Page 86 of Second Chance Summer
‘Oh, Sam.’ Lily spoke softly. ‘I am so very sorry. Truly.’
Her sympathy brought a lump to his throat. ‘No one else knows she was ever pregnant.’ Even as he spoke, he felt astonished that he was pouring out the most painful details of his life to someone he’d known for mere weeks, when he couldn’t tell the loved ones he’d known for years.
‘I’m here to listen,’ she said. ‘If you want to talk.’
His stomach flipped. In Lily’s eyes, he glimpsed the good, kind person beneath the hard exterior shining through. She’d already shown him so much of her true self, she deserved some honesty from him.
‘Rhiannon was about eight weeks gone and on a trainingcourse in Truro so I wasn’t even with her when she lost the baby,’ he said, remembering the sense of helplessness that had added to his agony. ‘The weather was bad – thick fog for days – so it was a while before she could fly home. She went through that on her own, apart from her colleagues being with her.’
‘When was this?’
‘First week of January last year. Not being able to get to her, to comfort her, was … awful.’
Sam looked down. He hadn’t realised that Lily was holding his hand. He didn’t let hers go.
‘It must have been absolutely terrible for you,’ she said.
‘It was bad.’ Torture, he remembered, to be trapped and unable to reach her. ‘To be honest, I’d never felt more like leaving the islands forever.’ He’d met her afterwards at St Mary’s airport on a raw grey day when you could barely tell where the sea and sky met.
‘She wanted a child so much. I did too, but it had taken longer than either of us had expected and Rhiannon blamed herself. When she finally conceived and then we lost the baby, it felt doubly cruel.’
‘Life can besocruel, without reason …’
Lily understood, Sam knew it. ‘When we got home to Hell Bay, I told Rhiannon that we still had each other. I reassured her that the two of us would always be enough if we weren’t able to have kids in the future. We were enough … enough forme.’
The pain of what happened next returned, almost assharp as when Rhiannon had first delivered the news that had landed like a bomb in his life.
‘A few days later, she told me that just us wasn’t enough forher. She said that she’d been having second thoughts about our relationship for a while and the baby had masked her doubts. She’d swept them aside when she thought we’d be a family, hoping that they’d go away once the child was born, but with only the two of us to focus on again …’
Sam broke off, to compose himself for a moment. ‘So,’ he managed, ‘we split up.’
‘Oh, Sam, that must have been so tough while you were still coming to terms with losing the baby.’
‘It was very hard, I’ll admit. I wasn’t enough for her on my own and to realise she’d been having doubts for a while … I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt like I was drowning, not knowing which way up I was, how to get through each day.’
‘All of those feelings are completely understandable.’
Comforted by Lily’s empathy, he took a breath and then went on. ‘So she left. While she’d been away on the course, a friend of hers had taken a job in Adelaide and mentioned how badly they needed more nurses. Rhiannon decided to leave too. Nothing I could do would change her mind and she asked me to respect her decision so I stopped trying. Three weeks later she was on her way to Australia.’
‘That’s a huge change to deal with. So sudden, two losses on top of each other,’ Lily said. ‘You must have felt helpless and abandoned.’
‘Both. I offered to go to Australia with her so we could give things another shot but she insisted I mustn’t try to go after her.’ Rhiannon’s words came back to him again – he saw her face, tender and sad but resolute.
‘Please don’t. I need to make a fresh start on my own, far away from here. I could never rip you out of the place you belong to. You’re as much a part of the landscape as the granite or the sand on the beach, Sam.’
‘I am so sorry.’ Lily squeezed his hand.
‘I’ve been grieving, I suppose,’ he said, still amazed he’d told her so much. ‘And I let it go on too long.’ He thought again of the flowers he kept in his room, ones he’d picked from a small meadow on Bryher to honour the loss of his child. A lump formed in his throat.
‘Sam, if I can tell you one thing, it’s that there’s no time limit on grief. Be kinder to yourself.’ She smiled briefly. ‘Oh, no, listen to me acting like a self-help guru. Next thing you know, I’ll be writing a book about how a near-death experience helped me to live again.Actually,’ she said, tapping her finger against her lips and musing, ‘that’s not theworstidea I’ve ever had.’
Lily drew a smile from him, like water from a dry well. In the midst of wallowing in his misery, she’d turned on the sunshine.
‘I’m joking,’ she said, suddenly serious again and no longer holding his hand. ‘You did all you could. You said you’d have been ready to leave Scilly if Rhiannon had asked you to.’
‘I was desperate. I have travelled and worked abroad. Itwas a fantastic experience but I love it here. Rhiannon was right, she was the wise one. Iampart of the landscape. I would never have been happy to live away from here.’ Even as he said it, he realised he was sabotaging any possibility of a relationship with Lily, however remote that had been before he’d told her about the baby.
‘I now understand why,’ she said. ‘It’s very beautiful. More than that, it’s extraordinary. Unlike any place I’ve ever seen – not that I’ve seen that much of the world outside airports or hotel rooms.’
