But it was as if Natalie didn’t hear a word we’d said. She began to sob, “I’m sorry, Daddy! I never wanted to disappoint you! I’m so sorry!”
“Disappoint me?” Alexander sounded eerily like Edmond. It was strange how he could be so like his father sometimes. Oliver could never quite climb to that same level of rigidity. He always fell short and went soft when it came to the children, but Alexander could turn purple as eggplant and shout until people scattered in all directions. “You came home, Natalie. How could that disappoint me?” He could have taken a less hostile tone, but I think we all acknowledged his effort. “I’m not disappointed in you! I’m bloody disappointed in that piece of…”
“She doesn’t need to hear that either!” Lucy interrupted.
Alexander clenched his teeth and looked over at his brother.
Oliver said nothing. He sat in his chair stone faced and locked eyes with his twin brother. He flicked a glance at Nattie and returned his stare to Alex. He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.
“Natalie, you are my daughter,” Alexander moved to his child. He knelt before her and took her face in his hands, “I love you more than my own life, Muffin. I really, truly am not angry with you. I am not at all disappointed in you. I love you and I love your baby. And whatever it takes, we will see you through this. Yeah?”
Natalie fell into her daddy’s arms, “I love you, too, Daddy. I just want you to be happy and excited for me! I want this baby! I really do! I’ve wanted a baby for a long time!”
“I am happy for you.” He didn’t sound incredibly sincere.
“Your dad’s in shock,” Oliver explained, trying to cover for his brother’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, “Give him a minute. Alex, come in the kitchen with me. Let the women talk about woman things.”
The two of them disappeared into the kitchen and exchanged words in harsh whispers while Lucy and I tended to Nattie. We got her calmed down enough to find that she was actually was pleased about her pregnancy, she was just a little shocked in the beginning and now was very afraid of the unknown. She needed us to do for her what we had always done for her. That was to try our best to understand, to protect her, and to love her without condition. Those were all things I had no doubt we’d be able to live up to. And the baby…well, that little muffin was just a bonus.
When the twins tried to walk out the front door by themselves, however, Lucy had the good sense to break up the dangerous duo.
“Oh no, you two! Don’t even think it!” She ran to the door and grabbed her husband by the sleeve, “If you think you’ll be slipping off, planning a trip to France you’ve got news coming to you!”
“Lucy’s telling the truth!” I called from my spot at Natalie’s side on the couch, “The two of you sharing ideas on how to make what’s wrong right is the exact opposite of what Nattie needs!”
“Let go of me!” Alex irritably yanked his arm away from his wife.
“Nattie needs her family now,” Lucy puffed up to Alexander. She didn’t stand even to his shoulder, but she gave the impression that if he didn’t listen she’d crush him with one hand, “She needs her father and her uncle here and not rotting in prison for killing the man she was foolish enough to love! We’ve all done that and you did it once, too, Alex! We’ve all loved a fool and been made a fool of for it! You had children on your own, too, if you remember, when your wife walked away from the three of you! How much better would it have been if Silvia had killed Melissa and been off in jail? And I know she wanted to, she told me so! No, Nattie’s got a lot to get through and I’ll not have the two of you adding more pain to her plate!”
Those two men could look amazingly innocent at times.
“We weren’t up to anything,” Oliver lied. “We were just going to the pub for a pint.”
“Give us some credit!” Alexander chimed in. “A good stiff drink would calm us down!”
“Lying to cover each other’s backs,” I shook my head, “Some old habits never die!”
“You must know we’re on to you by now,” Lucy told them and Natalie laughed out loud.
Our little Nattie’s original thought was that she wanted to live with Oliver and I in the wood. In the end, she did the best thing and moved in with her parents. They saw her through her pregnancy and six months later she had herself a wee baby girl she called Maria.
When Maria was eight months old, Natalie opened her own seamstress shop in Welshpool. A young real estate agent named Mickey De Long wandered in with a tear in his trousers. As she mended them, the two struck up a conversation. He asked her out for coffee and she declined. That afternoon after his office, which was just around the corner, had closed, Mickey appeared in her doorway holding two coffees and two pasties. Natalie said his smile was so silly and so sincere she had to invite him to sit.
Mickey wasn’t rich and he wasn’t immensely handsome, but he was clever and funny and he treated Nattie like a precious gem. Best of all, he fell in love with little Maria as quickly as he had Nattie. They became a couple and saw each other regularly for two years. He asked her to marry him on least ten occasions that I was aware of.
“I want us to be a family!” He told my niece over and over, “Please, consider me, Natalie! I love you both with all my heart!”
Nattie, however, had been hurt deeply by Maria’s father, and was not interested in having her heart shattered and her life turned upside down ever again. This was terribly frustrating for Mickey, who, having never been destroyed himself, could not understand why she wouldn’t move forward with the relationship.
“Oh, Daddy,” She sobbed as the three of us sat by the pond one autumn afternoon after she and Mickey had had a spat about her indecision, “I don’t know what to do!”
“He loves you,” Alexander told her softly, “What else do you want?”
“Nothing! He’s my best friend!” She told him. “I love him, too!”
“Well, that makes it even better,” I rubbed her back.
“I’m so afraid, though! I’m so afraid everything will change!”
Alexander looked at her slowly, “So what if everything changes?” His dark eyes searched her face, “Are things so fantastic now? You living alone with Maria in a one bedroom flat over a seamstress shop?” He smiled softly as he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her against his side, “Natalie, my love, listen to me. I’d have gone and found you a prince. I’d have plucked him straight out of a faerie story. I would have! And I have this feeling that if I had, he might have been a lot like Mickey.” He paused, “Oh, shut up, Silvia! Stop your laughing and stop looking at me like that! I’m about as romantic as that chair you’re sitting on, but I have eyes! That man loves our Nattie and he loves her daughter. You can’t ask for much more. And you, Nattie, you keep pulling him in and pushing him away. It’s cruel. He won’t wait forever.”
Funny, I thought, he’d done the same thing to Lucy until he’d figured it out, but I didn’t say a word since he’d told me not to. I didn’t want to ruin a rare and perfect moment when Alexander had said the right thing.
“I don’t mean to be cruel, but I’m scared, Daddy.”
“Well, that’s normal. I’d worry if you weren’t. But if you don’t get past it and take the chance, I’ll worry even more. You deserve to be happy. I see he makes you happy when you let him. It’s all I want for you and Maria to be happy.”
She looked at me with wide blue eyes. “What do you see, Sil?”
“I see that your heart has wings,” I told her, “Set it free and see where it takes you.”
Mickey proposed once again to Natalie on Valentine’s Day that same year. Without hesitation, she accepted and they were married the following year. Natalie wore my mother’s wedding dress as Caro and Lucy had before her. Four years later they had a baby girl together they called Kaleigh. Mickey and Natalie still live happily today, together in a little stone cottage on the outskirts of Cardiff.
Our Gryffin did finally marry his Lakshmi in the summer of the year he turned twenty-seven. He called once he’d gotten back to Edinburgh, so excited you’d have thought that he’d just met and fallen in love with her.