Three Wishes(44)

Well, she was simply not worth Laura’s regard and she definitely wasn’t worth Laura’s kindness.

Laura started walking again in hopes she’d get away before Lily saw her. She couldn’t abide speaking to her not, she imagined, that Lily would ever approach her if she had a single decent bone in her body.

Then she heard the still familiar voice call, “Tash! Stop dawdling, baby doll.”

Laura’s head came up and then she froze again.

Running toward Lily and the strange genie-man was a little girl.

Nathaniel’s little girl.

Laura knew it immediately. It was stamped all over the child.

The same blue-black hair, the same (even at that distance, Laura could tell, she was Nathaniel’s mother after all) darker than dark eyes, the same bone structure, the same long-legged, long-waisted body, except feminine and in child-like form. Indeed, there was no mistaking it, no denying it; the child was Nathaniel McAllister’s child.

Laura watched in stunned, frozen silence as the little girl ran toward Lily and threw her arms around her mother. Lily bent to kiss the top of her head and was talking to her, smiling down on her. This smile was not tired and drawn. It lit up her face, just like the old Lily.

Laura couldn’t believe it. She didn’t know what to do. She wanted to scream, to run forward and snatch the child from her mother’s arms.

Then Lily straightened from the girl, turning to lead them in the opposite direction and then Lily saw her.

Her pale face, if it could be credited, drained of colour. Her mouth dropped open and she, too, froze.

Moments later, Laura watched, her astonishment deepening, as Lily’s stupor cleared and her face melted into a look of such abandoned happiness, such love that it turned Laura’s stomach.

And Laura looked at Lily with every shred of hatred she had for the woman, turned on her heel and ran.

* * * * *

“My God, Fazire, my God. Did you see the way she looked at me?”

Fazire was levitating. He did this in agitation now, she knew, not just when he was practising or when he wanted to make a point.

He didn’t respond. He couldn’t have, Lily kept talking.

“She saw Tash. She knows. I told you I should have gone to them ages ago. Now it’s too late. Now…”

She stopped talking and started pacing, or more to the point started pacing more frantically.

Lily had been wanting to go to the Roberts’s home for years. Natasha was their grandchild they would want to know she existed. Even if it would be painful after Nate’s death (this, she decided in her fevered imaginings, happened on his motorcycle or in his Maserati, but she didn’t know, never wanted to know).

Something always got in the way. The store, the house, Tash getting sick, Lily having a migraine (they came far more frequently now, stress, the doctor told her), not enough money for the train tickets (there was never enough money), the phones got cut off, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, the car needing fixed (the car always needed fixed).

She should have written but how do you say that in a letter? It was something you had to do in person.

And Lily was so sick at first, the pregnancy had not gone well and by the time she and Fazire decided to cast their lot in Clevedon, she was practically bedridden. By the end of the pregnancy, she was forcefully bedridden. Then the birth had not been good. It took her a year to recuperate. By that time the debts had mounted, the bills were all overdue and she’d nearly asked her last wish of Fazire. But Maxine had saved the day. Maxine and Grammy Sarah’s beautiful limestone house with its Italian marble window sills and its ten acres.

While Lily was ill, she had time to think. She started wondering why Laura and Victor didn’t contact her. Why they let it be Danielle who told her that Nate had died. Why, when Lily knew that they knew she also lost her parents at the same time, had they not come to her knowing the enormity of her loss? Even not knowing about Tash, Lily was absolutely certain that they knew she loved Nate and she’d need to grieve with them when her vital, handsome dream man was swept away. She didn’t understand and thought, maybe, she had misjudged them. In her darkest moments (of which there were many), she realised they had raised Jeffrey and Danielle, perhaps they were just like their two children by blood.

Then time just flew, as time does, and it became too late.

This was the first time Lily had been to London in eight years. Eight years. They had a dingy hotel room in a not-so-good part of town. It was all they could afford.

It didn’t matter; they only had to sleep in it. The rest of the time Lily was supposed to be showing them all her favourite places in London and that included where she and Nate had taken their walk in Hyde Park.

Lily’s daughter knew all about her father.

Every detail Lily could remember, and that was most of them, were told to Tash in the grandest stories Lily had ever created. And as the years slid by, Lily even made up details just to keep Nate alive in some way for their darling daughter.

“I have to go to her,” Lily fretted.

Fazire looked down his nose at her and crossed his arms. He, personally, did not think much of these Roberts people. Every time they looked at his Lily-child, they did it with hate which was precisely why he consistently tried to talk her out of telling them about Tash and would distract her when she got down to the business of writing or phoning them.

If they knew about Tash, he couldn’t imagine what they’d do.