Everything.
When she was finished talking, Alistair stared at her a moment with a funny look on his face. Then he picked up a glass paperweight on his desk and threw it across the room. Lily wasn’t certain that was professional lawyer-type behaviour but she’d let it slide.
“Send them in,” Alistair called to his assistant and then turned back to Lily. “Don’t say anything, Lily. Just leave it to me.”
Lily nodded again.
She had thought about it in her rational moments, of which there were few, and she didn’t mind letting Nate have visitation rights though she wasn’t keen on Tash spending a great amount of time with Danielle or Victor or, indeed, Jeff. However, Tash needed a father and never expected to have one and didn’t even know she did have one… yet.
For Tash this would be a boon from the gods. Lily had been telling her daughter stories about Nate since she was born. Huge, lavish, adoring, heartsick stories that made Nate seem like any prince in any fairytale. Tash was going to be overjoyed when she heard Nate was alive. Tash thought Nate had been a superhero, the leader of the free world and a saint all rolled into one.
This was indeed a boon that neither of them ever expected. A boon that Lily would have wished for if Fazire would have done it, which, he informed her, he would not. Indeed, she did wish for it, prayed for it, begged for it, cried for it nearly every day for years and years.
When she’d seen Nate, standing, breathing, living, she thought every dream she had of his return from the dead had come real. It had been the most glorious moment of her life.
For about two seconds. Then it became every nightmare.
And then it got worse.
Now she was going to have to humiliate herself again. Have her whole sordid story and naive stupidity laid out for all to see.
All for Tash, her perfect, sweet, brilliant, beautiful Tash. Tash, who Lily had clung to in those dark days. Tash who looked just like Nate, a fact Lily used to think was a treasure, a precious gift. Tash, who was the only person besides Fazire (in his less annoying moments), who could truly make Lily smile anymore.
Tash was the only beautiful thing that had come out of eight, hard, dead years.
Alistair put his hand on her arm and squeezed reassuringly.
Lily winced carefully so he would not see her doing it. The deep, angry bruises that Victor had given her were still there. She did not tell Alistair about the bruises, after the paperweight incident she thought that omission was sensible.
“You don’t have to worry, we have them Lily,” he promised in a whisper.
“Hobbs,” a voice said from behind them and Lily turned her head to look.
Jane was leading in four men, two of them she knew.
She held her breath in surprise and fear.
Victor was there, wearing a face that was a mask of fury. And Victor’s fury was a scary thing, this she knew now all too well.
Nate was also there, wearing a well-tailored, unbelievably expensive-looking suit. He was no less tall, no less handsome, the years had only deepened his impossibly good looks until they were nearly unbearably good looks. He was looking at her, or more to the point at Alistair’s hand on her arm, with a look that could only be described as contempt.
If her heart had not already turned to stone, it would have at that look.
Instead, it pulverised.
It was then Lily became numb. Nothing worse could happen to her, not after losing her grandmother then both her parents then, she thought, Nate then her dreams of a bright future as a best-selling novelist, living with her dreamy romantic hero husband and creating a family together. Finally, Tash coming and it being so very hard after that. So, very, very hard.
Numb, she thought in a vague way, was a good way to be.
Alistair led her to her seat. Alistair had explained the drill. Jane would be courteously getting drinks, lulling them into a sense of security before Alistair unleashed his plan.
Automatically, Lily stated her preference for coffee to Jane and Lily was so removed from the scene, she was surprised when she was served her drink.
She didn’t touch it.
Alistair had arranged for the informal meeting to happen at his offices in Bristol. He’d been pleased to win that small battle but Lily didn’t care, though she was happy not to have the added expense of going to London.
She’d go to Sri Lanka if it meant keeping Tash.
Lily had dressed carefully in an outfit that Maxine bought her. Maxine had done a great deal in the eight years that had passed. She’d given Lily back her job. She’d taken care of Lily when she was recuperating after Tash’s birth. She held Lily’s hair back when she vomited in the throes of one of her excruciating migraines.
Lily owed Maxine a lot and more than just her lovely outfit.
It was a tan suit with a straight skirt that hit her just above the knees and had a deep slit up the back and a safari jacket belted at the waist. She wore a scarf pattered in tan and shocking orange jauntily tied at her throat (tied by Maxine who did everything jauntily). This was accompanied by a pair of tan, high-heeled pumps with a shock of patent-leather orange at the pointed toe.
“You’ll knock ‘em dead,” Maxine had told her upon looking at Lily in her suit.
Lily was too scared to care who she knocked. Fear was the only emotion she had anymore, fear and humiliation. The rest was just… dead. As dead as she thought Nate was. As dead as everything she ever felt for him.
And she had felt everything for him.
“Can we begin?” one of Nate’s solicitors was asking and Lily, who had been staring at her hands, felt her head come up as if it had a mind of its own (which, of course, it did, but normally Lily controlled it, now nearly everything in her life was out of her control).
She saw Nate coolly staring at her from across the table, again as if she was an insect and he was biologist getting ready to pin her to a board.
Strangely she had no reaction to this. She was beyond reacting.
He hadn’t said a word to her, not a single word.
This wasn’t unusual for Nate but perhaps he could have at least said a single word. Though, from the look in his eyes, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what that word might be.
Lily’s eyes swept down the table. His two solicitors sat side-by-side. Alistair said this was all just show but the fact that Lily could barely afford one and Nate could blithely bring two scared her socks off. Victor sat to Nate’s left and glowered at her with a hatred that eclipsed that of Danielle and even Laura who Lily would never have thought had it in her but apparently she did.
Lily decided to look back down at her hands. She figured that was her safest line of sight at the present moment.