A cold prickle of dread ran down her spine. It was as if everything was slowly escaping her control. Already Gage seemed to be incorporating her into his life. Even though this was fake, meeting his family as his fiancée meant something, she knew it. And how could she face them, knowing what she did? She thought about calling his parents. Demanding they speak with Gage, tell him the truth. But weren’t some things their secrets to keep? Did Gus Caron even know himself? It was too much. What she needed wasn’t a confrontation but time...
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Why?’ That question. One word. So innocuous, when her answer could leave her exposed.
‘I’m wondering how you’re going to explain things when it all ends.’
‘Thinking of me, cher?’
Always. ‘I don’t want to make things more difficult for you than they have to be.’
‘I’m an adult, I can take responsibility for my own decisions.’
‘What if I disappoint them?’
‘You told me you weren’t scared.’
‘I’m not.’
Gage cocked his head as if he was about to say something but a knock at the door interrupted his response. He let the porter into the room with their bags. The man dealt with the larger cases and left the small ones for them. Gage thanked him. Gave him a generous tip. She moved to grab her yellow suitcase, to place it somewhere safe. Maybe the back of a wardrobe where it could be hidden from Gage’s questioning gaze. Gage snagged it at the same time as she did. She
jumped at the shock of his warm hand touching hers as they held the little case between them.
‘I can take it,’ he said.
She shook her head. He was so close to the truth about everything with his fingers on the handle. He let go as she pulled a little too hard and the latch gave. Her heart jolted to her throat as her life for the past seven years spilled onto the carpet in sheaves of paper and scrapbooks. She let go of the handle and the case tumbled with a thud to the floor.
‘No.’ She bent down, scrambling to snatch everything up, her frantic fingers ineffective at sweeping the scattered papers into a pile and away. Gage bent down to help and her mind blanked as he picked up a scrapbook that had fallen open. The articles she’d collected over the years. Most were on her computer but those she’d found in hard copy she’d carefully cut out and glued onto now yellowed pages. She’d followed Gage’s every success and failure with an obsession, to make sure her sacrifice had been worth it. And it had, or so she’d thought.
He flicked through, hesitating on some pages. Picked up another. Seven years of news about him, all collected and curated. His gaze met hers. A frown on his face. His mouth opened, closed. Confusion. She snatched the book from his fingers.
‘That’s not yours to look at.’
‘If not me, then who? Because it’s all about me. You collected...’ His voice choked as he waved his hand over the remaining pages, lying about the carpeted floor like autumn leaves. She spied the corner of an official document, stowed in a plastic sleeve. One that had the power to tear the lies of the past seven years apart.
‘So what if I did?’
‘So what? You told me... You said... And yet you’ve been collecting articles about me. You didn’t forget. You didn’t put us behind you. Why?’
She gritted her teeth. Steeled herself for untruths to hide even greater secrets. This had to end now. ‘We were too young. It would never have worked long term. Better the recriminations then than divorce lawyers now.’
‘No.’ He wouldn’t stop looking at the papers on the floor, now running his hands through them, sorting, shifting. ‘I do not believe you had so little faith in us.’
Eve didn’t know what to do. She trembled, fighting back the tears threatening to fall.
‘Stop.’
Gage didn’t look up. He didn’t acknowledge her at all and then there it was. Safely pressed into a journal. The midwife working at the hospital had done it for her. Tiny footprints and handprints in blue, from a soul who had come too early and left too soon. Gage held them for a few seconds before they slipped from his fingers, the precious papers falling back to the carpet to join the rest. He scrabbled through what remained until he came to the printed official French document.
Eve froze to the spot. She couldn’t do anything but kneel there and watch the past years of their lives unravel like a skein of wool.
Because their son had breathed, he had a birth certificate. Louis Gage Chevalier. A name they’d always loved. Louis for a boy, Catherine for a girl. They’d dreamed every dream when they’d spun those fantasies with one another, when they’d been barely out of childhood themselves.
‘A...a baby?’ He scanned the page, looked at her, scanned it again. The paper shaking in his hands, ‘Our baby?’
‘Yes.’ Tears she’d promised she wouldn’t cry anymore began sliding down her cheeks.
The heat of banked anger flared in Gage’s eyes. ‘How could you keep our son...my son...?’