ILIOS had gone out. Lizzie didn’t know where. She wasn’t going to cry. What would be the point? Instead she did everything that had to be done. She booked herself a seat on the first available flight, packed her trolley case. She wasn’t going to take anything that had come to her via Ilios—except, of course, his child. But then he didn’t want that child—had denied it, spoken callously and dismissively of it.
She was crying after all. Tears were flooding her eyes to run down her face before she could stop them. Carefully she wiped them away with a tissue.
She had done everything she needed to do, including calling herself a cab.
The intercom rang.
It was time for her to go.
She dropped the tissue beside the notepad next to the telephone, where she had written down her flight number, and headed for the door.
Would she have gone yet? Ilios hoped so, he told himself as he unlocked the door to his apartment and went inside.
But it wasn’t pleasure or even relief that gripped him and twisted his emotions with ruthless, painful intensity when he stood in the master bedroom. Only the lingering echo of Lizzie’s scent remained to show that she had ever been there. On the bedside table on his side of the bed were her engagement and wedding rings. He picked them up. Lizzie had such slender fingers, elegant hands. The rings felt warm. Ilios curled his hand round them. Lizzie’s warmth. An image slid into his head of Lizzie’s hands holding their child, Lizzie’s face looking down at it, her eyes warm with love.
Fresh anger filled him. Broodingly he pushed the rings into his pocket. What was the matter with him? He was behaving like…like a lovesick fool. He was the one who had wanted her to go. Who had forced her to go. Forced her to go even when he had seen how unwell she looked. What if she fainted again? What if she did? Why should he care?
Ilios walked into the dressing room and removed his jacket. A wisp of lace trapped in the closed doors of Lizzie’s closet caught his eye. She’d obviously missed something when she’d packed. He pulled open the door, a fresh surge of anger burning through him when he saw all the clothes hanging there. The clothes he had bought her. What was she trying to prove? Did she really think he’d be impressed because she’d left them? Well, he wasn’t. The truth was that he would far rather she had taken them with her. Why? Because he was afraid that they would remind him of her, and that he might start regretting what he had done?
Of course not. That was rubbish. Was it? Wasn’t he already missing her? Hadn’t he regretted his cruelty to her almost from the minute he had left the apartment?
Didn’t the fact that he was here now, pacing the floor, unable to work, unable to stop thinking about her, tell him anything about his own feelings? About her—Lizzie?
Lizzie.
Ilios sat down heavily in the chair next to the telephone, dropping his head into his hands in defeat.
Alone in the silent space which, despite all his attempts to stop it from being so, was filled with intangible memories of Lizzie’s presence within it, Ilios glanced at the telephone. His body stiffened as he saw the piece of paper on which Lizzie had written her flight number and its time of departure. Another hour and she would be gone out of his life. There was a tissue beside the telephone marked with mascara—had she cried? Because of him? The sudden ring of the telephone filled him with a surge of fierce hope. Lizzie. It had to be.
He snatched up the receiver, his heart pounding as he demanded, ‘Lizzie?’ only to be flooded with disappointment when he realised that his caller was merely an acquaintance.
After he had got rid of him Ilios replaced the receiver and stood motionless, staring into space, whilst his heart thudded with sledgehammer blows that were pounding, beating into him the message, the knowledge that he had fought so hard to deny.
Pain wrenched through him, tearing at his heart, clawing at it, filling him with despair.
He loved Lizzie. He loved her and he had lost her.
Nothing was the same in his life because nothing could be the same. The anger he felt, the fury, the grim determination to destroy what had taken root in his heart, belonged not to a brave man but to a coward. It wasn’t his love for Lizzie that was threatening his future, but his attempts to destroy it. As though light had replaced darkness Ilios could see now, when it was too late, how empty his life had been—and would be without her. In the short time they had been together she had changed him so completely, in so many different ways, that he felt he was still getting to know the person he now was—and he was in need of her support to help him do so. She had taught him so much, but there was still much he had to learn. How could he teach the sons who would follow him to be the men Ilios now knew he wanted them to be on his own? He couldn’t. Those sons, just like him, needed Lizzie. They all needed her love.
When he thought of the sons he had planned to have, and the manner in which he had planned their conception, inside his head he saw them living in the shadows, deprived of the happiness they would have known had Lizzie been their mother. He wanted to stop time and turn it back, to that moment when he had still been holding her in his arms. He could have listened to what his own heart had been trying to tell him instead of resolutely denying it. Could have told her that he was nothing without her, and could have begged her to love him. Now it was too late.
Too late. Inside his head Ilios had an image of himself as a small child, standing on the quayside with Tino and his grandfather whilst he watched his mother and her new husband stepping onto his sailing boat. His mother had held out her arms to him, telling him to jump into them. He had desperately wanted to go to her, he remembered, but he had known that his grandfather disapproved of her remarrying.
‘Mummy’s boy, mummy’s boy,’ Tino had taunted him, and so he had hesitated, and then had had to watch his mother’s smile disappear to be replaced by coldness as she turned away from him.
That had been the last time he had seen her. A month later she had drowned.
If he had jumped, if he had taken that risk, if he had trusted her love to keep him safe, how different would his life have been?
Too late.
Ilios reached for his mobile. For the man with courage there was no such thing as too late. There was merely further to travel to reach what he most wanted.