The Fatherhood Affair

‘Why did you come here tonight, Natalie? After what we shared this morning, did you still feel driven to check up on me?’

His eyes burned with a need so intense it shamed Natalie for all she had put him through.

‘Please forgive me for doubting you, Damien.’ Her feet moved of their own accord, impelled to go to him. ‘I swear I didn’t come to check on you. It never occurred to me that Lyn would be here. She wasn’t on my mind at all.’ She lifted her hands to his chest, her eyes begging his belief. ‘And I don’t link you with Brett. Not any more.’

Damien caught her hands and held them still, his eyes deeply pained as he said, ‘There has to be trust, Natalie.’

‘On both sides,’ she reminded him. ‘If you’d told me Lyn was staying with you...’

‘Yes, I realise that. I...’ He heaved a deep sigh. ‘When does it end...this feeling that I have to keep fighting what Brett did to you?’

A door slammed again, fracturing the false sense of being alone together. Lyn reappeared, shooting them a look of haughty scorn. ‘How touching!’

‘Goodbye, Lyn,’ Damien said curtly.

She paused on her way to the front door, a malicious little smile curving her lips. ‘I had Brett, too. He was a more exciting lover than you, Damien.’ Her green eyes stabbed briefly at Natalie. ‘You just can’t get it right, can you?’ she said pityingly.

‘Witch!’ Natalie retaliated in anger.

‘Bitch!’ Damien flung at his ex-wife.

Lyn didn’t wait for any more. Having put them both down as best she could, she made her exit with another slam.

Natalie felt acutely discomfited by this further revelation of infidelity, and the crude comparison between Brett and Damien. ‘It’s not true, Damien,’ she said, flushing at the need to say it.

‘Typical of Lyn, wanting to twist the knife. Another lie,’ he said with a snort of disgust. ‘Brett never touched her.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He told me so after Lyn and I had parted. He said she’d made a play for him and he swore he hadn’t taken her up on it. He told me because he didn’t want her making any trouble between us out of spite.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘Yes. Brett wouldn’t have risked our relationship. Not for an idle screw. And that’s all it would have been to him.’

‘Yet he risked his relationship with me. Over and over again,’ she said with a pang of hurt. ‘You meant more to him than I did.’

‘Natalie...’ He winced. ‘Brett needed me. He needed you. Despite the way he used sex as a cover for his inadequacies and feelings of worthlessness, you were his woman, the only one who really counted.’

She had come to realise that, although it hadn’t given her any satisfaction. But for Ryan, she would have walked away from Brett and nothing in the world could have talked her back into being his wife.

‘Yet I came to despise him for the way he kept playing around behind your back,’ Damien continued. ‘I wanted to take you away from him, Natalie. I wanted you so damned much...’

His lips suddenly clamped shut over the words that had been spilling from them. He made a visible effort to relax his face into a lighter expression. His mouth tilted into a rueful smile.

‘Why am I talking about the past when it’s the last thing I want to do? That’s all over.’

‘Not quite, Damien.’

She hesitated, wondering if she should simply let sleeping dogs lie. Was the compulsion to know what had happened a destructive one? Yet didn’t trust only come with truth? If Damien had told her Lyn was with him...if she had told Damien she’d seen Lyn yesterday... It was what was left unsaid that preyed on the mind, providing fertile ground for doubts and misunderstandings.

‘I saw Anne Smith today,’ she blurted out, wanting it over quickly. ‘I asked her what happened on top of the cliff. Before Ryan fell. I never believed the story about the ball, Damien.’

He closed his eyes as though wanting to block out the memory of it. ‘What did she say?’ His voice was completely toneless.

‘She said to ask you. That only you could tell me the truth.’

He dropped her hands and walked over to the windows overlooking the ocean. He stared out to sea, his shoulders slumping for several moments, as though the secret burden he carried was too heavy to bear. Then his back stiffened and he turned around. The bleak look of desperation on his face squeezed her heart with fear.