regretful small shrug. "Anyway. I had a beautiful little girl for a while. We were going... I had promised a trip to London Zoo, took her on the Underground for fun, because she was mad on trains; and then a terrorist decided to blow the train up."

"The London bombings," she quietly noted in horror. "I remember that day. Oh John. How awful. I'm so sorry."

"Yes. Well," he declared on a sob. "I should have stopped him."

"It wasn't your fault," she insisted.

He ignored that. It was too painful to argue about, let alone give voice to the horrific images in his memory, but at least it was now a shared grief. "You don't realise you're lucky. You have been handed the chance to try again, to spend precious time with your baby."

"You're right," she agreed, giving her nose another blow with a tissue. Her baby was alive, and that fact had to be celebrated, for her sake as well as John's. "I can't turn back the clock, but I can try to fix things. Will you come with me to see him?"

"Of course," he easily agreed, hugging her close again. "Tomorrow, we will arrange everything. I promise."