A Price Worth Paying(53)

‘But I should have been there.’

He pulled her closer, his arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘Felipe hates hospitals. It will kill him being away from his vines.’

‘Simone, he’s dying. He’s too sick now to be at home. You can’t look after him. You can’t watch him twenty-four hours a day.’

And she sniffed again and knew that there was nothing he could say or do that would make her feel better. Felipe had needed her and she hadn’t been there.

And where she had been and what she’d been doing—oh God—was Felipe to get his wish for a baby after all? Was that to be yet another price she would pay for her lies?

She buried her face in her hands and cried, ‘I should have been there.’

Felipe’s condition steadily deteriorated after that, the break in his hip ensuring he would stay bed-ridden. Simone spent as much time with him as possible. He had moments of great lucidity, where he would talk about Maria and how they had met and the fiestas where he had courted her.

He had moments of rambling confusion, where he would tumble words in Spanish and Basque and English all together and make no sense at all.

At night Alesander would collect her from the hospital and take her back to the apartment and make sure she ate something before she fell into bed and woke up to do it all over again.

He watched her withdraw into herself, watched the shadows grow under her eyes, watched the haunted look on her features and he marvelled at her strength.

And he ached for her.

God, how he ached for her.

He wanted her so much. He wanted to hold her and hug her and soothe away her pain. He wanted to make love to her and put life and light back into her beautiful blue eyes.

But, true to his word, he did not make a move on her.

He doubted she even noticed, and that made him feel no better.

At night he watched her sleeping, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, her beautiful face at peace for a few short hours until she woke and the pain of grief and imminent loss returned.

‘You don’t have to go in every day,’ he’d said to her after the first week. ‘Have a day to yourself. Relax.’

But she’d shaken her head. ‘I have to go,’ she’d said. ‘I’m all he has. He’s all I have.’

And he’d ached for her that she had lost so much in her short life.

And what she hadn’t lost, he’d taken.

They’d made a deal, he told himself, a contract, and that made him feel no better at all.

‘He’s all I have,’ she’d said.

And it twisted in his gut that he didn’t figure in her deliberations at all. Was there no place for him? Did he mean nothing to her after the months they’d spent together? After the nights when she’d lain so slick with sweat and satisfied in his arms?

Sure, they’d always planned to part and go their separate ways when Felipe died and their contract came to an end. But why should knowing that he meant so little sit so uncomfortably with him?

An ambulance brought Felipe home to die, the two nurses setting up his bed near the window of the cottage where he’d been born so he could look out over the vineyard where he’d lived his entire life. A day, they warned her, she’d have with him. Maybe two at the most.

She spent the first day sitting by his side, talking to him when he was awake enough to listen, about what was going on in the vineyard or about what life was like in Australia. Every now and then she was certain he had taken his last breath, and she would hold her own as he would grow absolutely still, only for the next breath to shudder from the depths of his sunken chest and make her jump. Sometimes his breathing came so fast he could have been running a race. And other times he fidgeted and shifted restlessly, muttering words she couldn’t understand.

On the second day she grew more used to the breathing. Or maybe she just grew used to not knowing which might be his final breath. Still she expected his death to come that day.

On the third day she sat alongside the bed, feeling exhausted. He was eating nothing, drinking less, and still he held on. It was killing her watching him—listening to his stop–start breathing and hearing the bubbling gurgle in his chest. She held his hand, talking to him when it seemed he might be awake, sponging his brow when he seemed upset or agitated.

The fidgeting grew worse. Felipe fidgeted with the blanket again, murmuring words she couldn’t understand. She touched her hand to his to calm him and chided him gently, ‘You’re cold, Abuelo. You should put your hands under the blanket.’