“No, but I will. Especially after what’s just happened. I don’t want to have to wait for the next appointment. It might take weeks.” I put my hands on the front of his shoulders. “Besides, I want to spend a proper weekend in Aberdeen with you, look round the city together. We can go up another time, when you can spend more time with me.”

He sighs, but I think—I hope—I’ve convinced him.

“I guess you’re right,” he says.

I smile. “I’m always right.”

Ross pours a finger of whiskey into a tumbler. “To the aul’ bastard,” he says, raising his glass and giving me a sad little smile.

I raise my water in the air and we chink our glasses.

“To the aul’ bastard,” I say, looking deep into Ross’s eyes.

Catherine went crazy when I asked her to leave. When I told her to leave. Crazier than when she’d found out about the pregnancy even, and that was some kind of crazy, let me tell you. I told her I couldn’t keep doing this for the rest of my life—indulging her vengeful fantasies—and that it was time I stood up for myself. I was developing feelings for Lizzie. Uncomfortable, messy feelings. The sort of feelings I’d never experienced before, but that somehow felt…right. Playing the loving fiancé role was becoming both easier and harder than it had ever been. Easier because it came so naturally now. Harder because I didn’t actually want to play anymore.

Sometimes, at work, I’d draw Lizzie’s photo toward me—the one I kept in a frame on my desk. It’s a casual, unposed snap that captures her mid-laugh, her blue eyes smiling in the sun, a pretty smattering of freckles across her nose and the tops of her cheeks. Who’d have thought that Lizzie Molyneux would turn out to be so beautiful? No wonder Catherine hated it. No wonder she used to turn the photo facedown whenever she came into my consulting room.

She said she’d tell Lizzie everything and I said I didn’t care. I was going to tell her anyway. Tell her how I’d been manipulated and controlled since I was a little boy. Catherine didn’t like that. She didn’t like that one little bit because it was true and there was nothing she could say to make it otherwise.

I felt invincible then. Able to deal with whatever crap she threw at me, even when she ambushed me in the middle of the night wearing nothing but her silky bed shorts and beckoning me into her bed, because I knew damn well that if I didn’t make a stand, I’d never be free of her. Never.

And it was Lizzie I wanted now. Lizzie and the baby.

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