Hopefully this is ok . I'll admit I'm writing this on (and updating) it fairly quickly 'cos it's depressing me a fair bit and won't actually get out of my head.
She walks slowly in to the café, it's near enough to the outskirts that she doubts anyone will see her here and even if they do they probably wouldn't take any notice. She's skilled at hiding in plain sight. She spots him almost instantly, though his back is turned. For the briefest of moments she considers turning away and walking back to her car and forgetting that this was ever going to happen, but she knows it's too late for that now. She doubts he'll give up now. She watches as he turns towards her, as if sensing her gaze burning in to the back of his head. The sight of him steals her breath away once again. Slowly she makes her way towards him and takes the seat opposite.
"Do you want a coffee?" he speaks first and she is surprised by how relaxed he seems, when her entire body feels tensed. She hopes she is disguising it well enough that he won't know how much he is affecting her; how this terrifies her. She shakes her head, and he frowns, "I would have got you one but I didn't think you'd show" he admits softly.
"Well I did" she speaks harshly and fixes him with a glare that he had long since tried to forget. He had spent so long trying to push her from his mind, but he'd never managed for long; not without the aid of a bottle of something pungent with a percentage that would make most people's eyes water.
"How's Mia?" He tries to move the subject on to what he hopes is safe ground. He watches as she frowns and closes her eyes, almost as if she is for a second pained. When she opens her eyes, he thinks for a moment there is the glisten of moisture welling on their surface.
"Millie" she looks him in the eye, "her name is Millie" she informs him and she thinks for a moment he looks hurt by that. Mia is the nickname he had used for the baby from almost the moment her name had been decided, it was the nickname that seemed to be adopted by everyone else soon after although she had tried to resist it. When things had gone so very wrong she'd found herself unable to call her daughter by that name. For weeks, the child had been she or baby until she had finally settled on Millie. It was close enough to her full name but far enough away that it didn't remind her so much of him.
"How's … Millie?" He says quietly, the name feeling strange on his tongue. He thinks of the baby he'd held in his arms, the child he'd rocked in his arms and to whom he had sung lullabies. He tries to attach that name to her, but it seems wrong. Mia is his daughter, and she seems all the more lost to him now.
"I don't know why you care all of a sudden" he almost recoils back from her and the harshness of her tone. He knows in many ways in deserves it, but so much has happened; so much that he doesn't want to tell her and so much that he does that the tone almost cripples him.
"I never stopped caring about her" he answers, his voice small and distant as he thinks back over the lonely years. Of the life he has not lived, of the way he has merely existed. He wishes he could say more than that, that he could tell her that it isn't just Mia – Millie – that he has never stopped loving but he doesn't have the words too, and he knows she wouldn't accept them.
"You walked away from us Jonny" She glances down at her hands, which she has splayed on the surface of the table, before she returns her gaze to his face. She watches as the pain dances in his eyes, as he processes the words. She watches as he swallows hard, trying so desperately to regain control
"You pushed me away Jac" he responds finally, in a voice filled with a sadness that he haunted him for years. A sadness that has hung around his shoulders like a cloak preventing anyone from getting close to him, that has stopped them even bothering to try.
"You could have fought" he thinks he detects sadness in her words. He wonders if she knew how hard he had fought, how much it had destroyed him to have to fight every day and how on that last day it had just become too much. The final straw had snapped and he had been unable to stay; knowing full well that walking away would be the end.
"You don't know how hard I tried" he whispers. She tries to think back, but her mind muddles the events that occurred during her pregnancy and in those first few months of her daughter's life. She remembers being overwhelmed and suffocated and struggling to cope with that on top of the exhaustion that seemed to set out to destroy her. She remembers how he had seemed to stay out later, going to the pub with his best friend leaving her at home with the screaming child.
"You could have tried harder" there is a sort of plea in her words, and he wonders how different things could have been. He thinks of how she had tried to block him out, how she had insisted that she could cope and do everything without him, how it had destroyed him when she had pushed him away from their daughter because the child, she said, needed her mother. He had tried to help, to do the little things to make their lives easier but it has always been wrong; it has always backfired and led to the arguments between them. It had been Mo that had found him, arriving for a morning shift. His eyes red and a suspicious mark on his cheek. The second time she had been physical against him. It had been Mo who had dragged him to the bar to talk but he hadn't been able to open up; she would never have forgiven him for that and so he struggled on.
"You made it impossible" she recalls the worst night, when the baby had cried so angrily in the cot. The night when she hadn't let him close to the child to comfort her, though she couldn't recall why. She had shouted at him, words she could no longer remember though she knew their intention; to strip his dignity and to leave him small and weak; to see her emerge to victor. Only he had retaliated, with words he too knew would hurt. He had shouted of her ability to comfort the still howling child, how she was failing, she thought he had mentioned her DNA – that it was in her nature because of her own mother – but she wasn't sure that had happened; that it wasn't just her mind playing cruel tricks once again. She had thought it more than once in those early months. And she had hit him.
"You proved me right" she looks him right in the eye as she speaks. She had never expected him to stay, not really. Nobody ever stayed and she had been waiting for the moment when he walked. Perhaps she had hastened it by pushing him rather than delaying the inevitable. But she had known he would go, that he would seek an easier life, though it killed her to know that he could leave her daughter behind. But then, that was what father's did – or at least the fathers of Naylor girls.
"You gave me no choice Jac" he returns the gaze, of looking directly in to her eyes. She had made up her mind so early on that he would leave her, the self-fulfilling prophecy. Her own father had left her, the men she loved left her and inevitably he would leave her too. It wasn't just a possibility, a vague chance, it was a predetermined outcome and he had fought against it; tried to rewrite the story only the words already written had already scarred the blank pages leaving an ending he couldn't seem to change. He had wanted to more than anything, to prove her wrong but it had destroyed him slowly until the prophecy came true and he lost what was most important to him.
Her phone rings in her pocket and she frowns. She isn't expecting any calls and that worries her. She fishes it out and looks at the number on the screen. Her heart rate quickens and a feeling of terror settles over her as she flicks a finger across the screen to answer.
"Hello" she tries to sound confident and strong, her normal self.
"Yes this is Ms Naylor" she confirms her identity. She listens to the words that the person on the end of the phone line says only they don't seem to make much sense. She feels tears spring in to her eyes, and slip down her cheeks as she tries to make sense of what is being said.
"Right St James'?" she finds her voice to confirm this one detail and she closes her eyes, her body shaking now.
"I'll be right there" she says as opens her eyes and shuts off the phone. She pushes herself up and away from the table, unable to face the concern reflected in his eyes, in the slight downturn of his mouth. She tries to control her breathing before she walks away but the shaking of her body causes her to sway and she loses balance needing the support of the table to stand.
"Jac?" he speaks gently, she watches as he stands and moves closer to her. If she had more strength she would step back and away from him but she doesn't trust herself not to fall.
"Millie's had an accident" she whispers so quietly, the terror and panic colouring each word she manages to choke out.