His heart began to pound, and his whiskey-addled stomach to churn.

“Amelia showed me out after I’d spent some time with Victorine. She said she’d been unwell. But it was an illness she was happy to celebrate. Morning sickness. You’re going to be a father. Congratulations.”

The last word was desolate and this time she came into his arms gladly. He wrapped them around her and felt her cling to his back.

“Once.” His voice was a kind of animal moan. “I slept with Amelia once. I didn’t think I would ever see you again. Victorine was unhappy and I wanted her, more than anything, to know what it was like to have a loving family. So I thought I’d try…” He couldn’t speak for a moment but made himself go on. He’d hurt Jess yet again so the least he could do was be man enough to confess. “It was awful. How could anything have come of it?”

He felt her hold him more tightly, felt her forgiveness for him open up around him as she spoke into his chest. “But it did.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he insisted. But he knew it did. How could he give another child the instability of beginning its life without a family, like Victorine had had to endure? Amelia would never let him have their child if they divorced.

“But this will.” He felt the effort it took for her to pull away, for her to speak while the tears were still wet on her cheeks.

“You haven’t ever told Victorine about her parents, have you?” she asked.

Dan shook his head emphatically. “I don’t plan to tell her. Perhaps when she’s grown up. But the last thing she needs right now is to know that she isn’t even related to me. That she’s the offspring of two French people whose names nobody knows.”

“I thought Amelia knew about Victorine. She’s your wife so I just assumed…”

Dan reached out and stroked Jess’s face. “I have had possibly a dozen conversations with Amelia. I’m married to her yes, but she’s not really my wife. She knows that. She knows we don’t have anything.”

Jess drew in a sharp breath. “I think she would disagree with you. You see, I was watching Victorine skip away to have her bath and she looked so clean and grown up and different to the girl in Italy and in France that it just came out. I said, I wonder if her parents would recognize her if they were ever able to trace her? Amelia said that was obviously impossible because they were dead. And I said, unthinkingly, that I meant her real parents, not your brother and his wife. Her birth parents.”

Dan’s stomach twisted brutally. “She said she’d tell Victorine, didn’t she?”

Jess nodded. “Only if you divorce her.”

He felt the locks snap shut. Amelia was carrying his child. Amelia would ruin Victorine if she told her that Dan wasn’t even her uncle, let alone her father.