I've always thought Kat and Alfie should have had a reaction to Ronnie and Roxy moving in two doors down from them. I wrote this when I heard that they were buying the house. Stacey was yet to hand herself into the police at this point.
Kat and Alfie were heading home from a six hour jaunt around various baby stores when they happened to encounter Billy strolling in the direction of Number 27. Normally he'd have nagged at her to take things easy until she caved in out of sheer annoyance at his continued protests, but with Kat now showing and a scan photo on their mantelpiece that showed twins even to the untrained eye, it was difficult for Alfie to keep his excitement in check; this was the culmination of ten years of wanting, hoping and wishing.
As much as both would much sooner spend every waking second thinking of and working for their family, Billy Mitchell heading in that direction seemed just too much of a coincidence to ignore. His stance looked so defiant, so set on an objective as yet unknown to the couple that it didn't seem possible for them to have been mistaken, irrespective of the fact that he wasn't exactly walking around with a sign that declared to the world, 'I'm going into Janine's.' While it was true that he could use the bigger house, seeing more of Janet and William of late and having Lola, Lexi and Peter under his roof; clearly a certain commodity would put a spanner in that plan, an obstacle in his way. It was the same one which had led them down the 'charity' route as Alfie had termed it, and to move in with Mo; money, or rather the lack of it. Courtesy of Ian, the pair were aware that Janine was on a selling spree in the name of her legal fees, but even at a knocked down price, it would be too much for him to afford. Peter and Lola were hardly in a position to contribute.
"Billy," Alfie called across to him. "What are you doing?"
"I'm carrying a box."
It was a deja-vu moment for Kat, who was taken back to one of their hardest weeks, excepting the obvious such as the aftermath of Tommy's 'death' and the Andy saga. Losing the Vic hadn't really hit her as such, only in the sense that she'd had to witness Alfie worrying himself silly about how he would continue to support her and Tommy, all the while knowing that she was pregnant. "Are you a stuck record or what?!" Kat reeled at his response, spurred on by the memories. It was fairly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell that if someone asked you a question like that, they didn't mean it in a literal sense; the interest was in the why. It was entirely possible that such a condition ruled Billy out, but they had to live in hope. "And don't try telling me that you're an Executive Director of Operations, you're an Executive Director of naff all! Always have been, always will be."
"I'll have you know I was an integral part of the business at Butcher's Joints," he protested, with Kat cornering him before he could walk up the path to the house.
Kat scoffed. "Don't give me that." She wasn't an educated individual, but it was fairly widely known that operations included such things as procurement of goods. "You ordered the stationery; this Executive Director thing was just Janine's way of keeping you sweet," she accused.
A staring contest seemed to ensue, through which Billy remained silent. After what felt like five minutes, Kat was bored. "I'm tired," she announced, caressing her bump gently. "I'm going to go and have a sit down and you can tell Alfie what you're doing here. If you don't you'll probably find that you're eating that box for breakfast tomorrow!"
The change in Kat's attitude took Alfie by surprise to say the least. It wasn't the threats that bothered him, for he could see them as preparation to defend Tommy and their twins; if she was this fierce with Billy, an almost friend, anyone who dared to cross their family would do so at their peril. As much as he'd spent the last three months urging Kat to take it easy, he hadn't seriously expected her to heed the warning, but he was glad that she had. "You go up to bed and lie down, I'll bring you up a coffee in a minute," Alfie offered, hoping that would be as long as Billy would take to fess up. He couldn't fathom the failure of other men to go out of their way to make things as easy as possible for their wives or girlfriends, when they would be subjecting themselves to the most unimaginable pain in the name of family.
Minutes later, Alfie wandered into the kitchen, far from his usual self. "Alfie?" Kat eyed him concernedly; he looked as if he'd just seen a ghost. Billy Mitchell suffered from delusions of grandeur, he wasn't important enough to have that effect on her husband, whatever he was up to.
Kat had taken a pew at the kitchen table, having decided that a lie down at this hour at this stage of the pregnancy was too much like being wrapped up in cotton wool. She wanted to be with Alfie, they'd wanted this for too long for him to miss out on another second.
Rather than preparing the coffee that he'd offered earlier, Alfie immediately pulled Kat into his arms, clinging to her like a child would its mother. "What's he said to you?" "Tell me," she pressed him as he clung to her even more tightly. Still revealing nothing, he slipped one hand from the small of her back around to her stomach, as if fearing that both Kat and their babies would be ripped away from him if he neglected to hold onto them in the physical sense.
"Alfie, whatever poison he's come out with, just ignore him. He's a Mitchell, Phil's probably sitting over the road right now fashioning more strings to pull. You're the best husband and the best dad, you won't lose me and you won't lose them," announced Kat confidently, in the hope that she could somehow transfer part of that confidence to him.
He wished that he could share her optimism. Together with the Australia business which he was still yet to confide in her about, the development of which he had just learned struck up a sense of fear within him. Except this time, there was nothing that Kat could do or say to alleviate the feeling; worse still was the fact that it was entirely possible that the news could utterly petrify his pregnant wife. In her condition, this was the last thing the pair needed, in more ways than one.
Despite her words of encouragement, Alfie remained preoccupied and hadn't loosened his grip on her a jot. She didn't mind in a sense, because he would never and could never hurt them. It was clear however that there was a somewhat pressing issue at play, which they would need to deal with together. She'd been wrong to believe that she could relieve Stacey of her predicament without his support, just like she would be to ever think that she could solve anything without him; like he was of the mistaken belief at that moment. "Whatever it is just let me in. We can deal with anything, you and me against the world remember?" she urged her husband.
Reluctantly peeling himself from her, Alfie quickly pulled up a chair and positioned it so that it was directly in front of Kat's. He took his seat and sighed heavily, fully aware that this wouldn't be as easily dealt with as both had previously deluded themselves to believe. Taking her hands in his across the gap in between them, he pecked one comfortingly, before squeezing them so tightly that Kat couldn't resist a joke to this effect.
"What's that for? I'm the one that's got to push them out!" Kat chuckled at her own comment.
Alfie suddenly looked behind him, muttering, "Tommy," and starting to get up from the chair.
Tugging gently on his arm as a means of convincing him to sit back down, Kat disclosed, "He's fine, he's upstairs playing with Stacey and Lily." It was well known by all who knew the couple that convincing as such didn't exist in Kat's vocabulary, it was more of a prompting that couldn't be ignored. That said, with Alfie, it was as far removed from an order as Kat would ever get. They were equals, he did all that he could to prevent her from being haunted by the remnants of her tragic past; telling her daily that she deserved the best, sleeping only after she had nodded off so she wouldn't be haunted by the memories in the dead of night with him snoring beside her; reassuring her that she was and would be the best mother, and by so doing, making up for his own hurtful comments to the contrary. In return, she fought his corner in any battles that they were sucked into, which more often than not happened to involve a Mitchell.
"Fugitives are useful for something then," remarked Alfie. He had forgiven her for making the statement; hell would freeze over before she would ever back down, and Kat meant infinitely more to him than Michael; that didn't mean that he had forgotten.
"Alfie," Kat sighed deeply. "I thought we'd agreed to disagree?" This was a can of worms to put it lightly, how could you agree to disagree in a situation when it was your cousin versus theirs? It had been bad enough when it was Michael against Jean, and as it had transpired then, Michael was in the wrong. It hadn't been his wisest decision, getting involved with Janine, but it didn't mean that he deserved to have his murderer walk free.
"I'm letting it go because I know I have to. I don't like it but I can accept it or choose not to accept it and lose you, Tommy, the babies; everything in the process. Michael's still dead either way. I made an off the wall comment; sorry," he admitted.
Nodding understandingly, Kat took Alfie's hands in hers as she spoke up again. "Don't be, you've got a point."
Her words almost prompted Alfie to do a double take. Kat admitted defeat about nothing, even when she was in the wrong. It was part of her charm. "How do you mean?" he enquired. Though it was a conversation about the statement, something she'd thus far refused to discuss with him, he wasn't anticipating an apology; progress had been made and that was enough for one day.
Kat paused as she considered how best to put this. "I know we said we wanted three kids, but I always told myself that if ever we were to have twins, we had to stop at the two or have four."
"How come?"
"You know what they say about the twin bond," explained Kat. "These two will be inseparable and that's the way it should be," she remarked, indicating her bump. "I just worry about Tommy you know, being the odd one out."
"Hey," Alfie spoke up caringly, willing her to come and sit on his lap. "You, here."
Giggling that infectious giggle he loved so much, Kat shook her head. "Alfie I'm putting on weight like there's no tomorrow."
"Don't care, come on," he encouraged.
Sighing in defeat, Kat got to her feet. "Don't say I didn't warn you," she stated, before sitting down as she had been instructed.
"Tommy won't be the odd one out, I won't treat them any different because… you know…" Alfie trailed off as he desperately attempted to reassure his wife. She didn't need this upset in her condition.
Kat instantly moved in for a kiss, silencing him. "I know you won't, if I thought you would I'd be out of the door," she warned. "I didn't mean it like that."
"How did you mean it then?" Alfie followed up, fiddling with strands of her hair.
"Tommy will be the odd one out in the sense that he's the only one that's not a twin. Zoe will see them as her siblings but it won't be the same as having a playmate around. With Lily around it could help Tommy; someone to play with while the twins are as thick as thieves."
"Right," muttered Alfie, clearly with his reservations as far as this point was concerned.
Kat frowned. "What have I said?" she questioned, though not thinking in the literal sense. Guilty as she had been of losing her head on a number of occasions in the past, she could recall her words exactly.
Sighing, Alfie spoke up. It was easy enough to say, but it wasn't going to be easy in practice. "It worries me a bit that's all, Tommy could grow up closer to Lily than his brothers or sisters and I don't think that's right. It was alright for me, I grew up close to Michael, Jake, Danny and Maxwell but I was an only child at the time," he attempted to explain.
"It's not ideal, granted, but what do you want us to do about it?" asked Kat, perhaps a little short with her husband. She had already alluded to the ideal solution, but they had to face up to the fact that it would never happen. "Number four isn't going to happen, I'll be almost 45 by the time these two are here and we've got the all clear. Besides, planning pregnancies has never worked for us, has it?" she reflected rhetorically.
He nodded sadly, knowing that they had been beyond lucky already. After the whole fertility struggle, they had been lucky in that Kat had conceived the once, even if it had resulted in a miscarriage. The fact that they were now expecting twins was nothing short of a miracle.
"I say we take steps to make sure that they have a strong bond with Tommy as well as with each other," Alfie's intention constituted the bare bones of an idea, but it would take an extended discussion to formulate it into a workable plan. It was at this point that Kat gasped, apparently panicked and seeming to have remembered the fact that they still had the ambiguity of Billy's actions to deal with.
"What did Billy say?" she questioned Alfie, changing the subject begrudgingly to less appealing matters, in the subconscious knowledge that she simply couldn't let it lie.
Alfie gulped. He hadn't intended to derail the conversation from the matter at hand, but he couldn't deny that he had been comforted if not pleased by the tangent that it had gone off on. Bringing her some relief in the wake of this was going to be a challenge, but if anything could do that, it would be the thought of the complete family that they would become in four months or so. Like so many things in Kat's life, there was however a catch; the fear for these precious lives that would undoubtedly stem from current events.
"Alfie?" Kat pursued him anxiously.
"Don't get mad, okay?" he asked, unable to explain why it was that he was bothering with such an introduction. Kat would never agree to anything without a full knowledge of what it was that she was agreeing to. "I'm sorting it out."
"Sorting out what?" He'd barely stopped for breath before Kat had switched to something of a biting heads off tone. The situation was not of his making, yet with her hormones, Alfie had an unsettling feeling that it would somehow turn out to be his fault. Maybe it was, in a way; had he not thrown the bust, they'd still be living in the Vic.
"Ronnie… Ronnie's buying Number 27," he managed in one breath, unable to keep the unwelcome news to himself any longer. They faced things head on now, and most importantly, they did so together.
"What?!" Kat expressed her disbelief at such a volume that Alfie could practically see her blood pressure rising.
Running his hands through his hair agitatedly, Alfie willed the powers above to give him something, anything that would calm her. "Kat, don't let her wind you up. It's not good for the babies, think of them."
She gave a forced chuckle, the type that meant no words were necessary to get across the fact that she was far removed from the point at which she would see his logic. "I am thinking of them, I'm thinking we can't bring twins into the world with our son's kidnapper two doors away!"
He should have known. Kat had always been one to have an original interpretation of things. "I know Kat, I'm on it. I've rung the police; I'm waiting for that Jo whatsherface to call back, the one that dealt with our case," Alfie explained. It was hardly the situation rectified, but it was progress, progress that he hoped would lessen her fear.
"Joanne Peters," Kat told him, surprising herself in as far as she had successfully managed to recall the name in the face of their current concerns.
"Yeah, her," confirmed Alfie. "We've done all that we can for the minute," he stated. "Let's go and sit down."
Kat allowed herself to be guided into the lounge by her husband and upon reaching the room, immediately made a dive for the seat furthest from the door. "Should be able to see her coming from here," she mused.
"Kat," Alfie found himself speaking up warningly. "She's not exactly going to try anything right now, is she? She'll be busy unpacking." "This plan," he muttered, changing the subject after a pause. "I reckon we need a routine where we both get time alone with each twin, they get time with Tommy without each other and we get the odd day for some us time," revealed Alfie, before looking her square in the face again as he awaited Kat's reaction to the suggestion.
"Sounds good, but that's going to require a lot of babysitting," she admitted sadly.
"We can't afford to be splashing out on babysitters; it's going to be hard enough as it is with two more to feed and clothe, especially if the market closes."
"Darlin', we'll be fine," protested Alfie. It had become something of a figure of speech with him, always needing to reassure her, but on this occasion, he firmly believed it to be true. He was Alfie Moon; falling on his feet where money was concerned came naturally. His lucky break would come soon. "We've got a spare room full of nappies and all of Tommy's old stuff." For once, Kat's past was actually something of a blessing, as opposed to a stick for her to beat herself with; a nagging voice in her head that she would never amount to anything, and something to haunt her in the dead of night. Her desperation for another chance to be a mother and to be afforded the opportunity to do it properly at last had led to her keeping not only Tommy's first babygrows and booties, but everything.
"We best hope they aren't girls then," Kat commented. She was always realistic when it came to her approach of the issues that they encountered in life, but she had become quite the pessimist following their eviction from the Vic. He knew how much she'd longed not only for her own family who would never turn their backs on her like several of her relatives had done in the past, but more specifically for the little girl that she'd missed out on. Now, here she was wishing for the opposite for the sake of something as trivial as money.
"I wasn't suggesting we hire a Nanny two days a week or anything like that," Alfie said, looking up at her. "How about every other Saturday for some us time? Your Nan will be fine to babysit once a fortnight surely, we cook for her enough," he proceeded to reason.
"We are living rent free in her house," Kat reminded her partner. "Unfortunately," she added as her eyes again focused on the window, which looked out onto the Square. He might have perceived no rent as charity, but she had no such issue with that fact; Mo had extracted enough out of other people in one way or another, including the ability to sublet the house for a year and a half thanks to Alfie allowing her to live with them at the Vic, followed by a further year courtesy of Charlie's generosity. She'd never met her mother-in-law of course, but Kat imagined that if one had finally managed to break free of said family member, you'd be in no rush to move them back in with you. That was what mother-in-laws were wasn't it; interfering busybodies? Big Mo was as interfering as they came. The issue with their current living arrangements was of course their new neighbours.
"Come on, you know she won't mind. You only have to think of the way she was at Christmas; I never thought I'd see the day that Mo Harris would need a tissue!" stated Alfie. The comment was light hearted, but in no way was it a joke. She'd been almost as delighted with the news as they had. "She loves Tommy and she'll love the twins too; it can't have been easy for her, single all these years and watching her granddaughters leave town one by one."
"Ok, you win," she finally relented, looking past the various practicalities.
Alfie grinned triumphantly. "Thank you," he managed, before moving in to peck her on the forehead lovingly. "I'll get it right this time," he promised. "I had you but I blew it by being work crazy and obsessed with football and time with the lads. Who cares if we have a bit less money in the bank, at least we'll be us."
"No you never, I blew it. I was a moody cow half of the time, I got annoyed over next to nothing and I took you for granted."
Not really knowing how to respond to that, Alfie quickly pulled Kat into his arms. "We both did things we shouldn't have; we've drawn a line under all that. Let's leave it at that, where it belongs; in the past," he looked up at her pleadingly, imploring her to agree.
"Done." Kat couldn't have been more pleased at the prospect of forgetting all about her prior indiscretions. "So, how's this grand plan of yours going to work out with Nan babysitting once a fortnight?" she challenged him. Kat had always had quite an imagination, but even she couldn't see that one.
With an expression that said 'I've got the answer to everything,' Alfie elaborated, "Simple. We arrange it so we both have one day off of work a week, say a Wednesday to break the week up. Then we have a six week rota; one week you take Tommy out and I'll have Bert and Ernie; you take Bert and I have Tommy and Ernie, then you take Ernie and I have Bert and Tommy. After that we work it the other way round so I take Tommy and you take Bert and Ernie, then I take Bert and you have Tommy and Ernie; I'll have Ernie and you take Tommy and Bert. Et voila, everyone gets to spend time with everyone," he concluded, flashing her one of his trademark grins.
"Well?" Alfie broke the silence, having received no response. Kat had never been short of an opinion in the past.
"I have to admit, that is one of the better ideas you've had."
"Don't sound so surprised," he teased.
Checking out of the window once again for any sign of their nemesis behaving suspiciously, and, finding nothing, the penny seemed to drop for Kat. What was she doing, thinking more about Ronnie than Alfie when he'd given her another chance after everything she'd said and done to him? She was still a concern obviously, but one that they needed to face together. "Come here," she told him, in much the same way as she had after they'd received the happy news that they were expecting twins.
The two had been lying in each other's arms for approximately twenty minutes when the sound of Alfie's ringing mobile filtered through from the kitchen.
"What are you like, leaving your mobile lying about?" Kat remarked. "The whole point of a mobile is that you can take it with you," she smirked.
Chuckling gently at his wife's smart comment, Alfie got to his feet and headed in the direction of the offending object. Leaving the room, he looked back and flashed her a smile, before continuing on his way.
Reaching the kitchen, Alfie quickly took hold of his mobile and recognised that the caller as Joanne, returning his call. "Alfie Moon speaking," he said, answering the phone.
"Hello Alfie, it's Joanne here. How are you today?"
Clearly he'd had better days, or he wouldn't have been phoning her. With as little concern for politeness as he had ever had, Alfie voiced this. "Can we cut the pleasantries, Kat's pregnant and our son's kidnapper is moving in next door?"
There was a pause, followed by silence on Alfie's end of the line as Joanne said her piece.
"You what?! You ask us if we want any conditions putting on her release, we say we don't want her coming anywhere near us or Tommy; you ignore that fact and then you won't do anything when she decides to go one further and buy the house two doors up from us! Having her across the street was bad enough!" he despaired.
Joanne swallowed, buying herself the time to run through her response to this. Maintaining her professionalism, she then spoke up again. "Alfie, I understand that this is a shock for you and Mrs Moon, but Ms Mitchell has served her time. The board are of the opinion that she doesn't pose a threat."
"No threat! Get them to live next door but one to their child's kidnapper then!" Alfie began to vent. "No threat." he repeated out of sheer disbelief.
"It was the finding of the psychiatrists who were assigned to Ms Mitchell upon her imprisonment that she acted out of severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and as such, she is unlikely to reoffend. Obviously she will be severely dealt with if she does attempt to snatch another child."
The threat of punishment was far from comforting. She'd likely call up Jack and play along just long enough to have him find her an escape route from the implied sanctions.
"She knew what she was doing. Kat and I broke up not long after she snatched Tommy. She found out and started going on and on about how it couldn't be over. It didn't make a lot of sense at the time but it all slotted into place when we found out what she'd done. She was only trying to ease her own sense of guilt over the charade that she was carrying on with. She wouldn't have taken four months to confess if she wasn't as calculated as they come."
Alfie wasn't entirely sure what it was that had been said next, only that it wasn't what he wanted to hear, or even remotely encouraging. He'd have zoned back in in a second had Joanne given him anything promising to be holding onto. "You can tell Kat for me then; I can't break her heart like that," he hit back firmly.
While Alfie headed back in the direction of the lounge, Joanne gave him some speech about how he was being overly dramatic. He disagreed; if anyone understood Kat, it was him. The legal system seemed to Alfie to be all for complex personalities, advocating Ronnie's childsnatching ways solely because she'd encountered some tough times in her past. Why then did it fail to care for Kat? When someone had been deprived of their child at the hands of their own parents, was it not natural that the prospect of having their son's kidnapper as an almost immediate neighbour would break their heart?
"Kat," he called out, re-entering the room. "Joanne wants a word with you," Alfie informed her, doing his best to give nothing away. He could sense however that her mind was starting to work overtime, no doubt aware that it couldn't be the news they wanted on the basis that he wasn't coming in smiling from ear to ear at their triumph. At this development, he quickly departed from his original plan, putting the phone onto speaker. It was fair to say that Kat would probably drop the said phone when she learned of the extent of the law's concern for them, or lack of as it turned out. They were hard up enough as it was and could do without needing to replace the phone.
Words were spoken and Kat's expression fell still further. He'd expressed his concern regarding Kat getting her heart broken, and now it was breaking his. He couldn't bear to see her frightened or scared and would do anything in his power to ensure that she was happy. It just so happened that it was outside of his control on this occasion.
"Right," she eventually piped up again, given the strength to fight back by Alfie, who had sat back down and was now holding her comfortingly. "So she's the one that's done wrong and yet we're the ones that have to move. That's brilliant, just brilliant." The situation was far from ideal, but Alfie could still see the Kat that he had fallen in love with shining through.
"Mrs Moon, no one's suggesting that you have to move away."
"No?!" Kat began sarcastically, disgusted by the law's failure to protect victims. It wasn't for the first time either. Why had it taken four months to get Little Mo free? "What do you expect me to do then, take her round a cup of sugar?!"
Alfie was quick to interject, determined to prevent his wife from continuing her tirade and landing herself in trouble for the abuse of a police officer. With the way any crime he'd been connected to seemed to have been exaggerated, they'd probably decide that it constituted assault. "We would move away Joanne; anything's better than living with Ronnie two doors away at the moment. The problem we've got is we can't actually afford to move; we don't rob factories like that family. We're the wronged parties here, why should we be made to suffer because of that?"
The remainder of the phone call continued in the encouraging manner that it had started; that was not at all. There was something about not casting aspersions, and how witness protection was just that, not designed to relocate the victims of crime for the easement of their own albeit entirely rational fears. Unfortunately for Alfie, he soon had another reason to be concerned as Kat rose from the couch with a purpose. She was never going to take this lying down, but he had hoped, however unrealistic as it might have been, that she would do it in a way that would be less exerting for herself. He wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to know what it was that she was planning, considering that his chances of stopping her were about equal to his chances of living to see the day that he would become a great-grandparent.
"What are you doing?" he voiced, worried both for her safety and for that of their unborn children. Alfie had to admit that he had found Ronnie chilling to say the least back when she'd warned him off of Roxy. She was one of those who'd emerged from a prison spell as a 'hard-nut' for want of a better phrase; now that he'd all but humiliated Roxy by leaving it until the very last minute to choose Kat over her, plus happened to be having the baby with Kat that Roxy wanted, he really wouldn't put it past her to hurt Kat or any one of their children just to get to him. That included Tommy, who despite having stolen him from them; he didn't think she'd ever shown a semblance of care for.
"Going to mark her card," Kat revealed, still agitated. "We can't live like this. We need to be able to tell the kids that we did something to keep them safe when they find out who she is and what she did."
"You're going round there?"
"What else do you suggest, call Janine up and ask her if she'd mind doing Ronnie in as well?" Once again, as was so typical of Kat in times of crisis, she'd defaulted to taking a sarcastic tone with anyone who distracted her from the mission in hand, even if they happened to be the people that she loved most in the world. "Stacey!"
"You're taking Stacey round there as well?" Kat had never been one to shy away from a confrontation, but Alfie hadn't envisaged her going to quite those lengths.
Kat nodded the affirmative. "She's not going anywhere. If I threaten Ronnie and keep Stacey hidden, she's got one over me when she realises she's here," she reasoned.
Proving that she was far from the reluctant teenager that Alfie remembered, Stacey had appeared ready to head out within all of two minutes. The three then headed out to face the Mitchells, with Alfie hanging back and slouching against the gatepost of Number 23. Kat and Stacey wandered in the direction of Janine's old place, finding their rivals standing on their doorstep. With no camera in sight, it was as if they had planned it this way; loiter outside just long enough to intimidate Kat and Alfie as further revenge for their treatment of Roxy. Kat couldn't see Roxy particularly wanting to move into a house in which someone had been murdered; the fact that they were only two doors away had likely swung the decision.
"Right, I'm guessing you've heard our happy news from Phil or Sharon so I'm here to tell you that if you go near any of us, if you even look at Tommy or these twins, she'll stave your head in like she did your old man's," came the inevitable threat. Kat wasn't finished. "You'll stop little sis here from turning her into the old bill because if they find out what she did, I'll see to it that everyone knows what your dad did to you." It was cruel, but necessary. She could console herself with the fact that she'd never made anyone believe that they were burying their own child.
"You think you can come round here making threats like that?!"
It was at times like this that Kat began to wonder whether Ronnie was related to Phil at all. "Looks like I just did." He was as smart as they came and Ronnie ought to have known that she possessed nothing with which to fight back. It wasn't as if she was stupid enough to stroll up to Ronnie with a murderer for company if there was so much as a weak link in the plan, never mind a hole.
"You'll regret this. You can't tell anyone that my dad…" Ronnie soon stopped dead.
"Really? What are you going to do about it? Tell them that my Uncle raped me? You can't use that to hurt me because the whole of Walford already knows."
She was speechless. The ice queen had been rendered a mute by the very woman she'd lorded it over while playing landlord, trying to evict them with no authority. The saying had it that what went around came around; never had Kat seen more truth in it than at that moment.
"We both know that you don't want the truth coming out. You just showed me that you don't. You're a long way from making peace with it yourself; you couldn't even use the word rape. Believe me there's a big difference between coming to terms with it yourself and being able to hold your head up high when everyone knows what happened to you."
Alfie watched on in admiration as his wife put Ronnie in her place. As the scene unfolded, it suddenly dawned on him that Kat could just have easily have become twisted as a result of her abuse. Both women had started from essentially the same point; violated by a relative they trusted in the worst possible way, and denied of the chance to be a mother to their respective daughters. Showing true strength of character, Kat had eventually gone forward and sorted her life out, while Ronnie had taken the other turn and allowed herself to be consumed by it. Even now, it seemed that Ronnie refused to trust anyone completely, even Roxy. That didn't mean that it had been easy for Kat; it would never be with a past like that, but Kat had kept her guard up while allowing him to earn her trust, bit by bit until she didn't need the guard any longer. It didn't mean that Kat's journey had seen her be a shining star all the way, because it hadn't. There'd been times when she'd fallen back into the clutches of her past, but infidelity was preferable to her becoming an out and out psychopath and control freak, something that Kat had learned from and Ronnie was still failing to do. It was clear that Roxy was filling the void created when Ronnie had been denied of the chance to raise Danielle and James. Tommy was Kat's equivalent for the hole left by Zoe, yet she wasn't overbearing because of it. She didn't keep his parenting for herself, she simply appreciated every bathtime, every meal she prepared for him and each night she happened to tuck him in all the more for it. She was fully aware that Tommy preferred for Alfie to put him to bed, as he told better stories; the difference between Kat and Ronnie was, Kat had no issue with this, admitting that for a child of three, the stories that Alfie's imagination conjured up by far topped any of her attempts at the same. Ronnie on the hand would likely sulk, just as she had done quite publically when Roxy failed to answer her phone, had looked in the direction of a man or hadn't left her to pick up Amy from school.
He was still smiling as Kat eventually backed away from their mutual demon, closely followed by Stacey. Holding his arm out, Alfie waited for Kat to walk into it as Stacey wandered on ahead and into the house.
"You were amazing," Alfie told Kat as she fell gratefully into his protective embrace. "You and me against the world," he reminded her once more as they strolled inside, feeling that at least part of a weight had been lifted from their shoulders.