Everyone’s eyes turned to Lily who’d come running out of the house after her daughter. She stopped at the sight of them and her lips stayed parted in surprise.
“Oh my God,” Victor breathed.
Lily wasn’t wearing a pretty anything. She was barefoot, her face free of makeup and she had on a pair of faded, battered, what appeared to be army trousers and skin-tight, lilac camisole that showed her thin shoulders and arms.
It also showed slight purple and yellow marks around her upper arms, bruises that looked like they were made by a set of hands, bruises that could only have been caused by Victor.
Regardless of this she somehow, to Nate, looked unconsciously, undeniably beautiful.
Before anyone could say another word, Natasha’s head went back. Nate’s hand dropped from it and she looked up at him, her dark eyes,
his
dark eyes, dancing merrily.
“I’ve been watching for you all morning. It seems like for…
eh
… ver! I thought you were
never
going to get here!”
Apparently, however Lily broke the news, she’d done it well.
Natasha’s head jerked around so she could look at her mother but she kept her arms firmly around Nate’s hips.
“Look, Mummy, Daddy’s here,” she told her mother unnecessarily.
At the sound of her calling him “Daddy”, Nate felt that uncomfortable squeeze matched by a slice through his gut.
Lily’s stunned gaze slid from the early arrived crowd and then her face melted into a smile as she looked at her daughter.
“I can see that, baby doll.”
Nate was staring at Lily’s soft smile, feeling her endearment to her daughter, his daughter,
their
daughter, wash over him when Natasha’s head came back around and she looked at Nate.
“Mummy told me last night you were coming,” she informed him.
“Did she?” Nate murmured.
Natasha nodded gaily. “Yes, she told me she found out you were alive and you wanted to meet me straight away.” Then she took her arms from around him, held them out at her sides and announced, “Here I am!”
Nate stared in fascination at the beautiful child he and Lily had created. She was, quite simply, not to be believed. Her eyes were sparkling, her heart was open and the sunny smile never left her gorgeous face. It was clear to anyone that she was happy to see him, beyond happy, she was thrilled.
He had no idea what to say or do. Never, not once in his entire life had he been so uncertain of his next course of action.
Luckily, Natasha was not so uncertain.
She leaned into him. “Who are they?” she whispered loudly.
Nate looked around at Laura and Victor, who he had, while seeing and touching his daughter for the first time in her life, entirely forgotten.
He saw Laura had tears shimmering in her eyes. Victor was standing absolutely still, his chest puffed out with the effort he was making at holding back tears.
Nate settled his hand on the nape of his daughter’s neck. He found it strange, how small it was, tiny and fragile, and felt a protective urge settle in him that was beyond his control, should he ever wish to control it, which he never would. He guided her closer to his body, moved to her side and out of the way so she could fully see her grandparents. He looked down at her as she leaned trustingly against his side. This he found strange, this unquestioning trust, strange and something else, something extraordinary.
“These are my parents,” he answered her.
Natasha’s expressive eyes rounded with surprise and her head again jerked back to her mother and again her body stayed in contact with Nate’s.
Nate followed his daughter’s gaze and saw that Lily hadn’t moved but she had been joined by a funny-looking man with a shock of black hair, black eyes, a pointed, black goatee and a supremely rounded stomach. He stood with his hands on his hips, his feet planted so far apart he looked in danger of toppling over and he had an expression on his face so fierce, Nate was surprised the man hadn’t turned Nate to stone.
This
, Nate thought correctly,
must be Fazire
.
Nate’s thoughts were interrupted by his daughter breathing the word, “Grandparents,” in her mother’s direction. Her voice sounded like someone had just bestowed a rich and untapped diamond mine on her as a gift.
At the sound of the catch of Laura’s breath, a catch that heralded tears, Natasha’s head swung back around. As if sensing innately that Laura needed it, Natasha disengaged from Nate and walked forward then ran the last few steps and threw herself, luckily less forcefully, at Laura. Her arms closed around Laura’s waist and she proclaimed, “Nanna!”
Immediately Laura burst into tears and Victor looked away, not willing to be unmanned in front of an audience or at all, for that matter.
Nate saw a movement to his side and turned to see Lily joining him, standing too far away for him to touch her. She was watching this meeting with a strange, benign expression on her face but held her body rigidly as if waiting for something to attack.
When Nate would have spoken, moved toward her, caught her attention in some way, Natasha tore from the embrace Laura was now giving her to hurtle herself at Victor and give him one of her fierce hugs with a cry of, “Granddad!”
Victor immediate dropped into a crouch and pulled the child between his legs, hugging her just as tightly as she was hugging him.
Lily allowed this for a moment and then she called to her daughter, “Tash, honey, come inside. I’m sure your, um… they would all like a cup of tea.”
Natasha pulled away from Victor and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Do you want tea?” she asked him, her head tilting enquiringly to the side.
Victor didn’t speak, likely couldn’t speak, he just nodded.
She pulled free of Victor and half-danced, half-skipped back to Nate whose hand she grabbed.
“Great idea, Mummy.” She quirked a smile at her mother and Nate’s body stilled at the sight. His daughter’s smile, that familiar smile, was the only thing it appeared she’d inherited from her mother.
She had Lily’s endearing, quirky smile.
Natasha continued. “While you make tea, I’ll show them my bedroom!” She said this like it would delight and surprise them beyond their wildest imaginings.
Natasha pulled Nate forward with her hand tugging at his and Nate walked toward the house. Lily fell in step behind them,
not
, he noticed, beside them.
As they drew nearer the house, Fazire still stood with hands on hips and with a ferocious expression firmly affixed to his face.
“That’s Fazire, he’s our special friend,” Natasha made the introduction happily. “Stop scowling Fazire,” she warned him, her voice bossy, loving and teasing at the same time. She dragged Nate right passed the other man who did not move an inch. Then Natasha whispered, “Don’t mind him, he’s been in a
really
bad mood for at least a
week
.”
Of that, Nate had no doubt.
They entered the house, Lily’s house, through the vestibule and an inner, lovely, stained glass door. Natasha pulled Nate directly to the stairs as he glanced around to get a sense of Lily’s home.
“I’ll get the tea,” Lily murmured, walking by them but not looking at them then she said sternly, clearly making it an order, “Fazire, you can help.”
Laura and Victor were standing in the entryway and Fazire walked, or rather
stomped
in behind them. He slammed the door and then carried on stomping down the hall, forcing Laura and Victor to jump out of his way, following Lily who had disappeared at the back of the house.
Natasha was tugging at Nate’s hand, already two steps up the stairs and Nate looked at her. With one look at her excited, open, expressive face, he smiled at her.
Her face shifted somehow when she caught his smile and then she smiled back and said, “Mummy said you had a pretty smile. She said it was the most handsome smile she’d ever seen
in
her life
. She said it made her belly do
somersaults
.” She bestowed this information on him without any idea of the enormity of its meaning or its effect, even though behind them Laura gasped. “Come on!” Natasha urged excitedly.
She marched up the stairs, pulling him behind her but he barely took two steps when he abruptly stopped.
Hanging above the bottom stair he saw a picture.
The hall itself was painted soft beige with just enough peach to make it warm and inviting. The woodwork looked freshly painted in white but the wood of the banister and stairs had been refinished and was gleaming. The wood floors of the hall were also redone and those, and the stairs, had a muted beige carpet runner.
This would have been cultured and classic however it warred with a set of fairy lights, each light surrounded by a delicate, muted peach daisy, woven artistically through the rails of the banister giving it an offbeat feel. The only other adornment of the room was, every few steps, a picture in black and white in the same exact frame depicting the same subjects.
“My goodness,” Laura breathed, looking at the first one.
In it Lily sat in a wicker chair that had been placed at the front of the house. She looked thin and wan and had a rug thrown around her legs but she was smiling tiredly, almost valiantly, at the camera. She held a bundled, tiny baby carefully, as if she was fragile and as if the baby was the most precious thing on earth to her.
The next photo was the same except the baby was older and Lily was standing instead of sitting, holding the baby on her slim hip. She was looking down at Natasha, her long hair tucked behind her ear and she was again smiling. In the photo Natasha was gazing up at her mother, her chubby baby arm extended, her tiny fingers touching her mother’s cheek.
The next photo was more of the same, this time Natasha, a toddler and standing and Lily was crouched down and pointing to the camera, obviously calling the child’s wayward attention to it. Again Lily and also Natasha were smiling.
Each few steps was another and another, eight in all, the same photo but different. They were all of Lily and Natasha in slightly different poses, none of them rehearsed, none of them formal and in all of them Lily and Natasha were smiling.
Nate noted that Lily had cut her glorious red-gold hair from the length it used to be when he first met her, well passed her shoulders, to the length it was now, just brushing them, sometime when Natasha was five.
“Those are my birthday pictures except the first one wasn’t taken on my
actual
birthday because Mummy wasn’t home from the hospital yet. Fazire takes them. My Gramma Becky taught him how. She was a photographer,” Natasha informed them authoritatively as they hit the landing and she tugged him along through one of the middle of four doors.
Upon entry to his daughter’s room, Nate was momentarily stunned speechless rather than regularly so.
The room was painted in the pinkest pink he’d ever seen. He didn’t know such a pink existed. He thought that it might be a slightly better world if it that particular pink
didn’t
exist.
“Well,” Victor said, staring around him and struggling for something to say, “this is… er, pink.”
Natasha giggled. “I know.” She let go of Nate’s hand and started dancing around the room. “Mummy said I couldn’t have the pink I
wanted
because it was too
shocking
.”
Nate found himself wondering what was more shocking than the pink Lily had agreed.
Natasha skipped to a set of shelves while Nate glanced around. There was a small desk with spindly legs that was painted white, a matching wardrobe and chest of drawers. The centre of the room was taken up with a double bed with an intensely frilly, intensely girlie coverlet and it was festooned with ruffled toss pillows and stuffed animals. At the end, curled in a circle, was a fluffy ginger cat that completely ignored their arrival and continued existence.
Natasha gestured to the shelves.
“These are my books which Mummy used to read to me and now
I
read to
her,
” she bragged happily then lifted her hand to point to a shelf higher up, “and these are my bears which Miss Maxine gives me every year for Christmas. They’re special bears she has made ‘specially for me.”
She danced over to the cat and picked it up with a hand in its middle. The cat, obviously used to this, let its entire enormous, fluffy body go limp so that it was doubled over in her small hand.
“This is Mrs. Gunderson, my cat,” Natasha announced. “Fazire thinks it’s a silly name and not nearly nice enough for an animal of such a dignified breed. Mummy calls her Gunny. Mrs. Gunderson doesn’t sleep with me because I move around too much, she sleeps with Mummy.”
Natasha cradled the cat as she took them on the rest of the tour of her room which should have been short, considering there wasn’t much to it. However she seemed bent on introducing them to every item that had even the most minute meaning to her which was most of it. Then she stopped, dropped the cat, which made a quick getaway, put her hands on her hips, much like her friend Fazire, and looked around.
“Well!” She threw her arm out dramatically. “That’s my room. Now I’ll show you Fazire’s. I
love
Fazire’s room.”