Page 62 of A Diamond Deal
She shifted, brought her bottom to the edge of the cushion and glared at him. ‘I wasn’t broken, Konstantinos. I was depressed. A medical condition I got help for. Help I no longer need.’
‘But you did need it.HelpI couldn’t give you.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. She wasn’t ashamed of the deep depression she’d fallen into. ‘But I also needed you to be there forme, and you put me in another bed—on the other side of the monastery. You left me alone, Konstantinos.’
His gaze flicked to hers and held. ‘You pushed me away before the pregnancy was even deemed a risk.’
‘We both struggled with the news of the pregnancy, Konstantinos,’ she admitted. ‘I’m aware of the gulf between us… It started then, but it came from you, too. You distanced yourself fromme.’
And it had started the day she’d told him about Isaak.
Three times she’d taken the pregnancy test before she’d told him. She’d watched the pink lines appear, and turn from a faint pink to an almost vivid red. And those red lines had slashed through the foundations of their relationship. Torn them in two, until they had stood alone, so far apart from each other, and from what they had been.
Friends.
She’d started to prep for Isaak’s arrival—rounding corners, placing guards in front of marble fireplaces.
He’d watched her planning and executing changes to the monastery with narrowed eyes.
He’d stopped coming to bed with her growing bump.
He’d stopped talking to her.
He’d stopped wantingher.
Their friendship had failed because it was only based on the good times. It wasn’t a friendship at all if it couldn’t hold up with the strain of reality, she realised.
‘I was there for you,’ he continued, ‘in the only way I could be useful. Emotions…they only confuse things. Make people irrational. My mother… I didn’t know it when I was a child. I thought it was just…her. But she was depressed.Sick.My presence didn’t help her. She needed a doctor. She needed more than me.’
‘That’s how you knewIneeded help?’ she asked. She’d thought it was just grief that kept her in bed, or staring unseeing out of the window. It had been Konstantinos who had called the doctor.
‘I recognised the signs.’ His chest lifted with a sharp intake of breath. ‘But I did not abandon you,’ he rejected. ‘I employed people. Everyone you needed. You were never alone. All the help you required was at your disposal.’
Her bottom lip trembled. ‘I needed…you,’ she confessed, because she had. Despite their rules. No emotions. No love…
‘You didn’t want me close. You wanted to focus on the baby. I provided everything for you to do it safely. And then when he was gone you were different, and I didn’t know how to help you. Other than to be strong for you.’
‘I couldn’t tell you how I felt because you didn’t want to hear it. You never did, and I didn’t know how to tell you I was lonely. So lonely with you standing right beside me,’ she admitted raggedly.
Konstantinos radiated tension. Every line of his body a tightly coiled spring.
‘I wasn’t what you needed to recover. I employed people,’ he continued. ‘People who could help bring you back. People who hadn’t been called for my mother.Theyhelped you.’
Was that what he’d been afraid of? Had he dealt with his grief through action? Had he buried his loss—his pain—trying to fix her? Had he been afraid that if he’d stopped, he’d crumble?
Action, planning for the birth of her son, it had given her strength.Momentum.Even on bedrest, the planning hadn’t stopped. Her mind had been in action. But when Isaak died…
She’dcrumbled.
‘But when I found out about my father, it wasn’t a decision I took lightly not to tell you.’ His hands clamped together. ‘But you could barely speak,’ he continued thickly. ‘You were barely alive… The past gives us choices, Poppy. We can use what happened to us before—in the past—to make different choices. But if we choose to do things differently, we must respond accordingly. We must demand different outcomes. AndIdemanded it would not be the same with you. It would be different.’
‘Different?’
‘My mother, she committed suicide.’
Her eyes blew wide. She knew that his mother had died. She knew it had just been his father, when Konstantinos was a teen, but she hadn’t knownthat.
‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Her…suicide.’ She shook herself. Tried to clear her mind, focus in on what he was telling her and why. But she couldn’t understand it. All these words he said that had nothing to do withthem. ‘But what does your mother’s death have to do with you not telling me about your dying father?’
