The reason the twins weren’t here must be because Sander had taken them. There could be no other explanation. He must have come back whilst she was asleep and seized his opportunity. He hadn’t wanted to marry her any more than she had wanted to marry him. What he had wanted was the twins. His sons. And now he had them.
Were they already on a plane to the island? His island, where he made the laws and where she would never be able to reach them. He had their passports after all. A legal necessity, he had said, and she had stupidly accepted that.
Shock, grief, fear and anger—she could feel them all, but over and above those feelings was concern for her sons and fury that Sander could have done something so potentially harmful to them.
She could hear a noise: the sound of the main door to the suite opening, followed by the excited babble of two familiar voices.
The twins!
She was on her feet, hardly daring to believe that she wasn’t simply imagining hearing them out of her own need, and then they were there, in the room with her, running towards her and telling her excitedly, ‘Daddy took us to a café for our tea, because you were asleep,’ bringing the smell of cold air in with them.
Dropping onto her knees, Ruby hugged them to her not trusting herself to speak, holding the small wriggling bodies tightly. They were her life, her heart, her everything. She could hardly bear to let them go.
Sander was standing watching her, making her acutely conscious as she struggled to stand up that all that covered her nudity was the towel she had wrapped round her.
Going back to her bedroom, she discarded the towel and grabbed a clean pair of knickers before reaching for her old and worn velour dressing gown. She was too worked up and too anxious to get back to the twins as quickly as she could to care what she looked like or what Sander thought. The fact that he hadn’t taken them as she had initially feared paled into insignificance compared with her realisation that he could have done so. Now that she had had a taste of what it felt like to think she had lost them, she knew more than ever that there was nothing she would not do or sacrifice to keep them with her.
Her hands trembled violently as she tied the belt on her dressing gown. From the sitting room she could hear the sound of cartoon voices from the television, and when she went back in the boys were sitting together, watching a children’s TV programme, whilst Sander was seated at the small desk with his laptop open in front of him.
Neither of them had spoken, but the tension and hostility crackling in the air between them spoke a language they could both hear and understand.
Her headache might have gone, but it had been replaced with an equally sickening sense of guilt, Ruby acknowledged, when she sat down an hour later to read to the boys, now bathed and in bed. She watched them as they fell asleep after their bedtime story. Today something had happened that she had never experienced before. She had slept so deeply that she had not heard anything when Sander returned and took her sons. How could that be? How could she have been so careless of their safety?
She didn’t want to leave them. She wanted to stay here all night with them.
The bedroom door opened. Immediately Ruby stiffened, whispering, ‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve come to say goodnight to my sons.’
‘They’re asleep.’ She got up and walked to the door, intending to go through it and then close it, excluding him, but Sander was holding it and she wa
s the one forced to leave and then watch as he went to kiss their sleeping faces.
Turning on her heel, Ruby headed for her own room. But before she stepped inside it her self-control broke and she whirled round, telling Sander, ‘You had no right to take the boys out without asking me first.’
‘They are my sons. I have every right. And as for telling you—’
Telling her, not asking her. Ruby noted his correction, consumed now by the kind of anger that followed the trauma of terrible shock and fear, which was a form of relief at discovering that the unthinkable hadn’t happened after all.
‘You were asleep.’
‘You could have woken me. You should have woken me. It’s my right as their mother to know where they are.’
‘Your right? What about their rights? What about their right to have a mother who doesn’t put her own needs first? I suppose a woman who goes out at night picking up men needs to sleep during the day. And knowing you as I do, I imagine that is what you do.’
Sickened by what he was implying, Ruby said fiercely, ‘Knowing me? You don’t know me at all. And the unpleasant little scenario you have just outlined has never and would never take place. I have never so much as gone out at night and left the twins, never mind gone out picking up men. The reason I was asleep was because I haven’t been feeling well—not that I expect you to believe me. You’d much rather make up something you can insult me with than listen to the truth.’
‘I’ve had firsthand experience of the truth of what you are.’
Ruby’s face burned. ‘You’re basing your judgement of me on one brief meeting, when I was—’
‘Too drunk to know what you were doing?’
His cynical contempt was too much for Ruby’s composure. For years she had tortured and tormented herself because of what she had done. She didn’t need Sander weighing in to add to that self-punishment and pain. She shook her head in angry denial.
‘Foolish and naive enough to want to create a fairy story out of something and someone belonging in reality to a horror story,’ she said bitterly. Too carried away by the anger bursting past her self-control, she continued, ‘You need not have wasted your contempt on me, because it can’t possibly match the contempt I feel for myself, for deluding myself that you were someone special.’
Ruby felt sick and dizzy. Memories of what they had once shared were rushing in, roaring over her mental barriers and springing into vivid life inside her. She had been such a fool, so willing and eager to go to him, seeking in his arms the security and safety she had lost and thinking in her naivety that she would find them by binding herself to him in the most intimate way there was.