Sins

‘If you want to tell me.’

‘I’m not going because of you.’

Her chest tightened against her inhaled breath.

‘I can’t leave you behind.’

He was shaking his head as though he found the admission bemusing.

‘The truth is that I don’t want to leave you behind.’ His voice was softer now, and warmer. He was coming towards her. He reached for her hand and smiled at her. ‘I’ve been a fool, Rose. What I really wanted has been there in front of me all the time, but it was only when I was about to walk away from you that I recognised what I’d be losing.’

She could feel herself trembling.

‘I’m staying here and we’re going to get married and—’

Rose shook her head. ‘I can’t marry you.’ ‘Why not?’

‘I’m already married. Pete and I were married a week ago.’

Chapter Fifty-Two

‘What? Why? Why have you married him when you love me? And don’t try to deny it because I know that you do, even if it took Patsy to show me what I should have seen for myself years ago.’

‘He asked me. And…it seemed the right thing to do.’

They looked at one another, and then Josh turned and strode out of the room, leaving her alone in its aching silence.

He still hadn’t noticed her hair.

Ella had arrived in plenty of time for her appointment. The receptionist had smiled at her and ticked her name off a list on her desk, and the nurse who had then arrived to escort her to her room had been brisk and professional.

Now she was dressed in a hospital robe, waiting…waiting for the doctor to come and take away what was growing inside her so that she could go on with her life, waiting for it to be removed so that she need not fear the madness its birth might bring her.

It wouldn’t be long now. The nurse had said that she was first on the list. Soon someone would be along with a pre-med, then they’d sedate her and then…

Ollie scuffed the leaves that had fallen in the park. They made a crisp dry sound, releasing their scent into the air. During his childhood, the sights and sounds of autumn had been restricted to East End fogs and the harsh rattling coughs of the elderly. The first time he could remember seeing fallen autumn leaves had been when he’d been off school with a bad chest. His mother had taken him to work with her, telling him to stay out of

sight and keep quiet, as she’d taken off her hat and coat and pulled on her pinafore in the kitchen of the house she was cleaning. His father’s house, he knew now.

He’d sneaked out into the garden whilst her back had been turned, scuffing the dried leaves much as he was doing now and thoroughly enjoying himself until right in front of him he’d seen a pair of highly polished black shoes. He’d looked upwards over the immaculately pressed, knife-edge-creased trousers and then the overcoat, until finally he’d reached the sternly harsh face of the man looking back at him.

He’d panicked then, remembering his mother’s warning, and he’d turned to flee, only to catch his foot in something and take a tumble.

He’d been terrified at first when the man had picked him up, fearing all manner of unwanted consequences, like his mother’s hand against the back of his bare legs or, even worse, his dad’s belt, but the man hadn’t said anything, simply held him firmly so that their eyes were on the same level and looking at him in silence, his hands suddenly tightening on his arms, before he finally put him back down on the ground.

That memory was all he had of his father–everything and nothing. He had never been able to ask anything of the man who’d given him life, but he had been given that life, unlike his own child. Today its life was going to be extinguished, taken before it had properly started.

He’d reached the exit to the park before he’d even realised that he’d started to move, hailing a cab and giving the driver the address that he hadn’t known until now he’d memorised.

The receptionist listened to him, purse-lipped and frosty-eyed.

‘I’m sorry—’ she began.

‘No you’re not,’ Oliver stopped her, ‘but you bloody well will be if you don’t tell me where she is, and fast.’

A nurse gaped at him as he ran down the corridor, trying to step out in front of him, protesting, ‘You can’t go in there.’

Ella could hear the altercation taking place in the corridor through the numbing fog of her pre-med. Then the door to her room was thrust open and Oliver burst in.