The Consequence He Must Claim

“I should check on Enrique,” she said as the song finished.

He realized she was trembling and tightened his hands on her, trying to still the odd vibrations rolling off her.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, surprised to sense he was being rejected—which was an extraordinary enough circumstance without the heavy dose of reacting to it with a feeling of injury that weighted his insides.

“Nothing.” Her smile was such a blatant lie, it was a slap across the face. “Excuse me.”

He did not follow anyone and beg for affection. He let her go.

* * *

The nanny looked up from where she was reading a book in the sitting room. Enrique was sleeping in the cot next to her.

“I have a headache,” Sorcha choked with a weak smile and pointed to the bedroom, then closed the door behind her.

Sinking onto the foot of the bed, she wrapped her arms across her middle and told herself not to cry.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, more racked with fear and pain than she had been while in labor. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. She rocked, trying to ease the agony ripping upward like a tear from the very center of her being into her heart, rending and leaving jagged edges as it climbed to score her throat.

She was going to lose him. This time, when she told him about her father, there would be no sidestepping for a prettier angle. They might have grown closer than they’d ever been over their few weeks of marriage, but she hadn’t found the right way to explain what a pariah she really was.

Was Diega enjoying telling him? Sorcha hadn’t been able to wait and watch him realize what he’d married. Had she honestly imagined it would never come out?

She would have to face his disdain now.

Cesar had gone to school with him. Tom. Her husband’s friend was part of the evil, awful— He didn’t even know who she was! He had never even cared enough to look up a photo or find out his half sisters’ names.

Why would he? They were trash.

Don’t cry, she begged herself, pushing her bent knuckles against her trembling lips.

The door clicked and her husband stood in the opening for a long moment, observing her. His scowl might have edged toward concern, but her eyes blurred and she couldn’t tell.

She rose, wobbling in her shoes as she moved to the box of tissues. Plucking several from the holder, she dabbed her face, trying to stem the pressure beneath her eyes, but tears leaked onto the crumpled tissues, staining them with mascara and eye shadow.

“I did tell you,” she said, like it counted for anything that she’d confessed to being illegitimate. That was a far cry from whatever was being whispered about her downstairs. Tom was one of them and she already knew how quickly she would be exiled as not.

She was right back to that moment of walking across the schoolyard, when everyone had stared. The headmistress at the door had given her a cold look and someone had whispered, “Bastard.”

Her sister had held her hand in a sweaty grip while Sorcha had sought out her best friend, Molly. She’d seen Molly every single day since they’d both been in nappies, but Molly had only mumbled, “Mum says I shouldn’t be friends with you anymore.”

Sorcha had survived it and had stopped caring that people had refused to serve them, but the fact Cesar was going to react the same way had her stomach churning.

“Maybe I should have foreseen this could happen,” she said, voice traveling through razor blades all the way up from her lungs. “You’re both titled. I don’t know why I’m shocked you’re acquainted, but I honestly didn’t mean to—” She sniffed.

She hadn’t meant to bring her shame into his mother’s house and attach it to their son. How had she thought this wouldn’t happen?

“I told you she would be here. Resign yourself to seeing her, Sorcha. She and Rico—”

“It’s not her,” she choked, shaking her head. Diega was a catalyst. She was the spark, Tom was the fuse, but Sorcha’s mum taking up with a married man was the keg of dynamite that was causing her life to explode.

Gripping her own elbows, Sorcha looked to the ceiling, trying to stem the tears.

At what point would they be finished paying for her mother’s mistake in loving the wrong man?

“Sorcha, I haven’t seen you like this except for that time with your niece. Has something happened with your family?”

She choked again, this time on hysterical laughter. “Yes. Ha.”

Her voice started to waver and she dug her fingernails into her skin, using the physical pain to overcome the crevasse widening down the middle of her heart.

“I told you my father married for money? To save his estate? He didn’t love his wife. Couldn’t stand her. Once his children went to boarding school, he spent all his time in Ireland, only going back to England when his son and daughter were home. You must have noticed the house on the hill in my village? That’s where we lived with him.”