Among The Roses

Chapter 45: A Gathering

Chiara stared at him, slowly shaking her head, before pulling her hands out from under his.

"No. Oh no," she said in a conversational tone of voice.

To Drew, she sounded like she was answering an innocuous question about whether or not to take an umbrella somewhere, or if she'd be having sugar in her tea.

"That's not possible," she continued in the same, strange tone of voice. "For her to be carrying your child, you would have to have had sex with her." She swallowed and looked down at her hands, which were shaking in her lap. "You would have to have fucked her, Drew." She looked up, staring earnestly into his eyes. "You wouldn't, you couldn't have. Could you? Have made love with that creature with the perfect body and nothing inside? She has no soul, Drew! And you've changed, you said so yourself. You don't do that anymore, do you? Do you?"

And now her voice was going up, climbing and climbing, higher and higher, into the upper registers, creeping into the realm of hysteria.

She kept repeating, "Do you?" with her breathing getting faster and faster, her hands shaking in her lap, until Drew felt he had no choice but to slap her, very lightly, just to bring her back down to earth.

She stared at him, her hand going to her cheek.

"Thank you," she said tonelessly.

Drew had risen to sit next to her on the bed, weeping helplessly. He looked at Chiara carefully, but she was back to herself, he could see that.

"So it's true?" she asked, beginning to cry herself. "It's really true?"

He just nodded, unable to speak.

"When did it happen?"

"I don't want to talk about it," he responded in a whisper.

"Can you tell me if it happened more than once? Could you at least tell me that much?"

He shook his head. "Just the once."

"Was I here?"

He shook his head.

She opened her mouth to ask another question, but he cut her off.

"Please, I'm begging you, no more questions, CC--"

"Don't you dare call me that again, ever," she said, her voice deadly.

"Fine, no more questions about the conception," she said evenly. She took a deep breath. "What happens now?"

"Now, I don't see you anymore," Drew said in a dead voice. "I mean, I'm allowed to see you, but I can't be involved with you romantically. And you can live in the cottage, but you're not to live in the house anymore."

Chiara stared at Drew. "How is she going to make you stick to all of this?"

"We have an agreement. That's where I was last night and most of today, at my solicitor's. With her solicitor. And after the baby's born--"

"When's that, then? The blessed event?"

Drew winced at her words, but wiped his eyes and answered her. "Sometime around the beginning of October."

So Chiara thought, she couldn't help it. "That puts conception sometime in early January," she said. She looked at Drew, who didn't disagree. There were days in January when she slept at the cottage, she remembered.

"And?" she finally prompted. "After the baby's born what? What were you going to say?"

"We're to be married, she and I," he said, his voice barely audible.