‘From what I’ve seen, Ms Rich is quite capable of helping herself,’ a fierce-looking midwife wearing flashing antlers in honour of the holiday season told him when he was his usual assertive self. ‘She doesn’t need any additional stress now,’ she added, planting herself staunchly between him and the labour room door.
‘I’m not here to give Cassandra stress,’ he insisted, nearly going crazy with the delay as his mind tried to penetrate beyond the firmly closed door to find out what was happening.
The hospital had numerous ways to hold him in check, he now discovered. His passport had to be taken away and verified, and even then he was made to wait until his relationship to Ms Rich could be established with certainty. From the donning of a mask, gown and over-shoes to his entry into a temperature-controlled room where Cassandra was working towards the moment of birth with a stoicism that everyone but him found remarkable, he was out of his comfort zone, tossed headlong into a situation that was completely new—and, he admitted silently, alarming to him. He pushed that aside now he was with Cassandra. His heart gripped tight with all sorts of emotion, concern for her being uppermost amongst them. She looked so young—too young to be going through this—but when she saw him she reached out to him.
‘Marco...you came.’ Her eyes lit up as she held out her hand.
It was that look that stopped him. It held love, trust and gratitude, none of which he deserved, and he couldn’t—mustn’t—encourage it. Love deeply, and it was always stripped away and denied. Hadn’t he learned that by now?
‘Marco?’
She sounded concerned, but then a nurse hustled him out of the way. ‘You can sit over here,’ the nurse told him. ‘Or stand, unless you think you might faint.’
He glared at the nurse. Cassandra defused the situation.
‘Could he hold my hand?’ she asked in that way she had that made everyone warm to her and want to do things for her.
‘Would you like to?’ one of the nurses asked him dubiously, as if this could be in doubt.
He noticed the glances exchanged by the staff. They knew his press. They didn’t think much of him. Why would they when they only had his lurid backstory as depicted by the world’s paparazzi to go on? They thought even less of him now a woman of his acquaintance was in labour.
‘Of course I’d like to—I must,’ he insisted.
He was at Cassandra’s side in a stride. Pain he understood. The need for reassurance he understood. He could also comprehend that a new and frightening experience was better shared. It was the look in Cassandra’s eyes that baffled him. How could she still feel this way about him when he could give her nothing back?
‘What can I do of a practical nature?’ he asked the same fierce-looking midwife, now masked and gowned like him. He felt useless, just standing by the bed.
‘Be there for her. That’s all you have to do. If she asks you to leave, you go. If we ask you to leave, you go faster. Understood?’
He ground his jaw and agreed.
The quiet efficiency of the staff impressed him. An aura of purposeful calm prevailed, and it was not allowed to be disturbed. Cassandra was the centre of everyone’s attention, as she should be, and she was everything he might have expected of her. She made barely a sound as she clung to his hand, then his wrist, and finally his arm with a ferocity of which he would not have believed her capable. He was drawn in. She drew him in so that he was part of her experience—a very small part, admittedly, but a necessary one, her unflinching stare told him.
And then a baby cried.
Lustily, he noted with relief.
‘Your son,’ the midwife said, bypassing him to put the child in Cassandra’s arms.
Cassandra had a son.
Her face was spellbound as she stared down at the tiny, wrinkled bundle in her arms.
‘Oh, Marco...’
She couldn’t bear to rip her enraptured gaze away from her baby’s face. She was mapping every feature in the way that only a mother could, he guessed from his scant knowledge of what a mother might do. His brain was still frantically trying to patch together all the new information. The expression on Cassandra’s face was new to him. This situation was new to him. Love, raw and new, confronted him. There was no escaping it. He was consumed by it. He had no response ready, and he doubted that one could be prepared in advance.
‘What do you think of him?’ Cassandra asked him, her gaze still fixed on her baby.
‘He seems healthy,’ he observed, trying not to look too closely. ‘Sturdy,’ he amended as one tiny arm flailed as if the child would like to catch him with a blow.