Page 61 of A Diamond Deal
‘You thought if you told me…I’d die?’
He looked at her for a tense, silent minute. ‘What worried you about telling your mother the truth?’
‘I wasn’t worried the truth wouldkillher.’
‘But you were,’ he rejected. ‘Not about causing her physical death,’ he conceded. ‘But the death of everything you were clinging to by not revealing your father’s secret. You were scared, Poppy. Scared the truth would hurt all those you cared for.’
Her heart stuttered.
Washescared?
‘Youwereworried,’ he continued. ‘Worried if you revealed it, the world you were trying to hold together would crumble. So you held it together any way you could.’
The little girl inside Poppy who had wanted to tell her secret to someone, so she wouldn’t be alone.
He understood why she’d done what she’d done. However selfish her choices had been, he didn’t diminish the difficulty of those choices. But it didn’t explain his.
‘But you weren’t close to your dad,’ she countered. ‘I certainly wasn’t. His death, it would have changed…nothing.’ She sucked in a loud, shuddering breath. ‘I’m sorry, that sounds so horrible. He was your dad, but he wasn’t. Not in any way that meant anything, Konstantinos. Not in a way that would have affected us.’
‘I was worried, for you. So much death, Poppy. It had surrounded us. The threat of it. And then the reality of it,’ he admitted, and his emotive honesty, it rounded her eyes. Lowered her jaw.
Hewasscared.
‘I didn’t have a close bond with…him, but you were sick—fragile. I wasn’t prepared to risk another death—the proximity to it—would have broken you.’
‘You think I’m breakable?’ she whispered.
‘Not when we met,’ he replied. ‘But you changed…After…’ His neck corded. ‘I saw your fragility then.’
‘I was grieving.’ A soundless sob clung to the inside of her throat. ‘It would have changed you, too, if you’d accepted Isaak was part of our lives.’
‘He wasn’t. There was nothing to accept,’ he said again as if it was a mantra. A coping mechanism to trick his brain to respond to the repeated statement. As if he was making himself believe it was true. As if Isaak’s short time in their lives hadn’t affected them.
It had.
Her chest burned. ‘How can you be so…cold?’
His jaw ticked. ‘He was gone, Poppy.’
Poppy stared at him. His eyes not vacant, but haunted. Was he haunted by their son, too? The what-ifs and maybes of what could have been? Secretly, beneath his public and personal persona, did he hurt too? Hadshemissed the signs? Her brow furrowed. There had been no signs. A shadowed look meant nothing.Did it?
‘You just carried on as if life was normal. As if nothing had changed,’ she said prompting him to change his mantra. Prompting him to be honest.
‘Nothinghadchanged, but you refused to move on from a situation that didn’t exist any more,’ he dismissed, as if her grief had been nothing. But it had been everything. Grief had riddled her bones, and yet he…
He was pure stone. Impenetrable.Immovable.
‘How can you sit there talking about our son—Isaak—as if he didn’t change everything? As if he didn’t change us?’
His shoulders rose. Exposing the hard lines of him. His unbreakable body. Not an ounce of fat. Just muscle and sinew. Strong.Powerful.
She wasn’t like him. Her body was soft, and she was all too aware of that softness now. The juxtaposition of her body—her internal self—compared to his.
‘My mother’s death broke me,’ he confessed. ‘Inside I was a mess. My father didn’t let the mess spill out. He made me keep it hidden. My grief. He thoughtthatwould make me strong. And he was right. If I hadn’t panicked when my mother walked into the sea—I could have saved her. If I didn’t love her, I would not have gone into the water after her. If I had kept my emotions—my feelings—out of the situation I could have saved her. I had to be strong when he died. I am strong, Poppy, because I do not feel. I do not love. Because when life hurts—I know I can be strong for you. I was strong when Isaak died, because you couldn’t be. Becauseyoufelt too much,’ he said. ‘I did my duty. I did it all becauseyoucouldn’t,’ he continued. ‘You were just like my mother, and I… I needed to protect you as I hadn’t protectedher.’
Her eyes rounded. ‘What?’
‘My mother, she was always so sad. Sad about…everything. Her mental health…her mind…it was broken. She didn’t function. She couldn’t care for herself. She could not brush her hair. I brushed it. She would not eat. I fed her. And you…seeing you so broken, Poppy. I wouldn’t let you disappear completely as she did.’
