‘How do you know what it’s like, Jack? If you think there’s anything sentimental between us then you’re living in cloud cuckoo land. Angelo offered me a proposition. Sleep with him or else walk away.’
‘I know. And you chose to have a relationship…’
‘I chose to have sex with him,’ Francesca said tightly, reducing it to the most basic terms possible. She had to keep thinking straight. It was the only way to extricate herself from the mess. She didn’t want Jack to start harping on about her feelings for Angelo. For someone who had structured his life around non-involvement, he had a very healthy set of romantic notions, and one of them was that because she loved Angelo then everything would surely be all right. In her more generous moments she had found this trait endearing. Now she just found it insufferable and a breach of her privacy.
‘And now that this has happened, well, it’s my problem and I’m going to deal with it and if that means running away then, yes, I’m going to run away, and if I can’t trust you not to betray me again, then I’m going to have to leave without a forwarding address.’
‘Don’t be daft. How are you going to do that? You own a house, you own a catering business…’
Francesca’s mind feverishly took off down the road of practicalities. Where exactly would she go? And if Angelo wanted to find her, then he would. It would be easy. She would have to sell the house, sell off all the kitchen equipment and, even if she handed it over to a lawyer to do, he would still be able to trace her through that route. She couldn’t bear to look at Jack. It was the first time since they had been kids that any major disagreement had arisen between them.
While she was still grappling with the enormity of what lay ahead, Jack was again speaking, his voice oddly firm and controlled.
‘You can’t run away. You’ve run away too many times and now you’ve got to stop. I wouldn’t have gone to see him if I thought that you were happy with your decision…’
‘I have been very happy with my decision!’ Francesca said hotly.
Jack’s voice was as calm as hers had been vehement. ‘No, you haven’t. You’ve been miserable and now it’s affecting the pregnancy. You know what the doctor said. Much more stress and you run the risk of miscarrying. Is that what you want?’
No, it wasn’t. She might not have expected or wanted to be pregnant with Angelo’s child but, now that she was, she felt intensely happy about it. It was about the only thing she did feel happy about. It was selfish, but there was a strong sense of wanting this bit of him for ever.
‘Well, thank you very much for introducing yet more stress for me to cope with.’
‘You need to start being honest.’ He stood up and brushed himself down. It had been a late night. When he thought back to Angelo’s reaction to what he had said—the disbelief followed swiftly by cold, angry shut-down—he could understand why she now felt inclined to take off. The man was, frankly, intimidating, but taking off was not the answer and he was convinced that the guilt she blithely dismissed would eat away at her until she ended up in hospital. If she had never intended to fill him in then he might have remained silent but she had meant to and had chickened out at the last moment, and had then wrapped up her cowardice in lots of flowery packaging of being mature and thinking of the impact it would have on his life and wanting to spare him the unfair anguish of having to deal with a mistake she had made, as though she had been solely responsible for the situation.
After he had met Angelo he had headed back to his local pub and drowned any niggling doubts he had had in a few pints of lager. Lord only knew how the pair of them were going to get it together to do justice to the job they had for later that evening. Give it another week and the kids they used would be rising up in arms and staging a mutiny.
‘Where are you going?’ Francesca demanded, standing up and then sitting back down when she was overcome by a wave of nausea and dizziness.
At once Jack was by her side. ‘I’ll stay if you want, Els.’
‘Was he very angry?’ she asked in a small voice and the slight hesitation provided her with an answer. ‘God,’ she moaned, curling into him, forgetting the fact that he had become the bad guy.