Still suspicious of a trick, he resolved not to play into her hands. He’d give her no sympathy. He’d be hard and bitter.
‘Talk, then,’ he said.
There was a pause. She seemed to be seeking a way to begin.
‘It’s been ten years,’ she said. ‘A lot’s happened in that time. But a lot of things stayed . . . unresolved.’
‘What does it matter?’ Frey replied. ‘The past is the past. It’s gone.’
‘It’s not gone,’ she said. ‘It never goes.’ She turned away from the window and faced him across her desk. ‘I wish I had your talent, Darian. I wish I could walk away from something or someone, and it would be as if they never existed. To lock a piece of my life away in a trunk, never to be opened.’
‘It’s a gift,’ he replied. He wasn’t about to explain himself to her.
‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked.
The question took him by surprise. There was a pleading edge to it. He hadn’t expected anything like this when he was led into the room. She was vulnerable, strengthless, unable to defend herself. He found himself becoming disgusted with her. Where was the woman he’d loved, or even the woman he’d hated? This desperation was pitiable.
Why had he left her? The memories seemed distant now: it was hard to summon up the feelings he’d felt then. They’d been tinted by ten years of scorn. Yet he did remember some things. Thoughts rather than emotions. The internal dialogues he had with himself during the long hours alone, flying haulage for her father’s company.
In the early months, he’d believed they’d be together for ever. He told himself he’d found a woman for the rest of his life. He couldn’t conceive of meeting someone more wonderful than she was, and he wasn’t tempted to try.
But it was one thing to daydream such notions and quite another to be faced with putting them into practice. When she began to talk of engagement, with a straightforwardness that he’d previously found charming, he began to idolise her a little less. His patience became short. No longer could he endlessly indulge her flights of fancy. His smile became fixed as she played her girlish games with him. Her jokes all seemed to go on too long. He found himself wishing she’d just be sensible.
At nineteen, he was still young. He didn’t make the connection between his sudden moodiness and irritability and the impending threat of marriage. He told himself he wanted to marry her. It would be stupid not to, after all. Hadn’t he decided she was the one for him?
But the more he snapped at her, the more demanding she became. Tired of waiting—or perhaps afraid to wait too long—she asked him to marry her. He agreed, and secretly resented her for a long time afterwards. How could she put him in that position? To choose between marrying her, which he didn’t want, or destroying her, which he wanted even less? He had no option but to agree at the time and hope to find a way out of it later.
And yet Trinica seemed blissfully unaware of any of this. Though his bad moods were ever more frequent, they didn’t seem to trouble her any more. She was assured that he was hers, and he seethed that she would celebrate her victory so prematurely.
By the time the date of the wedding was announced, Frey’s thoughts were mainly of escape. He slept little and badly. Her father’s obvious disapproval encouraged him to think that the wedding was a bad idea. A barely educated boy of low means, raised in an orphanage, Frey wasn’t a good match for the highly intelligent and beautiful daughter of an eminent aristocrat. Those social barriers, that had seemed laughable in the first flush of love, suddenly rose high in Frey’s mind.
He wanted to be a pilot for the Coalition Navy, steering vast frigates to the north to do battle with the Manes, or south to crush the Sammies. He wanted to be among the first to land on New Vardia or Jagos after the Great Storm Belt calmed. He wanted to fly free across the boundless skies.
When he looked at Trinica, and she smiled her perfect smile, he saw the death of his dreams.
That was when she fell pregnant. The wedding was hastily brought forward, and her father’s opposition to it transformed into whole-hearted support of their enterprise, backed up by veiled threats if Frey should waver. Frey began to suffer panic attacks in the night.
He remembered the sensation of a vice around his ribs, squeezing a little harder with every day that brought him closer to the wedding. He never seemed to have quite enough breath in his body. The laughter of his friends as they congratulated him became a distressing cacophony, like an enraged brace of ducks. He felt harried and harassed wherever he went. The smallest request was enough to send him into a fluster.
He remembered wondering what it would be like to feel like that for ever.
By this point he was absolutely certain he didn’t want to marry her. But it didn’t mean he didn’t want to be with her. Even with all the irritation and buried anger, he still adored this woman. She was his first love, and the one who had teased him from his rather cold, uninspiring childhood into a wild world where emotions could be overpowering and deeply irrational. He just wanted things to go back to the way they were before she began to talk about marriage.
But he was terrified of making the wrong choice. What if she was the one for him? Would he be condemning himself to a life of misery? Would he ever meet anyone like her again?
He was paralysed, trapped, dragged reluctantly into the future like a ship’s anchor scoring its way along the sea bed. In the end, there was only one way out he could face, and that was not to face it at all. He couldn’t make even that decision until the very last minute. He was hoping desperately for some vaguely defined intervention that would spare him from hurting her.
None came, so he ran. He took the Ketty Jay, in which was everything he had in the world, and he left her. He left her carrying his child, standing in front of a thousand witnesses, waiting for a groom who would never come.
After that, it only got worse.
‘Darian?’ Trinica prompted. Frey realised he’d slipped into reverie and fallen silent. ‘I asked you a question.’
Frey was taken by a sudden surge of anger. What right did she have to make him explain himself? After what she’d done? His love for her had been the most precious thing in his life, and she’d ruined it with her insecurities, her need to tie him down. She’d made him cowardly. In his heart he knew that, but he could never say it. So instead, he attacked her, sensing her weakness.
‘You really think I’m interested in a little catch-up to make you feel better?’ he sneered. ‘You think I care if you understand what happened or not? Here’s a deaclass="underline" you let me go and I’ll have a nice long chat with you about all the terrible things I did and what an awful person I am. But in case it escaped your notice, I’m going to be hanged, and it’s you that’s taking me to the gallows. So piss on your questions, Trinica. You can go on wondering what went wrong until you rot.’
Trinica’s expression was surprised and wounded. She’d not expected such cruelty. Frey found himself thinking that the white-skinned bitch who had taken the place of his beloved might actually cry. He’d expected anger, but instead she looked like a little girl who had been unjustly smacked for something they didn’t do. A profound sadness had settled on her.
‘How can you hate me like this?’ she asked. Her voice was husky and low. ‘How can you take the moral high ground, after what you did to me?’
‘Broken hearts mend, Trinica,’ Frey spat. ‘You murdered our child.’
Her eyes narrowed at the blow, but any promise of tears had passed. She turned her face away from him and looked out of the window again. ‘You abandoned us,’ she replied, grave-cold. ‘It’s easy to be aggrieved now. But you abandoned us. If our child had lived, you’d never have known it existed.’