Page 58 of Bound Enemies
As much as I want to, there’s no point castigating myself for what happened four months ago. I’m well aware of how badly my self-control failed. What matters now, though, are the facts and those are that Beatrix is likely pregnant and, while there’s a slight chance that Antonio is the father, the more obvious candidate is myself.
I didn’t use a condom that day at the funeral, too overcome by my own base urges to even think about it. I didn’t even remember not using one, just had that nagging feeling for months that I was missing something.
Turns out, Iwasmissing something and now that lapse of memory has come back to bite me.
A child.Mychild.
Something flexes and shifts inside me in response, something powerful and possessive. The little piece of my father that I’ve never quite managed to get rid of, that yearns and wants and hungers for things I can’t permit myself to have.
I despise that part of myself, andshecalled to it back there at the funeral. She brought it out of me, and I wasn’t strong enough to overcome it. But that won’t happen again. Emotions always come second to my intellect, since emotions are weaknesses, little vulnerabilities that allow all sorts of other, more primitive things to creep in, such as addiction, sexual excess, violence. Those things ruined my parents and I won’t permit them to ruin me.
My intellect, on the other hand, is cool and rational. It favours facts, not instincts, and it is only wrong when the facts are wrong. My intellect has saved me more times than I can count, especially when I was growing up, and it’s certainly more trustworthy than my parents ever were.
After all, one of the many reasons I hated my father was that he had no control over himself. He had a ready temper that he’d lose at the slightest provocation, and base sexual urges that led him into the affairs that so humiliated my mother.
She loved him, that was her problem. She’d always been emotionally fragile, and finding out about his affairs broke her. Some of the blame for that does lie with me, I admit, since I was the one who told her about them, after discovering Antonio with one of his mistresses. She tried to talk to him, but he was already furious with me for what he deemed ‘a betrayal of trust’ in informing her, and threw her out, throwing me out along with her.
I have some regrets about telling her, since her alcohol addiction started not long after their marriage ended. But I was only a child at the time—twelve, if not younger—and I was angry at my father for his betrayal and thought she should know he’d been lying to her. Those regrets are small ones, however, since she’d have found out at some point anyway, and the result would have been the same.
I pace over to the window and stop a moment, staring out at the winding silver strip of the Seine and the spire of Notre Dame.
I could choose to ignore her pregnancy, and tell myself that the child is my father’s rather than mine. Leave her to bring up the baby in the peace of the Veracruz’s Castilian estate. But I know myself. I won’t be able to let this go until I know for sure whose child it is.
The facts need to be ascertained. They’re vital in my work as a scientist. Facts are the building blocks of the universe, they make up the fabric of reality, inexorable as gravity, and more importantly, they don’t lie. People do, though. People do nothing but lie and most especially when it comes to protecting their own interests. And they hate the truth, too. My father, for example, did not like me telling the truth, and the fact that he got rid of me when he got rid of my mother made a lie out of all the words of love he once gave us.
He didn’t love us at all. He didn’t love her and he didn’t love me, and so I can never trust those words ever again. People in general can’t be trusted, and so I put my faith in the facts.
I can’t ignore those facts now. The child will either be mine or be my half-sibling, and I must know which it is in order to make a plan about what to do next.
For that I’ll need a paternity test. My father’s widow won’t like that, especially if she’s trying to hide the pregnancy, which she clearly is, considering she hasn’t told anyone about it. But that’s too bad. I will have to insist.
And if the child is yours?
I stare at my reflection in the glass, trying not to see my father’s features looking back at me. At least my mother’s endless need for attention isn’t visible. There’s too much of both of them in me for comfort, though. It’s why I made the decision early on that I would never have children of my own. I have too many bad genes, too many vulnerabilities to pass on.
Except if this child is mine I’ll need to make a choice about what to do.
I’ve always been a man who takes responsibility for his mistakes. It’s why I took responsibility for my mother’s health, why I look after her even now, since I’m the one who told her about my father’s affairs. And, since I’m the one who made the mistake and forgot the condom, I’ll take responsibility for any child resulting from that mistake.
What that responsibility looks like, I can’t determine as yet. What I do know is that I won’t make any decisions until I know for certain who the father of Beatrix’s child is.
Taking out my phone, I scroll through my list of contacts. I have her number and email address saved after that abortive attempt to convince her that she needed to choose me instead of Antonio. I should have deleted it long ago, but I didn’t. I thought it might come in useful one day, and it looks like today is that day.
You saved it because you couldn’t quite let go of her, could you?
Hardly. I let her go the day she married my father.
Is that why you backed her up against the wall in the church the day of your father’s funeral? Because you’d let her go?
I ignore the whispers in my head, they’re not relevant, and hit the call button instead.
‘Hello?’ she says, answering immediately, and no matter how long it’s been since I heard her husky little voice, the effect it has on me is the same.
Every muscle in my body tenses and all I can think about is that same voice begging me in the church as I pushed inside her, ‘Please…oh, please…’
I grit my teeth, forcing my body’s urges back into the box they came from. ‘Miss Morgan,’ I say, deliberately not using her married name. ‘It appears we need to have a little chat.’
There’s a silence down the other end of the phone.
