All three of them have Alaric’s grey eyes and his dark hair, and that is the whole of what they got from him.
I left that house at nine weeks pregnant and I did not tell him. I was twenty-nine and frightened and I had watched what Rowena Branmoor did to people in rooms with lawyers in them, and I decided that if she knew about a pregnancy she would take it apart.
So I went, and I did not say why, and I have had five years to think about that decision.
I worked. I built a marketing agency out of a rented flat with three cots in the room and I am now one of the larger independents in the country, and I will not be putting the number here.
I rang my assistant on the Tuesday.
“Clear Saturday. And ring the tailor.”
“For what?”
“Three dinner suits. Four-year-olds.”
Saturday was bright and cold.
That estate looked like a magazine. White roses in banks, a quartet by the fountain, four hundred people on the lawn with champagne.
Rowena was on the upper terrace watching the drive, because of course she was.
What came through those gates was three black cars.
The first one stopped at the top of the aisle and about four hundred people turned round.
I got out in green.
