Arabella waited until she got to her apartment before she rang her parents. She didn’t think the Uber driver wanted to hear her rant or ugly snot cry and she needed time to cool down and order her thoughts.
She hadn’t cooled down by the time she dialled their number but she was thinking a little clearer.
“I had a baby?” she said, her voice terse, not bothering to find out who’d picked up before launching into it. “I was pregnant and had a baby?”
“Logan told you.” It was her father.
“No,” she snapped. “I found a picture. And then he told me the whole damn conspiracy!”
“Now, Arabella.” Her father’s tone was irritatingly condescending. His court voice.
“Don’t you now Arabella, me!” she yelled. Her hands were shaking – hard. “Why on earth would you keep that from me?”
“Darling...” Her mother this time. He must have put it on speaker. “It wasn’t... intentional. But we should have told you. We’re so, so sorry.”
Arabella laughed a harsh, snorting noise. “Yeah. It seems like everybody is sorry.”
“We didn’t plan to keep it from you,” her father said, more contrite now. “It just happened.”
“So you didn’t sit down and discuss whether to tell me or not.”
He sighed. “Not... in the beginning.”
“Right. But you did. At some point.”
“Those first weeks and months we were just concentrating on getting you better and getting you home, darling,” her mother said. “That was all we could really think about. And then there was your lengthy rehab and it took you a long while to even want to fill in those memory blanks. And the doctors told us to be guided by you, not to push, to wait for when you were ready to know things.”
“But you could have told me when I found out I’d lived in Brisbane for a year. You could have told me about Logan. And the baby.”
“We could have but...” It was unusual to hear even a whiff of hesitancy in her father’s voice. “You have to understand. We had our old Arabella back. After you lost the baby and had come home... you went into a terrible depression. For over a year. We got you therapy and you were on medication but nothing seemed to be able to pull you back from your grief. The bubbly, bright Arabella everyone knew and loved was ...gone. We were at our wit’s end. I would have done anything, given anything, paid any money to have erased your pain. But there was nothing we could do.”
Arabella could hear her father’s anguish but felt oddly detached from it. From him and this strange story of her life. It confirmed what Logan had said about her mental state after she’d lost the baby but her father could have been talking about a stranger.
“You eventually got better. You functioned again. You went back to law school, you re-entered society but you were never the same. There was a sadness about you that was haunting. And then you had your accident and the entire thing was magically erased from your memory and we had our old Arabella back. It was the one good thing that had come out of your accident.”
“And the longer we went without telling you the harder it was to tell you.” Her mother’s voice was shaky as if she was on the verge of tears. “To find the right moment. And we didn’t know how you’d react to the news. We didn’t want to take you back to that dark time again, sweetheart. Or risk plunging you into despair again. Having you hurting all over again. We just... couldn’t. But it was wrong. It wasn’t our secret to keep.”
“It wasn’t Logan’s either,” she said. A well of anger rose at their complicity, refusing to be quelled.
“Don’t blame him,” her father said, surprisingly quick. “There wasn’t some kind of conspiracy. He wanted to tell you right away and he didn’t because I asked him not to.”
“Oh, I’m not blaming him,” she said, knowing her father was damn good at reading in between the lines. She was laying the blame for Logan’s collusion squarely at her father’s feet. “But I am angry at him for agreeing. Why did you ask him to do that?”
“Because you were only going to be in Brisbane for a few months.” Her father’s logic was obvious to him but not so much to Arabella. “You were supposed to be coming back home to your life. What possible purpose could it have fulfilled for Logan to tell you? To possibly devastate you? We didn’t know that you were going to fall in love with him again.”
Why? The question poked its way into her brain. Why didn’t they know that? Did they think her amnesia had reset her hormones? Why wouldn’t she fall in love with him again? She was beginning to think that some love transcended things like time and memory. That some people were destined to connect, to be together.
How else did she explain Logan and her meeting and falling in love twice?
“So you were just... going to keep this from me? Forever?”
“Darling... no. We hadn’t really–”
“Yes.” Even from three thousand kilometres away, Arabella could hear her mother’s conflict but her father’s abrupt honesty as he cut in held no conflict whatsoever. “If at all possible yes. I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear.”
She shook her head, a tear squeezed out of her eye and trekked down her face. “That’s not your call, Dad.”
“I know it’s not, damn it,” he said, sounding both annoyed and righteous. “But I’m supposed to protect you from being hurt. I couldn’t protect you the first time around and it ripped our hearts out, watching you go through such terrible mental anguish but I could this time so, yes... damn it.”
“I’m not a child,” Arabella chided.
The accident had rendered her helpless for a long time and her parents had coddled her and she’d let them because she’d depended so heavily on them. But she was better now. She was well. She was a grown ass woman looking after herself.
“There comes a time when every person has to stand on their own two feet,” she said. “I’m twenty-eight, I don’t need your protection. I need your honesty.”
“Right,” he said, in his court voice. “And how do you feel now, Arabella? Now that you know?” he demanded. “You feel better for knowing? You feel happy. You feel good about yourself? Or are you going to crawl under the covers of your bed and cry yourself to sleep? Not talk or eat or work or live? Just be consumed by it? Like last time?”
A hot ball of hurt exploded the ice in her chest, flinging a million icy shards like tiny needles everywhere.
He didn’t get some kind of absolution from her because he was trying to protect her from some potential emotional fallout.
“I’m angry, Daddy.”
It had been a long time since she’d called her father Daddy. That was how pissed off she was. It boiled in her bloodstream and streaked like forks of hissing lightning up and down her spine.
“I’m really angry at you two for keeping this from me. I’m angry at Logan for doing the same. But I’m not going to fall apart. How could I?” she yelled. “I. Don’t. Remember.”
She hung up the phone, wishing it was one of those old-fashioned corded ones so she had the satisfaction of banging it down. It rang almost immediately. Home. She declined the call. It rang again. Logan. She switched it off.
She was too angry with either of them to talk.
She lay on the bed instead, tucking her legs up until she was as small as she could be. Her chest burned from the pent-up emotions she’d been trying to keep at bay as her hands slipped to her belly. She cradled it, trying to wrap her head around the fact that once upon a time, a life had grown inside her.
For twenty-two weeks.
Logan’s baby. A little girl.
Arabella waited. And waited. Lying there, hoping she’d get some kind of sense of that life. A feeling that, if only for a brief moment in time, she’d been a mother. She squeezed her eyes shut, peering into the black hole inside her head where the memories were locked in some kind of abyss, frustratingly out of her reach. She peered so hard it felt as if her skin was splitting open as she desperately willed it to come like she’d done so many times before.
Willing something, anything, to come out at her from the void. A shard, a glimmer, a whisper of that time.
Anything.
But there was nothing. The space under her hand felt empty. There was no vague echo of the life that had once grown there, that she’d apparently been excited about. Not one fragile gossamer thread to which she could cling.
So she did exactly as her father had predicted and cried herself to sleep.
It took a while for Arabella to lose her head of steam. Logan had tried to ring her but she’d ignored his calls. He took to texting, then, begging to know that she was okay. She’d replied to let him know she was fine, but she needed some time.
He’d thanked her and agreed to give her as long as she needed. It hadn’t stopped him from texting but they weren’t ones that required a response. Normally, just pictures of Flash or a building in the city that he liked or some titbit from the news or a picture of his lunch or something silly that had happened at work.
Informative and funny and friendly. Absolutely no pressure. Despite her animosity, Arabella had grown quite fond of them and looked forward to her phone vibrating several times a day. Looked forward to the inevitable laugh his texts provided.
A bright patch amidst the dullness of court and the confusion of her life.
She hadn’t cried since that night. She hadn’t regressed or fallen apart as her father had feared. But she had turned everything over and over in her head until she was dizzy with it. In a strangely detached, logical way she had come to understand why her parents had chosen their course of action.
But it had taken a while to accept. For the anger to dissipate.
Her amnesia had been piling up layers of rage for four years now. Anger over what it had robbed her of had built incrementally and she’d needed time between each hit to assimilate it. To deal with it.
She usually got there in the end and this was no different.
Rationally, she knew her parents had done what they thought best at the time. She knew from her kind of work that most people did the best they could with what they had. Her parents hadn’t kept her lost baby from her to hurt her, but to protect her.
No matter how wrong or misplaced that was.
So she’d reached out to them and they were talking again even if it was a little stilted and strained.
Arabella didn’t feel similarly charitable towards Logan. There was no logic or detachment where he was concerned. It was all seething, roiling emotion. She loved him so much it hurt, which only increased her sense of betrayal. At least her parents had done what they’d done for her. Logan had done what he’d done for them.
Was it too much to expect the man she loved to be on her side?
She might be looking forward to his texts but she was a long way from forgiving him. From wanting to see him.
But then she woke one Saturday morning, two weeks after she’d found that picture, with such a crushing sense of loss she couldn’t even get out of bed. It sat on her chest like an elephant and she couldn’t drag herself out from under it.
It was so different from the bizarre disconnection that had haunted her past couple of weeks. Suddenly she knew what she wanted and it was Logan. Or rather the information that only he knew. Sure, she wanted to cry and rage at him and pummel her fists against his chest. She wanted to hurt him, transfer the pain she was feeling to him. But more than anything, she wanted to know about her baby.
Their baby.
A sudden knock on her door startled her. Even before she peered through the peep hole, she knew it was Logan. It was as if her emotional turbulence had conjured him up. Or summonsed him, anyway. She was in her PJ’s – one of his T-shirts she’d acquired that fell to mid-thigh and her underwear – but her pulse leapt and her heart leapt and he was outside her door so big and real and she’d missed him.
She was still mad as hell at him but her gut twisted in such a visceral way that she flung the door open without a moment’s hesitation.
“Bella,” he said and it scraped along all her nerve endings.
He was so gorgeously male in his soft faded jeans and T-shirt – so Logan – she had to hold tight to the door handle to stop herself from bursting into tears.
“I’m sorry, I know you wanted me to stay away but... I just had to see you.” His gaze raked her face and her body like he was doing an inventory, checking everything was still were he left it. That she was okay. “I’ve been so worried about you.” He pushed a hand into his hair. “Are you all right?”
Arabella shook her head slowly as one by one the features of her face gave into the emotion that had been threatening since she woke with that elephant on her chest. Her chin dimpled as she sucked air in and out of her lungs trying to prevent the inevitable breakdown. But it was too late, her bottom lip was wobbling and her whole face was collapsing.
It felt grotesque – God knew what it looked like.
He took a step towards her, over the threshold of the apartment. “Oh, God, Bella... don’t. Please don’t.”
He held his arms out to her but she took a step back, shaking her head. “I’m st-st-still r-really... p-p-pissed at you.” She choked the words out in what must have been a largely unintelligible mess.
“I know,” he said, reaching for her, ignoring her feeble head shaking and attempts to ward him off, as he hauled her into his arms. “I know.”
Arabella didn’t resist any longer. It felt so good. He felt so good. Big and solid, shouldering her sobs, absorbing her grief.
“It’s okay,” he murmured into her hair. “I’ve got you.”
And it was exactly what it felt like. Like he had her. He smelled like he’d just got out of the shower and his arms banded around her like he never wanted to let her go and his heart thumped sure and steady beneath her ear. It felt like she was home. Like she was safe. Like she could tell him anything. Lean on him for anything.
She had no memory of what had happened all those years ago – none whatsoever – but it felt really freaking real this morning. The grief over a child she never knew, didn’t even have a memory of, was suddenly profound and shocking.
And he was the only other person who could truly understand that. In his arms, she knew he understood how she was feeling even when she didn’t understand it herself.
He held her until her sobs eased and her tears dried up. Until they were just standing in the middle of her apartment, holding each other.
“Are you okay now?” he asked, when he finally pulled away a little, his eyes locking on hers.
Arabella shook her head. It didn’t feel like she’d ever be okay again. “I want to know more. About the baby. About Faith.”
He nodded slowly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Would you like to see where we buried her?”
Arabella’s breath caught in her throat as a warm rush of tears threatened again. Surely there were no tears left?
She hadn’t thought about a grave. A special place where they’d laid her to rest. She’d barely come to terms with having had a baby let alone that baby’s stillbirth.
The fact there was somewhere filled Arabella with immense relief.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Very much.”