‘You can’t do it on my account. I won’t let you break up your family for me!’
‘But I love you. I’ve never felt like this over anyone. Only you, Evelyn.’
She floundered, thinking, No! I have to downplay this! We can’t do anything rash! ‘Eddy, you practically married your first sweetheart! You don’t know if you could feel this way over someone else. You haven’t had enough women.’
‘You were my first sweetheart. Or, you should have been.’
‘We don’t know that we’d have worked.’
He looked at her in disbelief and frustration. ‘Why are you saying this?’ She had hurt him. ‘Do you honestly believe – after the time we have just spent together; after everything we have continued to mean to one another – that we wouldn’t work, Evelyn? Do you?’ He was searching her face, but she refused to meet his eyes.
When she wouldn’t answer, he said, ‘You can believe what you want, but I’m certain there’s a reason we had to meet again after all these years. And these last few days have proven this to be right. Tell me you don’t believe that this was fate?’
‘Even if all that’s true, Eddy, you have a family. A child. You belong to someone else. As do I.’
‘But we can change that! We have a chance! Evelyn, I want to do all the things with you that I should have been doing with you from the minute we met. I want to shop with you, go to the beach with you, fill up petrol with you, watch telly with you, plan holidays with you . . . I want to be able to be seen with you in public, without looking over my shoulder. I want to walk down the damned street with you, holding your hand. I want this affair word stricken from my mind. It’s beneath us. I don’t want to be ashamed. I only want to be proud of everything that exists between us.’ He was right in referencing how covert they’d felt they needed to be. How many times, when they were doing errands around town, had she wanted to stop and spontaneously kiss him? But she’d had to check herself. Despite them trying on the idea of being an item, it had been so depressingly tempered by the fact that they were both married to someone else. And, if anything, he had hated that more than her, and she hadn’t known that would be possible.
He held his head between both of his hands – this gesture of despair or silent panic she had seen before. After a moment, he looked up again. ‘I want you to be my wife. I want to see the outline of your body there in bed. And I want to see that outline of you change over the years, Evelyn. I want to be with you when I’m old and know that maybe it didn’t work out quite the way it should have, but at least I got forty good years with you – if I’m lucky enough to get that.’ He paused, his eyes buzzing around her face. ‘I want a life with you, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have that in this day and age. We’re not living in our parents’ era.’
She wanted to protest as strenuously as he’d declared his love, but his speech had robbed her lungs of air.
‘I’m going to tell her tonight. And then I’m moving out.’
She jumped up from the chair. ‘No! You can’t be serious! Where would you even go?’
This broke his stride slightly. ‘Well . . . anywhere. I’ll get a flat. Or I’ll live with you.’
She sat down beside him again, aware that a part of her was involuntarily withdrawing. ‘Eddy, you’re not being rational.’ She had seen him as a man with values, with a strong moral code. Someone much like herself. Yes, they were doing a deceitful thing, but they weren’t actually hurting anyone. But this – this reckless desire to dump all his responsibilities for love – this would hurt others. And the fact that he wasn’t paying heed to that – it made her think less of him.
He gripped her shoulders and forced her to look at him. ‘Just tell him you’re not going back. You can get your stuff shipped up here. People do it all the time. It’s not impossible.’
She opened her mouth to say something, something to drill some sense into him, but it died in her. He gently shook her. ‘It really just comes down to this, Evelyn: do you love me and want to be with me? Because I believe you do.’
Tears built up. She felt the need to lie, but she couldn’t leave here having lied to him about something this big. ‘I do love you, yes. There is just a rightness when I’m with you, a sense of belonging.’ Now she’d said it, she felt elated, as though saying it was all that was needed to give it the ghost of a chance. And yet there was a concrete weight of impossibility in her heart. ‘In a way, I fully understand what I always suspected. I couldn’t go on that date with you because I knew I’d fall in love – if I hadn’t already. I was torn then, and I didn’t want to be torn, I wasn’t ready for that. But I’m not sure I’m ready for it now, either.’
She could see he was floored by her pragmatism and lack of faith. ‘And you’re wrong in what you say,’ she added. ‘You said it really just comes down to whether I love you and want to be with you. But it doesn’t just come down to that! What would you say to your daughter?’
He looked genuinely mystified. ‘Well, I’d tell her the truth. One day. When she was old enough to understand.’
‘I mean now. What would you tell her now?’ She knew she was putting him under fire and he wasn’t used to it. ‘You see, you haven’t thought it through.’
‘I don’t believe I really need to think that part through! I’m leaving Laura, not April. I would never do anything to harm my little girl. I love her for all the world, and that’s never going to change. I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to be with you.’
‘You would break her heart. Are you ready to do that? You’re her father. You’re supposed to set the values for her. You’re not setting the values for April if you walk away.’
‘One day she’ll understand,’ he repeated.
‘But she’d always know you didn’t put her first. You put you first.’