The Army Doc's Baby Secret

‘You’re rewriting history.’ His eyes glittered coldly from all the way across the room. ‘We were living our lives, but we were still together.’

‘I don’t think it’s me who’s rewriting things.’ She shook her head, warning herself to stay strong. To tell him even half the things she’d imagined telling him these past years. ‘I once calculated it.’

‘Calculated what?’

She breathed deeply, and in that moment she didn’t care if he realised how low she must have been at one time, to work it out.

‘I calculated that we, in fact, saw each other less than four hundred and fifty days out of over three thousand, six hundred and fifty.’

He blinked, as though taking it in for a moment. His expression darkening.

‘I don’t recall you complaining much at the time.’

‘No, because it was like a protracted honeymoon every time we saw each other, Zeke. Thrilling and wonderful, filled with passion.’

‘And thrilling was a problem?’

‘Yes!’ She threw her arms into the air, as though that could somehow articulate her point better than her words could. ‘Because there was nothing remotely realistic about it. We weren’t like normal couples who live together and get to know each other’s quirks and foibles. Who argue over putting the washing out, or whose turn it is to cook, or whether the toilet seat should be up or down.’

‘Seriously?’

‘You can scoff—’ she shook her head at him ‘—but you know I’m right. We didn’t really know each other at all. We were in love with the idealistic image of the kids who had once fallen for each other. We certainly had no real knowledge of the people we were growing into. Of how our careers, our experiences, were moulding us. You can’t really tell me you don’t see that.’

She peered at him incredulously, those blue eyes holding hers with such authority. But then it hit her, the realisation that he knew exactly what she was saying. That he agreed.

They didn’t know each other at all.

It was one thing to know the truth on an intellectual level. It was quite another to see it reflected so clearly in Zeke’s gaze.

She faltered, stepping backwards as though she’d been dealt a physical blow. The silence closed in again, and this time a bleakness came with it. She felt as though she were a thin plastic bag caught in a squall, blown this way and that.

‘None of which explains why you didn’t tell me that you were pregnant,’ he said suddenly, breaking through the water that was filling her mind and causing her to resurface. ‘Why you’ve kept my son from me for four years.’

‘Zeke.’

‘It’s funny how the problems of our protracted honeymoon, as you called it, only imposed themselves when you realised that my career as a soldier—the thing which had attracted you to me all those years before—was over.’

That wasn’t how it had happened but her frustration, and her fears, overtook her.

‘My God, Zeke. I was a teenage girl. Show me a teenage girl who isn’t swept up by the idea of a strong, good-looking lad intent on becoming some kind of heroic soldier and saving lives? And your monstrous father was what drove you on to be better, and better. It was your way to change who you were and make a difference in the world.’

‘And you loved that,’ he sneered.

‘As a kid...’ she heard the desperation in her voice as it rang out ‘...not as an adult. By the time I was a trauma doctor with several tours under my belt, I knew the reality wasn’t anywhere near so poetic.’

‘So what is the reality, Tia?’

‘That nothing would ever be enough for you. You were a maverick, Zeke. Your entire squad was. That was why you got the kind of missions that no one else could ever handle. I may not have known what they were, but I heard the whispers. I knew the rumours.’

‘Yet you stayed with me,’ he pointed out. ‘Because you wanted to be with me. I wasn’t just an average bloke you could have met in your student union, I was a marine, and then SBS. I was living life at maximum velocity and you loved that.’

‘I was terrified of that,’ Tia said quietly. Firmly. ‘But I loved you. So I accepted that was who you were. Someone who had to keep pushing himself, risking his life, because that was how you had come to define yourself. You guys thought you were invincible, and sometimes you even managed to convince me that you were, too. But then reality would set in, and fear. So, no, Zeke, I didn’t love it. That last year in particular I watched you walk out the door and expected never to see you again.’

‘Then you must have been thanking your lucky stars that I released you from the responsibility of being my wife when I got injured.’

His voice was full of such bitterness and loathing that it clawed inside Tia’s chest. She didn’t realise she’d sunk onto the rug until she felt the soft material gripped in her hands.

‘You really want to know what I thought when you got injured?’ she whispered hoarsely, barely recognising her own voice. Every fibre of her being screaming at her to stop talking.