When I Lost You: A Gripping, Heart Breaking Novel of Lost Love. (28 page)

‘You travel
less
!’ I exclaimed. ‘Surely it’s not asking too much for you to prioritise your wife above
your career for at least half of the year?’

Leo blew out a heavy breath, and then he said, ‘Molly, that’s not going to happen. Not any time soon.’

‘Can’t you see what this is doing to us? To
me
?’ I gasped, and he tapped his fingers against the table impatiently and stared at me with visible frustration.

‘
Obviously
I can. Do you think I like disappointing you?’ he growled, then he sighed again and ran his hands through his hair. He looked so uncomfortable and frustrated in that moment that I barely recognised him. ‘Look, I didn’t know how to bring this up, but I think it’s time that we …’ He tailed off and stared at me. He seemed to think that I could finish the sentence for myself, but I had no idea what he was trying to say.

‘
What
?’ I demanded furiously. ‘Time we
what
?’

‘Molly,’ Leo said, pointedly calm again now. ‘You need to think long and hard about whether you really want to stay in this marriage. I am not going to give up my career anytime soon.’

Once he said those words, it was like all of the fight and the air left my body at once and I deflated until I had slumped in my chair. Suddenly the loudest sound in the house was once again the ticking of the kitchen clock.

‘You want a divorce?’ I choked. I was beyond shocked – beyond stunned. Leo had completely blindsided me.

‘I didn’t say that. I don’t know
what
I want – I don’t know what the way forward is. I just know that neither one of us is happy, and we can’t go on like this. I’m flying out tomorrow.’

At this I gaped at him. ‘You’re running away.’

‘I’m not. We both need space. We need to figure out what it is we want and whether our goals for our lives even line up anymore… if they ever
did. I’ll be back with Brad when he comes home for the birth.’

He stood then, and as he turned to walk up the stairs, I finally lost the fragile hold I held on my temper. My hands were in fists and my voice was so loud that it echoed all through our apartment. I knew Mrs Wilkins and the students in the terraces next door would have heard me, but I didn’t care one bit.

‘How
dare
you drop that on me and then leave the country! You’re a bigger coward than I ever realised, Leo Stephens.’

‘Why don’t you go talk to your parents about it, Molly?’ Leo threw the words casually over his shoulder as he mounted the stairs, his tone mild again, as if we
weren’t
having the most fraught conversation of our entire marriage. ‘I’m sure you’d find a very sympathetic audience there if you want to discuss what a shitty husband I’ve been.’

‘You’re a
bastard
!’ I hissed, standing so fast that the chair I was sitting on clattered down to hit the polished floorboards.

‘And you are a spoilt brat,’ Leo said flatly, and he glanced down at me from the stairwell. ‘I’ll pack now and sleep in the study. My flight is at six.’

I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to run down the stairs and sweep me up in his arms and kiss me until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to find a way to make everything okay between us again, because I knew that I wasn’t going to feel okay until we did.

But I was left alone again – shaking with anger and frustration. I’d always assumed that we’d come through the rough patch eventually and life would be wonderful again. Until that night, it had never even occurred to me that I’d lose the battle if I ever tried to force him to choose between his career and our marriage.

T
hree weeks passed
. He had asked me to think about what I wanted and I did – in fact, that was
all
I did. I watched the calendar tick down to the birth of Penny and Brad’s child, knowing that Brad and Leo would be back in Sydney a few days before.

When Penny texted to let me know that Brad was back, I emailed Leo to ask him what time his flight was getting in. He called me a few hours later.

‘I’m not coming home,’ he said, without identifying himself. The hurt that rose within me was almost overwhelming. I wanted to lash out at him but I knew that I couldn’t afford to do so. I still wanted to fix things with Leo – and if I was going to do that, I had to keep calm.

‘Leo, please don’t do this. Please come home.’

‘Look, we agreed we needed some space anyway,’ Leo said, and he seemed uncharacteristically awkward. ‘I’m having trouble getting some resources for the next project, so I’m going to Istanbul instead to try to figure that out.’

‘We’ve
had
some space,’ I said. ‘Now we need to talk.’

‘Molly, I
need
to find a translator or the whole project stops, and we’ve put months of work into this. Brad is out for six weeks after his baby comes anyway. I’ll try to get back during that time. That’s the best that I can offer you.’

When I hung up that night, I felt a completely new emotion enter the equation of our marriage. All the lows and all the fear and all the longing had been bad enough but for the first time when I thought about Leo now, all I felt was panic.

That night on the phone, I realised that he was not just pulling away now – he was disentangling the last parts of himself that had been joined to me. I really was losing him.

Well, if he thought I was going to give up on our marriage without a fight, he was wrong. I walked to the computer and started looking for a flight.

M
olly’s
belly becomes quite obvious over the weeks that follow. Soon it’s a small but perfect curve that I can’t seem to keep my eyes or my hands off, and I love even the idea that people can tell she’s pregnant now just by looking at her.

I join her at the obstetricians one Friday morning for a check-up, and we get another brief glimpse of the baby on an ultrasound. This time, it waves its tiny hand towards us, and Molly’s eyes get misty. ‘You’re not crying in public, are you?’ I tease her, and she slaps my arm and tells me to shut up. The doctor and I laugh, and she rolls her eyes at us.

‘You should be able to find out the gender at the next scan,’ the doctor tells us, and Molly looks to me in surprise.

‘We haven’t talked about that. Do we want to know?’ she asks.

‘I kind of do,’ I admit, and she grins.

‘Okay, we’ll find out.’

In the car on the way back to our apartment, I rest my hand on her bump and think about the movements of the baby beneath it. I can’t wait for a few more weeks to pass so I can feel it kicking against me.

‘Do you have a preference?’ Molly asks me quietly.

‘Nope.’

‘What about names?’

‘I like Henry for a boy,’ I say, then suggest. ‘Henry Andrew?’

‘Oh yes,’ she gives me a surprised smile. ‘I really like that. And for a girl?’

‘Maybe you should pick that name.’

‘I’ve always liked the name Juliette – Juliette Stephens. It has such a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?’

‘I like that too.’

‘Wow, that was easy!’ she laughs.

‘I have a feeling this kid was meant to be, don’t you?’

Molly is clearly delighted to hear me say that. She gives this adorable shrug of her shoulders as she giggles, and says, ‘I feel like that too.’

‘I mean it’s been such an easy pregnancy so far. You’ve hardly had any morning sickness and you
look
fantastic!’ Her smile becomes a grin and I look down at my hand against her belly. ‘And we just agreed on names like it was nothing. Plus of course… well, the fact that it was conceived at all is pretty much a miracle, right? Weren’t you on the pill?’

There’s a brief pause, but it’s long enough that I look from her belly to her face. She nods quickly, but avoids my gaze. I frown. ‘Molly?’

‘I was,’ she says, but she says it too quickly, and then she looks out the window.

‘We haven’t actually talked about that… About
how
the baby came to be,’ I realise aloud, and I can’t help but frown.

‘I got lazy with my pill,’ she admits. Her voice is very small.

‘Like, you got busy and you got lazy?’ I say, and then a memory rises – of Molly all but begging me for a baby, and then once the subject rose, it rose again and again and again.

Some of those arguments flood back at me now, and once I know it, I can’t
un
know it.

I remember picking up the phone to call her more than once and putting it right back down again so we didn’t have to discuss this very topic. And in the beginning, I’d actually been quite open to the idea – so open that I’d spent a lot of time wondering about it myself while I was in the field. But any enthusiasm I had for a baby quickly faded when Molly’s calm request turned into an endless nagging that I just didn’t know how to counter. She found a way to work the topic into any discussion and the more she pressured me, the less appealing the idea had seemed.

‘It’s okay,’ I say now, carefully. ‘You don’t need to answer that. I remember.’ She stares at her lap, and I exhale heavily and run a hand through my hair.

‘I
had
been skipping my pill sometimes, for a long time,’ she whispers. ‘I went a little crazy, to be honest with you. River was a new baby, and then Penny fell pregnant, and it felt like everyone around us was having babies and it was all that I could think about. And at first
you seemed keen on the idea, but then you weren’t… and I just… It was selfish and stupid.’

‘Yeah. It was,’ I say quietly. I
am
angry, but not as angry as I might have been had I learned this information before I adjusted to the idea of the baby. I consider this and realise that the mitigating factor is that I do already
love
this child.

It was completely and utterly wrong of Molly to make the decision on my behalf, a betrayal of my trust, a manipulative and selfish move. It was the action of a spoilt child, far too used to getting her own way. But it doesn’t matter how many phrases I apply to what she did, I can’t make myself be as furious as I know I should be. Maybe it will come later, once this sinks in, or maybe I’ve just exhausted my reserves of energy for the day and I’ll wake up furious tomorrow.

All I know is that I am not all that surprised by this realisation – maybe because as conscious as I am of Molly’s strengths, I also understand her weaknesses. I wonder if on some level, I have known this all along.

‘So I guess…’ she murmurs. ‘I guess that’s done, then.’

‘Done?’ I repeat, and I glance at her sideways.

‘This was the
thing
, Leo. This was what brought our issues to a head – what I did.’

‘I think I can get past this,’ I frown. ‘This wasn’t what caused us to separate.’

‘Oh, it was definitely a factor.’

‘So… you found out you were pregnant, and
then
we called it quits? That’s crazy!’

She looks down at the bump of her belly and runs her palms up and down it a few times.

‘You’d asked me to think about whether or not I still wanted to be with you and we’d barely spoken in the weeks since that conversation, but you were coming home with Brad when he returned for the birth. Then you called at the last minute and said you weren’t coming home, so I got pretty upset. I went to Istanbul to spend a few days with you to try to reconnect.’

As she speaks, I remember a few things. I remember standing in my hotel room. I’d just put on my gym gear – I was in a foul mood, and hoping a vigorous workout would snap me out of it. I held a bottle of water in one hand, and I had the door key between my teeth. I swung the door open and Molly was standing there with a suitcase beside her. The sight of her was so unexpected that it startled me out of the trance-like processing I had been doing until I opened the door.
What the hell are you doing here?
I remember being as shocked by the rudeness of my own tone as I was by the sight of her, and I remember the way that her face fell.
I have been travelling for a full day to see you, and that’s how you’re going to greet me?

‘You weren’t happy to see me,’ she whispers, and then she clears her throat. ‘I shouldn’t have gone. It made things worse, not better.’

‘God!’ I say suddenly. I look at her in shock as I remember my next words to her. ‘I told you to go home.’

‘Yeah. We went into your room in that
shitty
hotel room you were staying in – it smelt like rotten socks and the bed had a popped spring in it and – it was just awful.’

‘I just took the first room I found – I didn’t want you to stay with me, not there.’

‘I said I’d find something else so we could have a few days together. You told me not to bother,’ she whispers.

Those memories are shocking, but jumbled pieces of the puzzle float around in my mind and I can’t figure out how to make sense of it. I was furious with her for coming – I was miserable – I was stressed and panicked. Worst of all, I felt utter despair at the sight of her, which felt like an out-of-place emotion even then.

When I opened that door, I couldn’t figure out what she was even doing there, standing in my hallway, looking at me with that desperate pleading in her eyes. I’d been ashamed to see her and to know that every new line on her face was
my
fault.

‘You’d never come into the field before,’ I say now, and she shakes her head.

‘It’s not like I walked through a firefight to meet up with you in Homs,’ she sighs. ‘You were
in Istanbul, so it was safe enough. But I hadn’t arrived unannounced before, no. We met up in Europe a few times during the first year, but you’d grown less keen on that as time went on.’

I’m frantically searching my memory, trying to figure out how that encounter ended. I can’t think past sitting on the bed with her in the dodgy hotel room and being embarrassed at how bad the place was. She had looked so uncomfortable, and so utterly sad, and so out of place.

‘I can’t remember why you stayed,’ I frown. ‘Did you insist? Were you only there to…? I mean, did you know that if we…’

‘
No
,’ she says, and she gasps at me, as if I’ve insulted her.

I wince and point to her belly. ‘Well… Molly, I mean… you did stop taking the pill. It’s not such a stretch that you might have lined up a meeting for the right time to seal the deal.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says, frowning at me. ‘I got
lazy
with it, I didn’t
stop
taking it.’

‘Is there any difference?’

She sighs and sinks back into her seat, then shakes her head. ‘I know, it’s still
wrong. But I
promise
you, I didn’t realise I’d missed enough for it to stop working.’

‘So how did you end up staying with me, love?’

‘You were angry, but then you realised what an arse you were being and you apologised, and we decided I’d stay,’ she tells me. ‘I found us a better hotel room and we moved across town, but you really only spent the evenings with me that week – you were busy all day.’

I have a vague idea that I might have made a point of staying out because I resented her decision to arrive unannounced and I hate the picture that paints of my mindset. I ponder this for a moment and another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

Trapped, I felt trapped. I felt exactly as though I was caught in a situation from which there was no safe exit – no way forward that didn’t involve pain. I try to understand that, but I’m getting impatient and stressed now, and my mind refuses to offer more context. I sigh and glance back at Molly: she’s the answer to the puzzle of my mind.

‘So if you weren’t there to get yourself a baby, what
did
you want out of that trip?’

She smiles at me sadly, and rests her hand over mine on her belly and squeezes my fingers.

‘I just wanted to reconnect with you.’

‘And we
obviously
did at least once,’ I say, and I nod towards her belly.

‘Not really,’ she says sadly. ‘I mean we were intimate again, yes obviously… but we didn’t connect on the level we needed to. When we did talk, you only wanted to talk about the embed, and I
really
didn’t want you to do it, so we kept arguing about it – which just proved the extent of the problem to us both, I think. I went there thinking that all we needed was time alone together, but by the end of that week…’ she clears her throat. ‘I couldn’t wait to get home.’

‘So did we decide to separate then?’

‘Actually, no. You came home a few weeks later, and we had another big fight about the baby, and it just got so ugly… I think we both knew it was over then.’

‘It
wasn’t
over,’ I frown at her. ‘It will
never
be over.’

‘I don’t think we
know
that yet, Leo,’ she whispers after a minute. Her eyes drop to my legs, and then return to my face. ‘Unless you’ve suddenly realised you want to retrain as an accountant?’

We spent the rest of the car trip in silence. I can remember patches of that week in Istanbul now, and I can remember making love to her once or twice while we were there.

I remember missing her, even when she was with me – and I can completely understand what she meant when she said she couldn’t wait to get home. I used to count down the days until I saw her, but that week, I counted down the days until she left.

I can hardly believe we let it get to that point – but I do remember the way that she had looked at me in Istanbul. There had been a confused blend of desperation and disdain in her eyes and every time I’d tried to share with her my enthusiasm for the assignment I was working on, I’d see even those emotions die altogether, until her beautiful blue eyes seemed dull.

I remember thinking that no one in the world had the power to hurt me like Molly did. She could cut me deeply with just a dismissive comment about not talking about my assignment, or a simple roll of her eyes when I tried to bring it up again. I knew that she didn’t mean to, I knew that I’d hurt her too and she was acting from a place of pain, but that awful week was one long series of awkward conversations and each of us trying to reignite something that was too far gone to be reanimated. When she finally left, I was relieved.

That desperate, desolate relationship I am starting to remember is worlds away from the one I know now. These weeks with Molly have been alive with love and intimacy again – despite
all
the challenges we have faced in that time. How can things between us be so wonderful now, and yet in the ordinary comings and goings of our days the first time around, we let it fade away to nothing?

Even as I’m thinking about all of this, my mind drifts back to the moment earlier that morning when I stood on my own for exactly ten seconds, and I heard Tracy say those wonderful, magical words.

‘Tomorrow, we take your first step.’