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and baffled by Brian’s illegitimate child, and their daughter’s acceptance of her. Yet, what could she do? The child existed.
Bev loved her parents. A part of her would always desperately want their approval. But she loved Brian more, so much more that it was sometimes terrifying. And the child was his. Whatever she had wanted, whatever her plans had been, that meant the child was now hers as well.
It was difficult to look at Emma and not feel something. She wasn’t a child who faded into the woodwork no matter how quiet and unobtrusive she tried to be. It was her looks, certainly. Those same elegantly angelic looks of her father. More, it was that sense of innocence, an innocence that was in itself a miracle considering how the child had lived the first three years of her life. An innocence, and an acceptance, Bev thought. She knew if she walked into the room right now, shouting, slapping, Emma would tolerate the abuse with barely a whimper. That struck Bev as more tragic than the miserable poverty she’d been saved from.

Brian’s child. Instinctively Bev laid a hand over the life she carried. She’d wanted so desperately to give Brian his first child. That wasn’t to be. Yet every time she felt resentment, she had only to look at Emma for it to fade. How could she resent someone so utterly vulnerable? Still she couldn’t bring herself to love, not as unquestioningly, as automatically, as Brian loved.
She didn’t want to love, Bev admitted. This was another woman’s child, a link that would forever remind her of Brian’s intimacy with someone else. Five years ago or ten, it didn’t matter. As long as there was Emma, Jane would be a part of their lives.
Brian had been the first man she’d slept with, and though she had known when they’d become involved that there had been others for him, it had been easy to block it out, to tell herself that their coming together had been an initiation for them both.
Dammit, why had he had to leave now, when everything was in upheaval? There was this child slipping around the house like a shadow. There were workmen hammering and sawing hour after hour. And there was the press. It was as ugly as Brian had warned her it would be, with headlines screaming his name, and hers, and Jane’s. How she hated, how she detested, seeing her picture and Jane’s on the same page of a paper. How she loathed those nasty, gloating little stories about new wives and old lovers.
It didn’t fade quickly, as she had prayed it would. There was speculation and questions about the most personal areas of her life. She was Mrs. Brian McAvoy now, and public property. She had told herself countless times that because marrying Brian was what she wanted most, she would be able to tolerate the public dissections, the lack of freedom, the smirking headlines.
And she would. Somehow. But when he was away like this, thousands of miles away, she wondered how she could bear a lifetime of being photographed and hounded, of running away from microphones, of wearing wigs and sunglasses to do something as ordinary as buy shoes. She wondered if Brian would ever understand how humiliating it was for her to see something as intimate as her pregnancy splashed in headlines for strangers to read over their morning tea.
She couldn’t laugh at the stories when he wasn’t with her, and she couldn’t ignore them. So she rarely left the house when he was gone. In less than two weeks, the home she had envisioned for them with its cozy rooms and sunny windows had become a prison. One she shared with Brian’s child.
But she was enough her parents’ daughter to know her duty, and to execute it unwaveringly.

“Emma.” Bev fixed a bright smile on her face as Emma turned. “I thought you might be ready for your tea.”
There was nothing Emma recognized quicker or distrusted more than a fake smile. “I’m not hungry,” she said and gripped Charlie tighter.
“I guess I’m not, either.” If they were stuck there