Shoes! She hadn’t put on any shoes! On another jerk, she was crouching on the floor and scrabbling around in the bottom of her wardrobe while Daniel seemed glued to the spot in stunned confusion.
She found her black leather boots and sat down on the carpet to pull them on, tucking the bottoms of her narrow jeans inside with fingers that shook.
‘Rachel…don’t do this!’ It must have hit him then that she really meant to go out alone because his voice was rough and urgent. ‘You’ve never gone out without us before,’ he rasped. ‘Wait until we can all…’
She was vaguely listening to him, though only from behind a wall of dark self-absorption. But one small part of what he had said got through. Daniel was right, and she never did go anywhere without one or all of them accompanying her! If it wasn’t Daniel, then it was the children—or his mother! All her adult life she had lived beneath the protective wing of others. Her parents first, her more outward-going friends, Daniel! Mostly Daniel.
She was almost twenty-five years old, for God’s sake! And here she was, a dowdy little housewife with three children and a husband who…
‘I’m going alone!’ she raked at him. ‘It won’t hurt you to have the children to yourself for once!’
‘I never said it would!’ he sighed impatiently. ‘But Rachel, you’ve never—’
‘Exactly!’ Jumping up she spun awa
y from him when he made a grab for her, concern raking at his taut face. ‘While you’ve been busy making your fortune, chasing your personal rainbows and having your affairs,’ she threw at him bitterly, ‘I’ve been quietly sitting here in this damned house—stagnating!’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ He made another lunge for her wrist and caught it this time. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re behaving like a child! It—’
‘But that’s just it, Daniel, don’t you see?’ she cried, appealing for his understanding even while rebellion ran crazily through her veins. ‘That is exactly what I am— a child! A very spoiled, very overprotected child! I never grew up because I’ve never been given the chance to grow up! I was seventeen when I married you!’ she choked out wretchedly. ‘Still at school! And, before you came along, my parents used to wrap me in cotton wool! My God, what a shock it must have been to them when they discovered their sweet little innocent daughter had been sleeping with the big bad wolf without them knowing it!’
He laughed; she knew he couldn’t help it because her description of himself was so damned accurate that it was either laugh or weep.
‘So, I get pregnant,’ she went on tightly, ‘and swap one set of parents for another set—you and your mother!’
‘Now that’s not true, Rachel,’ Daniel protested. ‘I’ve never looked on you as a child. I—’
‘Liar!’ she declared. ‘You damned hypocritical liar! And you know what makes you a liar, Daniel?’ she demanded shrilly. ‘It’s the way you’re beginning to panic because I want to spend some time on my own—because it could be Kate making the demand by the way you’re reacting!’
‘This is crazy!’ he breathed, shaking his dark head as though he couldn’t believe this conversation was taking place.
‘Crazy?’ she repeated. ‘You think it’s crazy? Well, how the hell do you think I feel knowing that I let you do this to me? I actually sat back and let you treat me like this—and look where it’s got me! I’ve ended up a twenty-four-year-old has-been with three children and a husband who’s already bored out of his mind with me! Oh, please let me go!’
On a wretched sob she twisted herself free, and made for the door. And it was with the walls around her looking strangely topsy-turvy that she stumbled down the stairs and through the front door, only just aware enough of what she was doing to remember to snatch up her purse from the hall table as she flew past it.
Her white Escort was blocked in by Daniel’s black BMW so she simply ran off down the drive, away from the smart modern detached house that had been brandnew when they moved into it five years ago, one of a set built on a small but exclusive estate in one of London’s executive belts. A house she had loved from the moment she walked into it because it offered them all so much more space after the tiny inner-city terraced house they had rented before.
Now she wanted only to get as far away from it as she could, and she hurried down the quiet tree-lined street and on to the main road, aware that Daniel would not come after her. It would take him ages to dress himself and three children before he could bundle them in the car to come looking for her. But knowing that did not stop her jumping on the first bus which came along.
Central London it was making for, so central London was where she was going to go. She sat staring miserably out of the bus window, where dust and grime and dried raindrops formed unsightly patterns across her vision. She could just make out the park where she often took the children to play—or was it they who took her? She didn’t know any more. She didn’t feel as if she knew anything for a certainty any more.
Collar turned up against the cool, late September air, hands stuffed into her pockets, blond head lowered, she walked the Sunday-quiet streets of London, lost inside a great pitiless sea of misery, her feelings becoming more battered as that cruel inner eye opened wider and wider to give her a ruthlessly honest look at who the real Rachel Masterson was.
She was a twenty-four-year-old woman who had become emotionally stuck at the age of seventeen, she decided. She, in her fantasy-like existence, had believed Daniel loved her because he made love to her, and she had never once questioned that love.
But she did now. And, though it galled her to do it, she found he had to be admired for the way he had calmly accepted responsibility when she became pregnant.
Daniel had simply paid his dues for getting himself involved with a young innocent. And if he did lead a separate life outside the one he shared with her, then maybe he considered that his due.
And a separate life it was, she accepted grimly. For it was only now, as she felt her cosy world rocking precariously on the very axis which supported it, that she realised that he hadn’t ever drawn her into sharing with him that faster, more exciting life he led beyond the confines of his neat, well-ordered marriage. A marriage he had created for her to play at being housewife and mother to his children because it was what she’d wanted to do.
Did she only play? She didn’t even know that any more.
Hours she walked, hours and hours without noticing them drift by. Hours just thinking, hurting, fielding the wretchedness of her own misery, until sheer exhaustion turned her feet towards home.
She caught a taxi, because she was tired, and because she was cold, and because home was suddenly the one place in the world she most wanted to be.
Which left her feeling somewhat defeated, because it also meant that her short grasp for freedom had done her no good at all.