Three Wishes(52)

The minute Victor walked in the room, seeing Lily so close and cosy with her lawyer, looking so beautiful, stylish and serene, he’d wanted to tear her head off.

Ten minutes later he’d had the crazy, sudden, unprecedented urge to get down on his knees and beg her forgiveness.

She’d named her child Natasha, for Nathaniel.

She’d named her child after him, Victor, she’d given her baby, Nathaniel’s baby, Victor’s name.

And she’d nearly died doing it.

And after ten minutes more, Victor had been too broken to know what to do and that was a feeling he’d not felt for decades.

He was broken because she was broken. Broken because the bright, vivacious girl who had walked innocently into his home eight years before had been all but destroyed.

That suit she wore was camouflage, making it not so easy to see all that had been the glorious Lily was lost. The longer the attorneys talked the more she retreated, the further she got from them, from anyone and especially from Nate. She was so thin, so pale, she actually looked at the end in physical pain.

All because of Victor’s two, spoiled-rotten, dead-rotten children.

He was to blame for this. Victor.

His past sins had come home to roost.

“Nathaniel, we have to talk,” he tried again.

Nate’s head slowly turned from the window he was staring unseeingly out of and his eyes focussed on Victor. At the look in his son’s eyes, Victor immediately had nothing to say.

Then Nate spoke.

“Eight years,” he said.

Victor closed his eyes in pain.

“They cost us eight years,” Victor heard Nathaniel say.

Victor opened his eyes again. “I’ll take care of Danielle and Jeffrey,” he vowed.

And he most definitely would.

A muscle in Nate’s jaw jumped and he turned his head back to his contemplation of the scenery.

Victor went on. “Son, I swear to you, they’ll wish they were never born.”

And he meant it. They were his children by blood but they were his children no more.

Neither Nate nor Victor for a second questioned that Jeff and Danielle had done exactly what Lily’s attorney had said they’d done. The whole time Laura ranted and raved and Victor cursed and shouted after Lily disappeared, they didn’t say a word.

It wasn’t as if Lily had a great offer to go shopping in Milan that she couldn’t resist and that’s why she left Nate. She was at home in Indiana grieving the loss of both of her parents. Then at twenty-two years of age, grieving, also pregnant, she came back to Nate only to be told he was dead.

And his children knew and neither of them said one single word.

Not only that, they’d participated in this terrible deception. Jeff likely took the note and Danielle…

Victor shook off his thoughts. He’d deal with them later.

“What are you going to do?” Victor asked.

Nate sat silent.

Victor continued. “Nathaniel, you saw her. She’s –”

“I saw her,” Nate bit off, his voice eloquently stating, without a great many words, exactly what he’d seen and exactly how it affected him.

“You have to…” Victor started but didn’t finish. How did one go about piecing together a shattered person?

Victor thought that Nathaniel could do anything he put his mind to doing. He believed this with everything he was.

However, this was going to be his son’s mightiest challenge.

“What are you going to do?” Victor asked again.

Nate took in a deep breath and then slowly let it out.

He turned to Victor and looked him directly in the eyes.

“I’m going to put my family back together.”

* * * * *

Nate stood at the floor to ceiling windows that made up the entire wall to the vast living room in his penthouse apartment.

As he drank from a tumbler that was filled with two cubes of ice and a lot of vodka and smoked what would be one of his final cigarettes (Lily didn’t like his smoking and he was not about to smoke in front of his seven year old daughter), he watched the sun set on London.

Lily had come back to him.

He tried to make this his only thought. Any of the others that were determined to crowd in his head were too painful to bear.

Like her pale, lifeless face, her fidgeting hands, her once-curvaceous, now nearly-too-thin body.

Like the fact that his brother and sister had connived, lied and stole away eight years of their happiness.

Like her horrible voice saying, “Let’s just get this over with.”

Like her haunted look when Nate’s attorney had suggested that the news of her parent’s death would be “entertaining”.

Like her flinching at feeling his hand on her arm.

Like her once expressive eyes now blank and looking through him like he wasn’t there.

Like the fact that he’d purposefully, with great relish, got her pregnant which nearly caused her to die.

Like her telling him, “You told me you’d always take care of me.”

Like the fact that he made promises to her, promises he didn’t keep, promises he didn’t even attempt to keep.

Like her whispering, “You told me you’d never let me go.”

On this final thought, he turned swiftly from the window and threw the tumbler of vodka across the room so savagely his arm was a blur. The tumbler exploded on the wall well across the room, dead centre of an exorbitantly expensive painting.