‘Fine. She.’ Had he really said it?
He hadn’t meant to but he was still processing the news. Dead air compacted the room, making it hard to catch a deep breath. Hard even to think.
‘So the baby is all right? She’s well?’
The look of pride that lit up her eyes was unmistakeable.
‘Yes, she’s well.’
‘How long was she in NICU?’
‘Only thirty days. She weighed three pounds and four ounces when she was born. She needed to weigh around four and a half pounds, and be able to feed, breathe, and stay warm on her own before they would let her come home.’
‘Of course,’ he managed hollowly.
‘She was actually pretty good at maintaining a good body temperature without the help of an incubator,’ Evie babbled on. ‘But she couldn’t breathe and swallow at the same time, so feeding was the big issue.’
‘Thirty days.’ He blew out a deep breath at last. ‘Our baby was in the NICU for thirty days and you never once called me. Never once tried to contact me. In fact, you didn’t just need that single month to get in touch with me, Evie, you had seven months before that.’
Evie stared at him mutely.
‘Nothing to say for yourself?’
‘The snide tone is beneath you,’ croaked Evie.
‘Call it shock,’ he bit back.
A bleak thought suddenly leapt out at him and he rounded on her.
‘What do you want? Money?’
‘No.’
He might have believed her cry of indignation five minutes earlier. Now, he didn’t know what to believe.
‘Really?’
‘Do you...think I did this deliberately?’ she croaked. ‘To trap you?’
‘Did you?’ he demanded.
Her aghast look didn’t sway him. He couldn’t make sense of it.
‘You told me categorically that you couldn’t get pregnant.’
‘I’d been told that was the case,’ she replied weakly.
‘Come on, Evie, we’re both medical professionals. Just because you have PKD doesn’t mean you can’t have kids, it doesn’t even mean you’d have necessarily developed renal failure. Plenty of women with PKD have one or two successful pregnancies without increasing their risk. In fact, the last figures I read suggested that only fifty per cent of people with PKD will have renal failure by the age of sixty, and about sixty per cent by the age of seventy. There’s no reason to suggest you would have even had renal failure if you hadn’t been kicked by that kid.’
Max stopped, hoping that was enough. Instead, Evie just stared at him as though she didn’t recognise him, making him feel like the bad guy when, surely, it should be her?
‘I didn’t say I couldn’t have children because of my PKD.’
Her voice cracked with emotion but she didn’t elaborate. Max barely stifled his frustration.
‘Then what? The dialysis?’ He scrambled to calculate everything she’d told him. ‘You said you went onto dialysis after you realised you were pregnant. But even if that hadn’t been the case, the chances of a woman of child-bearing age falling pregnant whilst on dialysis are slim but not impossible, one to seven per cent, right? So however you spin it, there’s no medical reason to support your assurances to me that it was impossible for you to get pregnant. So, I ask again, did you deliberately set out to trap me?’
Her desperate look disconcerted him more than he cared to admit.