Page 95 of The Rest is History
My niece rewards her with a face-splitting smile. ‘Da.’ She touches Elodie’s face wonderingly.
‘How old are you?’ Elodie asks her.
‘Da.’
‘She turned one last month,’ my brother supplies. ‘Emmy may or may not have gone totally over the top. We even had alpacas in the garden, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Alpacas aren’t OTT in the slightest,’ Emmy says, waving a hand dismissively, and Jack sniggers.
Elodie gasps theatrically and lets Aurelia grab her finger. ‘Did you? Alpacas? Aren’t you a lucky girl? I bet you had so much fun!’
‘Mmph.’ My niece blows some spit bubbles, and Elodie laughs.
‘Oh, isn’t that delightful?’ She turns to me, her face rapt. ‘Isn’t she the cutest baby ever?’
I look down at her. She’s bouncing my niece in her arms like a pro. I suppose she got some good practice in when Olive was a baby. She’s totally absorbed. Utterly smitten. Her eyes are shining. It’s painfully clear how much pure joy merely cuddling Aurelia is bringing her.
And I feel sick to my stomach.
I swallow and wrap an arm around her, pressing a kiss to her temple and closing my eyes for a second so I can drink in her scent without distraction. My niece is cooing happily and experimenting with her limited repertoire of noises.
‘Cutest baby on the planet,’ I tell her.
My gaze flicks away from the madonna and child next to me to the others. Em and Stace are cooing over Elodie and Aurelia. But my brother is watching me, and I see in his eyes that he knows exactly what’s going through my mind. I see my own pain reflected there. He swallows hard, holding eye contact, before raising his eyebrows in a question.
Have you told her?
I give him the briefest, tightest shake of my head.
There are kids everywhere, any adult who isn’t driving is a few glasses of rosé down, and the mood is perfect for a warm Sunday evening, but I’m struggling to achieve the necessary levity. On the surface, everything is perfect. My family is swarming around my girlfriend like moths to a flame. She’s been a huge hit. Obviously.
And yet, the unrest that’s sat deep within me since I started messing around with her is coiling into something more sinister. More potent. Something that refuses to be ignored.
I knew this was coming, for fuck’s sake.
I’ve known it since the second I saw her. It’s the singular reason I put my walls up. Stayed away from her for so long. And nothing has changed, but in a haze of love and carnal insanity, I’ve been ignoring it. It was never going away, and now I have to deal with it.
I’ve always said it. Elodie Peach is not the type of woman you do casual with. She’s a woman upon whose mercy you throw yourself as you wrestle a ring onto her finger—preferably one a size too small, so she can’t take it off. She’s the woman who would make me happy for the rest of my life.
But not at her own expense.
I could never do that to her.Willnever do that to her. And seeing her here, surrounded by my family, slams that right home to me, in such a brutal way that even my thick skull can’t fail to compute it.
I want Elodie to have everything her heart desires. She’s such a good, true person. She deserves the world.
It’s clear from watching her today that she’ll make an amazing mother. That she’ll want to have children of her own.
And while I would lay down my life for her, the one thing I cannot do is give her children.
The tests six years ago irrefutably robbed me of any hope on that front.
I sit and jiggle my three-year-old nephew Bertie on my knee as the others chat around me. The plates piled in the middle of the table are empty, and our stomachs are full. Bizarrely, even though Bertie’s the only one of Jack’s kids who’s not my flesh and blood, it’s he who holds the most special place in my heart. I suppose I was younger when Jack and Stace were popping out kids left, right, and centre. Younger and more gung ho.
As they bred, I looked on with amusement and affection and that entitled assumption that Adeline and I could do the same when we felt ready. Like Jack and Stace, we’d been together since uni, and the future felt long and pregnant with potential.
Bertie, on the other hand, arrived three years after our divorce. I’ll be honest. My brother’s attitude to Emmy’s pregnancy was difficult for me to handle. They had a whirlwind romance before he found out she was already pregnant with another guy’s baby, and he hit the fucking roof. It took him a while to get his shit together and work out that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth—and by gift horse, I mean a stunning woman who loves you, and her unborn child.
My brother had kids coming out of his ears, and my choice back then was simple. Resent him for it, and let that resentment eat away at me, or see my nieces and nephews for what theywere: a gift. A chance to have children in my life, even if not on the terms I would have hoped for.
