“I need to leave London until the baby is born.”
This time she wasn’t running. She was stepping down, putting others before herself. Though it broke her heart to know she would have to cut herself off from her surrogate family, she knew was she wouldn’t be able to see the Larsens. If they were to tell Richard the truth about the baby, she knew his heart would be torn in two.
Twenty One
April 25th 2012
“Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.” Hanna touched Matty’s tiny palm to hers, the slapping sound of skin on skin making his little eyes light up with delight. She repeated the song, and he squealed happily, nodding his head to encourage her to do it again.
He’d been awake for ten minutes, after a long afternoon nap, and it looked like he was going to make it through until Tom arrived. He’d made Hanna promise to keep his godson up until he got to his Villa in Nice, desperate to see how Matthew had changed in the few months since he’d last seen him.
“Row.” Matty’s vocabulary still consisted of single-word sentences, but each day he understood more. His face became so animated when Hanna asked him to find his shoes and he toddled back with them in his hand, standing proudly on his chubby legs.
Hanna took his hands in hers and began to sing Row your Boat. As always, he held his breath until she got to the bit about crocodiles, and then he would let out an almighty shriek, doubling over with giggles when she put her hands over her ears in an exaggerated fashion, pretending he had deafened her.
Christ, how she loved him. From the moment he was born and placed in her arms, it was like the sun had come out after hiding behind clouds for months. The adoration she felt for him bubbled up inside her, squeezing her heart until it physically hurt. She would move mountains for this boy, slay dragons, battle through the mines of Moria if she had to. Nothing was too good for him.
Hanna had given birth in a hospital just outside Nice. An easy, uncomplicated birth, it was like a herald, welcoming the easiest, happiest child she’d ever had the luck to come across. Not that he didn’t cry—she was used to waking up in the night, finding his pacifier, offering him an extra feed. But even then, she was so conditioned to his needs, that it didn’t seem like
a drag to have to pull herself out of bed. She counted herself way too lucky for that.
She’d tried to push the memory of Richard out of her mind, but he was never far away, always floating on the edge of her thoughts. She’d done the right thing; she really believed that. While Meredith was paralyzed and consigned to a wheelchair, at least Hanna had a beautiful future planned out with her little man, even if he’d never be able to know his father.
Now Matty was nearly eighteen months, no longer a baby. Matthew Richard Vincent was her little man, light brown hair curling over his head, big brown eyes following her whenever she walked around the room. Hanna counted herself lucky that she’d spent nearly every day of the past year and a half with him, working from Tom’s villa, writing Fatal Limits’ biography, as well as writing for Buzz.
She’d adapted Tom’s orangery into an office. Her laptop rested on a vintage, white wooden desk. In the corner—piled high in a garish, plastic cornucopia—stood Matty’s toys. Every half-hour or so, she would take a break, sit with him and build bricks until he pushed them back down. She loved to hear his gurgling guffaws.
“Do you remember Uncle Tom, Matty?” She lifted him onto her lap, burying her face in his soft, downy hair. “He likes to sing to you.”
Matty babbled something unintelligible, and Hanna played their usual game. She pretended to understand what he was saying, talking back to him as if he was just another adult.
“That’s right; he recorded that song for you.”
Dear Matty, released in February 2011, had gone platinum. Everybody thought it was a love song dedicated to a new girlfriend. Only the group and Hanna knew that it was really declaring Tom’s love for his newborn godson. Every time she heard it, the song sent chills down Hanna’s spine.
Matty climbed onto Hanna’s lap, pushing himself up to standing, lacing his fleshy arms around her neck. His wrists still had little rolls that looked like somebody had put elastic bands over his skin. Every day he was getting stronger, slimmer, more like a child. Only the delight of getting to know him better was enough to quell the sadness that her baby was growing up.
A loud three-tone beep from her phone alerted her to an incoming text. Lifting Matty from her lap, she balanced him on her knee, walking over to the corner of the glass room. Her iPhone was still lit up, and she picked it up, scraping her finger across the screen.
Landed in Monte Carlo. Should be there in a couple of hours.
The final leg of Fatal Limits’ world tour had been in Australia, and Tom had taken a couple of weeks off to relax and do some surfing. He’d flown home to London a week earlier, and was planning to join Hanna in Nice for a while. They needed to go through the final proofs of the biography, and hoped to spend some time together since Tom had been away so much after Matty was born.
Hanna had only been back to London a couple of times herself. She still kept her flat there, knowing one day she might want to move home. But at the moment, she was settled in France. Matty loved the gardens of Tom’s villa, and going to the beach. It was an altogether more peaceful way of life.
Plus, she didn’t have to worry about bumping into the Larsens.
Will put the champagne on ice. Fish fingers for tea.
She smiled as she sent him the text. One of his favorite parts of being a godfather was trying Matty’s food. During his whirlwind visits to France between tour dates, he’d enthusiastically feed Matty the frozen, pureed food that Hanna had made. Often he’d eat more than half himself, in his “one for Matty, one for Tom,” routine.
Best make an extra portion. I’m bringing someone with me.
Now, that was intriguing. To the best of her knowledge, Tom was single, although Hanna suspected he had his regular hook-ups in some of the towns he toured. Her hope that he would get together with Ruby seemed to go nowhere, and part of her suspected it was Hanna’s fault. In the carefully drawn lines between herself and the Larsens, Tom had placed himself firmly in Hanna’s camp.
Not that she expected him to choose. She still kept in touch with Ruby and Claire, almost surprised that they accepted her lame-ass excuse for not being able to see them. She’d invented an agreement between herself and the “reclusive singer” she was writing about, saying she couldn’t reveal her whereabouts to family and friends. Perhaps it was Claire’s experience with New York eccentrics that led her to believe anything was possible, or Ruby’s preoccupation with her PhD in Molecular Physics. Either way, it had been embarrassingly easy to cover up Matty’s existence.
THE FRONT DOOR banged, and Matty started babbling, splashing his hands in the bathwater.