Hanna leaned in to her, urgency in the movements. ‘Bell, it was never my intention to drag you into this. I would never knowingly put you in a position where you had to lie for me, or felt like you had to choose.’ Hanna glanced at her askance. ‘You must think I’m a terrible person.’
‘Of course I don’t. I . . . I don’t know what I’d do if I was in your shoes.’
‘I love Max. You have to believe that.’
Bell looked sidelong at her, sensing a ‘but’.
Hanna dropped her head, nodding ashamedly. ‘But, yes, I love Emil too. As much as I wish I didn’t. As much as he doesn’t deserve it after the things he’s said and done.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe part of it is guilt, I don’t know.’
Bell looked at her. ‘Why would you feel guilty? He’s treated you appallingly.’
‘But he doesn’t deserve what’s happened to him. No one does. No matter how vile his behaviour, he’s still lost more and suffered more than the rest of us put together. I can understand his rage, even if I don’t like it. He’s a desperate man.’
They watched the girls together in pensive silence, both knowing there was no easy answer, no compromise, no kind solution to their problem. Someone had to lose. Someone had to get hurt.
‘You know you will have to choose, though,’ Bell murmured. ‘Sooner or later. Everyone’s suffering this way.’
‘I know, but how?’ Hanna asked, her voice a desperate whisper. ‘How do I choose between the father of my son and the father of my daughters?’
Again, it was a question with no answer. ‘Does Max know?’ Bell asked instead, keeping her voice down, glancing back to check he was still in the kitchen. She could see him through the glass door, scrubbing the perfectly clean worktop, his muscles flexed and tense.
‘He hasn’t said anything outright, but I think . . . I think he suspects there’s something.’ She gave an unhappy laugh, rubbing her face in her hands. ‘He’s feared it from the first day.’
Bell well remembered his haunted look when she’d come into the kitchen that early winter’s morning. He had looked . . . not defeated, but somehow resigned to that eventuality, as though he expected to always lose out to Emil.
‘But it wasn’t from the first day, was it?’ Bell hardly dared ask, a quaver in her voice. She didn’t want to hear the details and yet, perversely, it was all she wanted to know. Whatever else had happened between her and Emil, there had been no lies between them; he had never deceived her. He had been upfront and direct about his plans to win his family back from the start.
‘God, no. It’s been a long, slippery slope.’ Hanna sighed and gave a weary shrug, looking worn down. ‘I tried hard, so hard, to keep the boundaries clear, but . . . there’s history there, you know? And as Linus’s father, we had to create some sort of new partnership together; I couldn’t cut him out of our lives . . . I just never realized how difficult it would be – to be together but apart.’
‘I’m sure,’ Bell murmured. Together but apart was precisely what she’d had to navigate with Emil for the last two weeks, too. ‘You took vows together, and he’s still your husband at the end of the day.’
‘He is, yes,’ Hanna said slowly. ‘But he’s not the man I married, if that makes any sense.’
Bell glanced at her, confused.
‘The accident has changed him . . . The Emil I married was . . . different. Repressed, I guess you’d say.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘His family are so prominent, their views can change the stock market fortunes of companies, alter careers of politicians . . . so he learned never to speak his mind, never to really show how he was feeling – which didn’t always make him the world’s best husband.’ She sighed. ‘But now, he’s different. He’s more quick-tempered, volatile . . .’
‘And that worries you?’
‘If I’m being honest . . . it sort of excites me,’ Hanna whispered confidingly, eyes shining with her guilty admission. ‘He’s passionate now. Unpredictable. If anything could ever be said to be a positive outcome of a traumatic brain injury – it’s that he has no filter.’
‘That’s not necessarily a good thing,’ Bell murmured, having been on the wrong end of it herself. Opportunity. Lust. Relief . . .