The Affair - Danielle Steel Page 0,82

at times that she felt as though aliens had taken over her body. The baby was fighting for space, and finally, three days after her due date, she went into labor. Her mother and Nicolas took her to the hospital. Pascale had insisted she wanted a natural delivery and wasn’t prepared for how painful it was. By the time she couldn’t stand it anymore and wanted drugs, it was too late to have them. She screamed piteously and Nicolas felt sorry for her. They did their best to help her stay calm, and in the end, no matter how she fought it, the baby tore through her and appeared. She lay crying afterwards, and refused to hold him. Nicolas was the first one to hold his son. He was a big, strapping baby with a lusty cry, and he looked just like her. It shocked Nicolas to realize that Pascale’s mother was younger than he was. She had had Pascale at sixteen, and was now a grandmother at thirty-eight.

The oddest thing was that Nicolas was sad not to be able to share this moment with Nadia. The baby hadn’t brought him closer to Pascale. It didn’t create a bond between them, which surprised him. And he felt sorry for the baby. Pascale had no idea how to be a mother, and no desire to learn. And he was a reluctant father. He’d been roped into it, duped by his lust for Pascale, but with no deep feelings for her.

Pascale looked at her son as though he belonged to someone else, and it reminded Nicolas that becoming a parent took more than just giving birth. You had to want to be one, and she didn’t. She had wanted a baby, but had no idea what that meant. She felt separate from the baby, and her mother said she had felt that way too when Pascale was born. They weren’t maternal women, and their children weren’t born from their love for the baby’s father, as his children with Nadia were. Pascale wanted to free herself of the baby and take her body back. It hadn’t been the magical experience she thought it would be. It was long and painful and hard. It was too much for her. All she wanted to do afterwards was sleep, and she refused to nurse him. Her mother helped take care of the baby in the hospital, and Nicolas did too. But it was different from what it had been with Sylvie and Laure. He and Nadia had been so excited to share them. His son had come into the world with a mother who was still a child herself, and a father who felt guilty every time he looked at him. Nicolas had feelings for him, but the baby wasn’t part of Nicolas’s family. He was a separate entity. When Pascale went home to her mother’s house, Nicolas spent a few days with them, feeling like an outsider, and then went back to Paris to his rented apartment. All he wanted to do was get away. He knew he didn’t belong in Brittany with them. He wanted to see his daughters, and to show them photographs of their brother when he saw them. He was sad about the life the baby would live, with Pascale and her mother. Nicolas was going to provide for him and already had, but it took more than money to parent a child, and Nicolas didn’t intend to be a full-time presence in his son’s life. He couldn’t be.

They had posed for photographs Pascale’s mother took, with Nicolas holding the baby, and within days, they appeared in the tabloids. Nicolas was sure that her mother had sold them to the press. He was wearing doctor’s scrubs, and smiling into the camera, as he held his son. The tabloids announced the baby’s birth, and Nicolas hoped that their interest in the baby’s arrival would end there. It provided a conclusion to their love story, and not a fairy-tale ending. They named the baby Benoit, which was the name Pascale had wanted. Nicolas acknowledged him by allowing him to use his last name, and intended to provide for him generously. He had made all the arrangements, and Pascale supported her mother so Benoit would lead a comfortable life. But somehow the infant didn’t seem as much his child as Sylvie and Laure had, because he didn’t love the boy’s mother in the same way. In the end, Nicolas discovered, it did make