Newborn Under the Christmas Tree

Curious, Alice followed. She’d never even noticed this path before, let alone taken it.

Ahead of her, Liam came to an abrupt stop. ‘Yeah, no. This place is definitely too small, and I can’t see me getting permission to expand as much as you’d need. Funny, it looked bigger on the plans.’

Alice frowned, leaning around him to try and get a glimpse of what he was looking at—and felt her heart stutter for a moment.

It was her cottage. The one from her vision on the hill. Oh, it looked different; it was half-falling-down, for a start. But underneath all that—under the overgrown ivy vines and the gaps where roof tiles were missing—it was her cottage.

Her impossible, dream life cottage.

Which was beyond absurd. She wasn’t even staying, and if she was she wouldn’t have Jamie with her.

She’d have no need for a family cottage like this one.

‘No. You’re right. Too small.’ She turned her back on the cottage, and Liam. ‘Let’s go.’

* * *

Liam stared at the cottage a moment longer, then turned to see Alice already halfway back up the track to the main road. He frowned after her, trying to decipher what he’d heard in her voice as she’d dismissed the cottage as a possibility.

Of course it wasn’t suitable—he’d told her that, for once. But there’d been something behind her words—something he hadn’t heard at any of the other apparently also unsuitable sites. It had sounded like...longing? Like the way he’d felt sometimes as a child, wishing for something permanent, something real.

Something his.

Did she want the cottage? Or was the cottage just a symbol of all the things she didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t let herself have?

He wanted to know.

He caught up with her easily, taking the path at a lazy jog.

‘Shame, really. It’s a great cottage. It would make someone a lovely family home, don’t you think?’ The track was too narrow for them to walk side by side so he couldn’t see her face, but he was close enough that he could feel her shoulders stiffen at his question.

‘It’s very pretty,’ she admitted without emotion.

‘Did you ever want that?’ he asked. ‘The whole chocolate box cottage thing. Marriage, a family, not living in a creepy old castle.’

‘I tried marriage once. It didn’t suit.’

The words were throwaway, as if they didn’t matter, but they hit Liam in the stomach all the same.

‘You were married?’ He tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. The Alice he knew would never let any man that close.

Which, now he thought about it, was probably because of the aforementioned marriage.

Was this the missing piece of the Alice puzzle he’d been looking for? Part of it, maybe. But not all. There was still so much he didn’t understand about her. And this admission was the first hint that she might be willing to give him some more clues.

‘For a year and a half,’ Alice said. ‘It was a disaster, it’s over, and I don’t really like to talk about it.’

Yeah, he wasn’t letting her off that easily. ‘What happened?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It might.’ He couldn’t say why, but it did matter to him. ‘Did he cheat?’

‘Probably.’ She sighed. ‘But not that I know of. Look, really, it was a long time ago.’

‘You got married young, then?’ She didn’t answer so, as they turned from the track onto the main path, he nudged her shoulder as he walked beside her. ‘It’s still a decent walk back to the castle,’ he pointed out. ‘And I can keep hypothesising the whole way.’

She stalled to a halt. ‘Why do you care?’

He shrugged. He didn’t really want to analyse his reasons too deeply. He just knew he did care. ‘We’re working together, living together, looking after a child together...and I know next to nothing about you. I told you all about my shining childhood. Now it’s your turn. It’s only fair.’

She looked away and started walking again. Then she said, ‘Fine. I’ll give you three questions. What do you want to know?’

Three questions. So like her to put limits on his curiosity, to find a way to make him play by her rules again. He’d just have to choose carefully, then.

‘Why did you split up?’ That was an obvious one.

‘He was abusive, so I left him.’ Her words were almost robotic, as if she was distancing herself from the very memory as well as the events.

Liam clenched his jaw, a strange fury burning through him. He’d known, he realised. He’d already known that Alice had suffered—he’d read it in her eyes, in her words, in her very actions. He’d known all along—but it hadn’t felt real until now. And the idea of anyone laying their hands on Alice made his fists clench and his mind rage.

‘You have two more questions,’ Alice pointed out, totally calm, and he realised he had to get a grip on himself.

‘He was violent, I assume,’ he mused. Keeping it abstract and factual helped. Looking at the particulars—and not the woman involved. Because if he thought too much about that he was going to lose it. ‘And no, that’s not my second question. How many times? Did you leave the first time he hit you or...’ He trailed off, unable to even articulate the idea.

Alice looked away, her arms around Jamie’s carrier on her front. ‘The first time was just a push.’

‘There’s no such thing as “just” when it comes to this.’ He’d seen it before. One of his mother’s boyfriends who had ‘just’ slapped her, then ‘just’ pushed her and then she’d ‘just’ happened to fall down the stairs. The next time he’d ‘just’ broken her arm.

Liam had wanted to break his face. But he’d been eight years old and puny with it, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do.

Just like he couldn’t change the past for Alice.

‘I know that now,’ she snapped. ‘But back then...’

‘You stayed, then.’

‘For a while.’ She picked up speed as the castle came into sight. ‘Look, we’re nearly there.’

‘I still have one more quest

ion.’

‘Then ask it fast.’ Alice didn’t slow down at all. If anything, she walked more quickly.

Only one more question. It had to be a good one, then. And suddenly he knew what it had to be—the question he’d never been able to ask his mother.

‘Why did you stay?’

She sighed. ‘Because... Because I wanted the future he’d promised me. A family, a home, a place to belong. I’d built all my dreams on that marriage. I couldn’t just give it up so easily. And... I honestly believed that I could change enough, be the person he loved enough that he wouldn’t react that way again.’

Liam supposed that made a twisted sort of sense, although a future that involved being violently abused or being someone she wasn’t didn’t sound like much of one to him. And it should never have been up to her to change, to be anything else or less than what she was. The fault was with her husband, not Alice.

He opened his mouth to say as much, but she cut him off. ‘And that was your third question, so we’re done with this conversation. Understood?’

Liam nodded his agreement, even though he had an inkling they weren’t anywhere near done with this topic. She’d answered everything he asked, given him the whole sorry story.

So why did he feel like he’d been asking the wrong questions all along?

* * *

It was almost too easy to settle into a routine over the next few days. Alice made sure to put all the focus on Jamie—and not the exposure of her confessions—and in no time it started to feel as if this was the way things had always been. They still shared Liam’s suite of rooms, taking turns between the daybed and the king-size, mostly, while Jamie slumbered in his travel cot. And if there had been one or two nights that had ended with all three of them sprawled out in the king-size, Jamie resting on Liam’s chest as he sat up and held him, half-awake, and Alice curled up beside them, well, she wasn’t considering them too closely. With a newborn, she’d learned quickly, you did whatever you had to do to make sure everyone got at least some sleep. That was all.

Even if it felt alarmingly like a family sometimes.