Helena stood in the kitchen and held the envelope in her hands. Although it was plain and deliberately unmarked, she knew by the thickness of the fold of paper inside what it contained. She had sent the samples off to be analysed over a week ago. Even though she knew what she was doing illegal, she had made up false identities and signatures for the consent form, pretending she was carrying out the test on behalf of a patient.
Her heart was racing and her palms felt clammy as she stuck her index finger under the gummed flap and pulled along the seal to open it. She removed the letter and just held it between her fingers. She needed to be certain that she really wanted to do this. She could bin it now, forget all about it and nobody would ever have to know.
James was still completely oblivious to the secret that she was keeping from him. He was recovering surprisingly well. He was doing the rehabilitation exercises that his physiotherapist had given him and was making good progress. Because he was laid up and she was still on leave of absence, they had no choice but to spend a lot of time in each other’s company. She had finally told him about what had happened in the surgery. He had been shocked as she had recounted how she had broken down in front of Julie Carroll and how Ken had suggested she take a few weeks off.
As she had shared the true depths of her pain with him, she’d suddenly realised that she had never let him in. She had never let him see just how broken she really was in her fruitless journey to have a child because she was afraid that if she fell apart, then he would too and once the floodgates opened there would be no saving them from the torrents of their grief. Normally life was so busy that it was only now that Helena realised how little time they actually spent together. She guessed they had slipped away from one another over time. She knew she was guilty of filling her life with stuff; going for a run, meeting a friend for coffee, working late – anything to avoid the sadness that had been their struggle to have a baby. There were times when it had just been too painful to look at her husband and see the emptiness in their life where a baby should be. It had been easier to avoid him and run from the pain, but now she had had time to think, to process her feelings and gain clarity, and she was starting to see glimpses of the way they used to be before they got beaten down by the disappointments of infertility.
They had talked through a lot of the old hurts and pain and what the infertility had done to them as a couple. James had explained to her that when he had contacted the surrogacy clinic, he had thought he was helping. He had hated seeing her in so much pain and he just wanted to fix it; he had never meant to hurt her. She now understood that they dealt with their disappointments differently; Helena needed to process it and grieve first, whereas James just wanted to mend it via the fastest route possible.
They had stayed up late the night before laughing and reminiscing too and it reminded Helena of the early days of their relationship. She always joked that James had wooed her with his coffee cups. He had opened the first branch of GreenCoffee just down the street from the surgery and she used to pick up a latte there most mornings on her way to work. She had noticed the good-looking barista working there but didn’t think anything of it until one morning she sat down at her desk and realised he had written ‘Will you go out with me?’ along the side of the cup with a Sharpie. At first she thought it was meant for someone else, she guessed he probably tried it on with lots of women and so she put it out of her head. The next time she went in, he had written ‘Please?’ on her cup. She had flashed him a smile behind the counter and continued onto work.
The next morning, he had said, ‘Well, what’s your answer?’ over the din of the coffee grinder. So they had gone on a date – a picnic in the park on her lunch break. It had been sweet and romantic and things had moved quickly after that. He had brought her to his friend’s wedding two weeks later. She had done the macarena with the children, dragging him up with her until they were both creased in laughter. They had stayed talking into the dawn until they were the last of the wedding guests still up. As sunlight rose on a new day, James had led her by the hand out into the garden. She had taken off her high heels, which had been burning her feet, and as she walked over the dewy grass, they had kissed and she knew there and then that she had met her soulmate. It had taken a while to find him but they had had a connection that she had never had with anybody else. It was the twinkle of his blue eyes and the way he held her gaze when he talked to her. The way she hated being apart from him and counted down the hours until they would see one another again. Despite everything that had happened in recent weeks, she was starting to fall in love with her husband all over again.
She stared at the envelope that she clasped in her hands. It felt like holding a bomb; whatever was inside it could destroy everything. She knew this was her last chance to stop this; to put this whole crazy charade out of her head and just forget about it. Aidan had texted her the week before to say that Milly had been released from hospital and she’d felt consumed by guilt as she’d replied to say how happy she was for him. He thought she was his confidante, an ally and friend through these difficult days, when the truth was that her deceit was worse than both Rowan and James’s put together. But she needed to know – one way or the other – if she didn’t discover the truth, it would haunt her forever.
She began to unfold the wad of paper in her hand. Her eyes scanned quickly across the words, unable to read them. She flipped the page and skipped straight to the Statement of Results towards the end of the letter. Then she saw it.
The alleged father cannot be excluded as the biological father of the tested child. Based on our analysis, the probability of paternity is 99.99999999%.
Oh God. She felt her legs grow weak and she sank into a chair. There it was in black and white. Definitive. James was Milly’s father.
Why had she done this? She now realised there was a huge difference between having suspicions and then actually having them confirmed. The burden of this knowledge was even worse than she had anticipated. What was she supposed to do now? So many lives would be torn apart by this.
‘What is it?’ James asked, entering the room on his crutches. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she bluffed.
His eyes searched her face and she had to look down at the kitchen floorboards.
‘Come on, I know you better than that,’ he said, grinning at her.
‘It’s just work stuff.’ She quickly folded the letter and put it inside her handbag. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m starving… I’d better start dinner.’
She opened the fridge and began taking out the ingredients to make a stir-fry. ‘Would you prefer chicken or beef?’ she called over her shoulder.
‘I don’t mind, maybe chicken?’ James suggested, his question about the letter forgotten about.
As Helena took a knife and began chopping peppers, she was torn. She pictured Aidan, Milly, Callum and Jack sitting together on their sofa watching a family movie on the TV, oblivious to the heart-breaking secret she now kept. They were already fractured with the loss of Rowan and this would crush them completely. But how could she keep this from James? Having a child of his own was all he ever wanted. She had the chance to change his life forever. If the situation was reversed and she had had a child out there unbeknownst to her, it would have been a dream come true to discover it. And Milly was wonderful, so wonderful.
Helena slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning and wrestling with her mind about what she should do now that she knew the truth.
As the light in her bedroom changed from the inky shades of night to the primrose yellow dawn, her decision became clearer. Her mind was made up. Even though she felt guilty for denying James the chance to know that he had a child, it was for the best. It was too big, she needed to contain it and the only way to do that was to keep it to herself. The secret had to stay with her. She had decided she would take this knowledge to her grave; let everyone get on with their lives the way they should and nobody would get hurt. Secrets were dangerous. Once one person knew the truth, these things had a way of unravelling, like a ball of wool; once you tugged on the end a little, soon the whole thing would unfurl and it would only be a matter of time before everyone found out and she couldn’t let that happen.
She tied her robe around her and descended the stairs. The smell of freshly brewed coffee woke her senses as she entered the kitchen. She knew James must already be up.
‘Helena, what is this?’ he asked as soon as she came in. She saw he was sitting at the table, holding the paternity test results in his hands.
Her heart stopped. She marched over and snatched the letter from him. ‘Where did you get that?’ She had never thought he would go near her handbag.
‘Why have you got a paternity test result in your bag?’ he asked.
‘You shouldn’t be looking through my things,’ she snapped.
‘I swear I wasn’t. You left your phone in your bag and it was ringing, so I went to answer it and then the letter fell out.’
‘It’s confidential information concerning one of my patients,’ she continued crossly.
‘But why is our address on the letter? Why didn’t you get it sent to the surgery?’
It was almost as if he could tell that she was trying to hide the truth.
‘Because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get it in the practice, so I had it sent here,’ she lied.
‘Come on, Helena. You looked like you were going to faint when I came into the room last night and you were reading it. Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?’
Icy cold sweat broke out across her neck as fear flooded through her. He wasn’t going to forget about it. She had really hoped she could avoid this but he could see right through her lies. The whole thing was unravelling and she was terrified. It was only a matter of time until he worked it out for himself. She knew she had no choice but to tell him the truth. She took a deep breath.
‘James, I think you should sit down,’ she began as her heart began pounding.
His brow furrowed in concern. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
She pulled out a chair for him and waited until he had manoeuvred himself down onto it before beginning.
‘It’s Milly—’
‘Rowan’s daughter? What’s wrong? Is she okay?’
‘Aidan is not her father…’ The words sat in the air and she watched as he tried to grapple with them.
‘W-what do you mean? Of course he is.’
‘I did a paternity test.’
She watched as bewilderment knitted his brow. ‘Helena, are you serious? Why on earth would you do that?’
‘It’s a long story…’
‘But if Aidan’s not the father then who i—’
She waited for the penny to drop as his mind processed what she was telling him.
‘You think it’s me?’ He pointed at himself in disbelief.
Helena nodded to confirm.
‘Oh my God, Helena… but…’ His face was a sea of confusion and she knew he had never suspected anything himself. ‘We only slept together once – I swear.’
She explained everything then, from Aidan’s admission about the blood type in the hospital and how seeds of doubt had been planted in her mind to how so she had carried out a secret DNA test on him and Milly.
‘But is that even legal without Aidan’s consent?’ James asked, holding his head in his hands.
‘No it’s not, but I had to know…’ she said. ‘I did it to put my mind at ease. I know it sounds stupid, but I never thought it would actually come back that you were Milly’s father.’ She was just as shocked as he was. What was she meant to do with this new information?
‘Oh God, Helena, I don’t know what to think… I mean, I’ve wanted a child of my own for so long, but not like this…’ He looked up at her. ‘What about Aidan? I mean the one-night stand was bad enough, but this…?’
Guilt as thick as sludge trickled slowly through her veins. Now that they knew the truth, she wished she could erase it from their minds and pretend it had never happened. ‘I shouldn’t have done it.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘Do you think Rowan knew that I was Milly’s father?’ James continued, as his mind tried to process this information. ‘Is that what she wanted to tell me that morning?’
‘I’m not sure, I keep asking myself that. Maybe she was going to tell you the truth, but we’ll never know now. For all we know it’s possible that she didn’t even realise Milly’s true paternity herself; aren’t we all guilty of sticking our heads in the sand and believing the truth we want to believe sometimes?’
‘I can’t believe she’s my daughter…’ he said, clearly still trying to get his head around this information. ‘Wow.’
‘It’s a lot to take in all right,’ Helena agreed.
‘Imagine if we had known from the start? We could have been present in her life. Imagine what that would have been like, Helena? We’ve been robbed of so much. All those stages, her first steps, taking her to playschool for the first time, pushing her on a swing, movie nights snuggled up together, we’ve missed out on all of that and if it wasn’t because of the crash and then thanks to you following your instinct I’d never have known. I would have gone to my grave not realising I was a father. This changes everything.’
‘Does it?’ Helena asked fearfully, as she realised the magnitude of what she had done. She hadn’t expected him to react this way; she had expected shock yes, perhaps anger too but he almost seemed grateful for her deception. The repercussions were rippling out like shockwaves and it was unbearable to know it was all because of her.
‘What should I do now?’ James asked, running a hand through his wavy hair that was falling over his eyes.
Her breathing snagged. ‘Well, do you have to do anything? I think you need to take some time to think about this properly.’ Helena was already regretting her role in all of this.
‘I can’t just do nothing!’ he spluttered. ‘There’s a part of me out there – I have a chance to be a father – I’ve already missed out on three years of being her dad, I don’t want to miss any more.’
‘Think of Aidan,’ she pleaded. She hadn’t expected such urgency from James. He seemed determined to plough ahead without thinking about what this would do to everyone.
‘But you know how much I’ve yearned for a child – you too – we could have had one if Rowan hadn’t filled everyone full of lies. There are no winners here. Don’t you see, we’re all victims – Aidan, me – even you. If Rowan had been honest from the start, could you imagine the pain it might have saved us?’
Having Milly in their life might have healed his pain but it wouldn’t have stopped hers, how could it? Milly wasn’t her child. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, her words danced with fear. She thought of Aidan at home trying to hold himself together for the kids’ sake, just about picking himself up again after the blow that life had dealt him and then this happens. This would finish him off completely. It was cruel and it was all her fault.
‘Well what else can we do? We have to tell Aidan.’