Three Wishes(48)

She didn’t touch it.

Alistair had arranged for the informal meeting to happen at his offices in Bristol. He’d been pleased to win that small battle but Lily didn’t care, though she was happy not to have the added expense of going to London.

She’d go to Sri Lanka if it meant keeping Tash.

Lily had dressed carefully in an outfit that Maxine bought her. Maxine had done a great deal in the eight years that had passed. She’d given Lily back her job. She’d taken care of Lily when she was recuperating after Tash’s birth. She held Lily’s hair back when she vomited in the throes of one of her excruciating migraines.

Lily owed Maxine a lot and more than just her lovely outfit.

It was a tan suit with a straight skirt that hit her just above the knees and had a deep slit up the back and a safari jacket belted at the waist. She wore a scarf pattered in tan and shocking orange jauntily tied at her throat (tied by Maxine who did everything jauntily). This was accompanied by a pair of tan, high-heeled pumps with a shock of patent-leather orange at the pointed toe.

“You’ll knock ‘em dead,” Maxine had told her upon looking at Lily in her suit.

Lily was too scared to care who she knocked. Fear was the only emotion she had anymore, fear and humiliation. The rest was just… dead. As dead as she thought Nate was. As dead as everything she ever felt for him.

And she had felt everything for him.

“Can we begin?” one of Nate’s solicitors was asking and Lily, who had been staring at her hands, felt her head come up as if it had a mind of its own (which, of course, it did, but normally Lily controlled it, now nearly everything in her life was out of her control).

She saw Nate coolly staring at her from across the table, again as if she was an insect and he was biologist getting ready to pin her to a board.

Strangely she had no reaction to this. She was beyond reacting.

He hadn’t said a word to her, not a single word.

This wasn’t unusual for Nate but perhaps he could have at least said a single word. Though, from the look in his eyes, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what that word might be.

Lily’s eyes swept down the table. His two solicitors sat side-by-side. Alistair said this was all just show but the fact that Lily could barely afford one and Nate could blithely bring two scared her socks off. Victor sat to Nate’s left and glowered at her with a hatred that eclipsed that of Danielle and even Laura who Lily would never have thought had it in her but apparently she did.

Lily decided to look back down at her hands. She figured that was her safest line of sight at the present moment.

“Firstly, I’d like to say thank you for accepting this informal meeting. We’re here to discuss a visitation schedule for Natasha Roberts McAllister Jacobs,” Alistair announced somewhat grandly.

At Tash’s full name being read out something immediately shifted in the room. Lily felt it but was too numb to register it. Instead, she lifted her head to watch Alistair as he spoke.

“We’re not here to discuss visitation. We’re here to discuss custody. As you know, Mr. McAllister wants full custody of the child,” Nate’s solicitor pointed out.

“Obviously my client isn’t warming to that idea,” Alistair retorted and Lily didn’t move her eyes from him.

“For seven years, since the girl’s birth, Ms. Jacobs kept knowledge of the child from that child’s father. My client obviously doesn’t warm to that idea,” Nate’s solicitor returned.

“She could hardly tell him she’d given birth when she thought he was dead,” Alistair parried swiftly.

Another shift came about the room and Lily’s head dropped again to stare at her manicure. She needed one, she decided distractedly. Of course she could never afford one but that didn’t change the fact that she needed one.

“That’s preposterous. It’s quite apparent that Mr. McAllister is alive as he’s sitting at this very table,” Nate’s solicitor shot back.

Alistair retorted smoothly and immediately, “Yes, of course, she knows that now but she only discovered that fact a few days ago.”

“This is an interesting defence,” Nate’s other lawyer decided at this point to throw in his lot and he did so sarcastically.

“I agree. It is most interesting,” Alistair commented absently all the while sorting through his papers lying on the table as if trying to find something. “Let me see. Yes,” his head came up, “here it is,” he said even though he wasn’t looking at a single sheet of paper.

Then he launched into “the plan”.

“Our story begins eight years ago when Ms. Jacobs was living in London with Mr. McAllister. However, she had to leave the country urgently due to a family emergency.”

“Considering the ‘he-was-dead’ defence, I’m sure this will be hugely entertaining.” Lily didn’t see it but she heard the scoffing behind Nate’s attorney’s tone, that would be attorney number two or Sarcastic Attorney. Her startled eyes moved to the man who, she noted distractedly, was staring at her with extreme distaste.

“Well, I’m not sure one would describe losing both of one’s parents in a plane crash as ‘entertaining’,” Alistair noted blandly.

It was at this comment that the room didn’t shift, it tilted on its axis and the tilt was caused by Nate. Lily felt it, felt it so surely that her eyes slid to him of their own accord.