The White House - Book 6, The Porth Kerensa Series

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The bright sunshine and vivid vibrant beauty of Rio de Janeiro seemed like a different planet to Elise when she walked out of the airport and she spent the first few days awestruck by everything she saw. As she strolled through the streets taking in the sights, she wondered if Val hadn’t always had the right idea about life. The thought of going back to the UK and facing all she had left behind filled her with fear and loathing.

She walked the beaches of Guanabara Bay and she found places to set up and paint beautiful pictures that she sold to tourists, but as the days turned into weeks the rocky mountainous terrain and the calm picturesque bay began to make her feel hemmed in. She missed the vastness and the fury of the Atlantic Ocean and the horizon that was so far away.

She had hoped the idyllic corner of paradise would be a blank canvas where she could paint a new version of herself. She wanted to become someone who hadn’t experienced so much loss that she felt as if a huge part of her heart had been carved away. She had thought that being somewhere else would make her feel free and would help her forget the last couple of months.

She’d been wrong.

The nights were long and she lay in the narrow bed in her hotel room and remembered the time when things had been good between her and James. She recalled the years of loss, frustration and pent up anger at their failure to build a family and she cried for all that they had become. She longed to pick up the phone and hear his voice. She ached to tell him she knew that what had happened wasn’t his fault and that she didn’t blame him.

If she blamed anyone it was herself. She should have made them move out long before Val or Kay warned her to. She had known deep down that whatever was in the house wasn’t good for James. She had seen him changing with every day that had passed, but her own selfish need to help a sodding ghost had driven James to the point of no return. She had put her own desperate desire to feel like a mother above the health and sanity of her beloved James and she didn’t know if she could live with the weight of guilt she felt now. She had been so caught up in the notion of a lonely little ghost boy in her house that she had closed her eyes to the creeping malevolence that had burrowed into her husband.

She had been a fool who thought she could save Oliver when really she should have been trying to save James.

      ******

She had ignored a lot of things, but when she marked the eighth week since Val’s funeral she knew she could no longer ignore what she had suspected since she’d arrived in Rio at the end of February. How strange that a horrific act of hatred from James had resulted in something they’d never achieved in the years of trying and loss that had gone before.

Was that irony, she thought, smiling wryly.

On the simple narrow bed, with the moonlight shining through the window, Elise laid her hand on her tummy and stroked it, gently.

She had made it to three months and her baby was still growing safely in her womb.

It was time to go home and speak to James.

      ******

Elise flew back to the UK a couple of weeks later. She had debated calling James and asking him to meet her at the airport but in the end she couldn’t bear the thought of an awkward greeting at the airport arrival lounge, not after the last time she had seen him. She wasn’t sure if she even wanted to tell him about the baby, although she knew she should.

The thought of keeping such a huge secret from him made her feel physically sick. However, she couldn’t help wondering if it would be better for both of them to go their separate ways and never see each other again. She didn’t want to have a conversation about what had happened and she didn’t want him to apologise for it.