‘Ms Moore, is this something that you are happy to accommodate?’
Dimitri almost couldn’t look at her, didn’t want to gauge her reaction. When he’d walked into this, he’d been so sure. Sure of his plan, of his information, of the situation. Yet the moment she’d revealed that she wasn’t Mary, but Anna, he knew she wasn’t lying. He’d felt the truth of it settle about his shoulders and, looking at it now, he was relieved. The woman who had given birth to his daughter wasn’t an alcoholic. Hadn’t been arrested. The woman he’d slept with and spent years dreaming about... Layers and layers of cloudy images began to shift, and when he opened his eyes he looked at Anna and they became clear.
Anna was looking down at her daughter, rocking her gently in her arms as she settled their child, making soothing noises that seemed to satisfy the girl...his daughter. And he held his breath before her pronouncement. He felt, rather than heard, her sigh.
‘I’ll put him in one of the recently vacated rooms. I’m not comfortable with the way he’s done things.’ It irked him that she was directing her conversation to David rather than him, but he had to be fair. It was justified after the accusations he’d hurled at her. And Dimitri knew a thing or two about wrongful accusations. ‘But we do,’ she continued, ‘need to talk and figure out where we go from here.’
Dimitri followed David out to the car, assuring David that he wasn’t such a monster as to cause harm or fear to his daughter or the mother of his child, especially given that she was clearly not the woman he had thought from the report. He took several deep breaths of cool night air before returning to the small bed and breakfast. Peeking into empty rooms on the ground floor, he felt like a trespasser in his daughter’s home and hated it.
He followed the soothing sounds of a gentle lullaby that contrarily only fuelled the anger within him. How many nights had he missed the simple pleasure of putting his daughter to bed, knowing that she was safe, cared for...loved? He paused on the threshold of a dusky-pink room, gently lit by a softly glowing night light.
Dimitri looked at the nearly sleeping child in the crib. She was peaceful and angelic. He knew that was a cliché, but he couldn’t think of any other words to describe his daughter. It was the first time he’d really seen her, not hidden by the shoulder of a stranger or buried in her mother’s arms. Her skin was dark, like both her parents’, but the eyes—they were his. He knew that Anna hadn’t seen him yet, her body hadn’t stiffened the way it had every single time he’d come within a foot of her. But she was far from relaxed, and he deeply regretted that their adult emotions had come to interfere with his child’s sleep.
* * *
How had this mess happened? She’d been shocked by Dimitri’s accusations, his presence...all of it. For nineteen months, she’d forced herself to abandon the hope that he might come for her. The hope that her daughter wouldn’t grow up feeling that same sense of rejection that felt almost a solid part of Anna. But that was the thing—Anna’s father hadn’t just been absent, it wasn’t a passive thing...he had walked away. Had actively chosen to leave her and her mother behind.
She pushed at the adrenaline still pounding through her veins, desperately fighting the need to flee. Instead, she clung to the words she’d spoken to the lawyer. They really did need to find a way forward, now that he knew about Amalia, now that he claimed to want
their child. Wasn’t that what she’d dreamed of when she first reached out to him? Never would she have chosen to raise her daughter without a father in her life...the way she had been raised.
As Anna watched her daughter in the crib, she marvelled at how she’d got so big. She was twenty-seven months old and before lying down on the soft mattress Amalia had held on to the bars and looked at Anna with big brown eyes. Anna had reached out and smoothed a soft curl of hair from Amalia’s forehead. She’d bent down and whispered a promise to her child.
‘It will be okay, sweetheart. It will.’ She’d hoped that she wasn’t lying.
Anna waited until she heard the sounds of her daughter’s breathing slow. She waited until she knew she couldn’t put it off any more and turned to leave the room.
But Dimitri stood in the doorway.
How many times had she imagined him standing there? How many times, during Amalia’s sleepless nights, the teething, the crying...the times when Anna had been so exhausted she couldn’t even weep? What would she have given to see him standing there, a support, a second hand, anything to help take away some of the weight of being a single parent?
But when she’d heard the lawyer—the assistant, as she now knew—dismiss her claims as one of the many women who had called Dimitri, she’d realised that she hadn’t known Dimitri at all. The disbelief and incredulity in Tsoutsakis’s voice had been the reminder she’d clung to each and every night that she had been right to hang up the phone, to end the conversation before she could reveal any more of herself, of her daughter.
But now? What did it all mean? That it hadn’t been Dimitri who had outright rejected his daughter. That he was innocent of the imprisonment that had made her sure she couldn’t let a criminal be the father of her child. Now that he was here, standing before her.
‘I don’t even know her name.’ Anna read a whole host of emotions in that one sentence: pain, regret...anger.
‘Amalia. Her name is Amalia.’
For a second, he looked as if he had been punched in the chest... He closed his eyes briefly but when they opened he wore a mask.
‘She’s mine.’ It was a statement rather than a question. But for all his seeming arrogant certainty, she could tell that he needed to hear it from her. It was as if he was holding his breath.
For just a moment, Anna considered lying. It would all go away. Dimitri would leave and go back to Greece, or America, or wherever he’d come from. Life could return to normal, she’d continue to manage the bed and breakfast, continue to handle her mother’s alcoholism, continue to raise her daughter on her own. But she couldn’t do it. She knew what it was like to grow up in this small village without a father, with the stigma of being discarded and unwanted. She knew the questions that were sure to come from her daughter’s lips because they had come from her own.
Where’s my daddy? Didn’t Daddy want me? Did he not love me?
His eyes darkened impossibly as she made him wait for her answer.
‘Yes. She’s your daughter.’
‘How?’ he bit out. ‘We were careful. Every single time. We were careful.’
It was a question she had asked herself time and time again during her pregnancy. Forcing herself to relive that night, the intimacies they’d shared, trying to find the exact moment that their daughter had been conceived.
‘Protection fails sometimes,’ she said, echoing the words of the female doctor who had looked at her with pity.
Anna followed him out into the hallway, ensuring Amalia’s door stayed open just an inch.