Public Secrets

wasn’t so easy to remember. “My father would get drunk, go on one of his famous rages before he passed out. I’d hide out in the cellar of the flat. One day Jane was there, like she was waiting. Before I knew it, she was on top of me.”
“You don’t have to go into all this, Bri.”
“I want you to know.” He took his time, drawing in smoke, letting it out. “We seemed a lot alike, Jane and I. Somebody was always fighting at her house, too. There was never enough money. Then when I started getting interested in music, I spent more time with that than her. She went crazy. She threatened me, threatened herself. I kept away from her.
“Then not long after the guys and I got together, when we were struggling so hard to get a break, she showed up again. We were playing in dives, barely making enough for food. I guess it was because she was someone I knew, someone who knew me. Mostly it was because I was an asshole.”
Bev sniffled, gave a watery laugh. “You’re still an asshole.”
“Yeah. We got back together, almost a year. Toward the end she was outrageous, trying to start trouble between me and the others. She’d break up rehearsals, make scenes. She even came to the club and went after one of the girls in the audience. Afterward, she’d cry and beg me to forgive her. It got to the point where it stopped being easier to say, sure, fine, forget it. She said she’d kill herself when I broke it off with her. We’d just hooked up with Pete and had a series of gigs in France and Germany. He was working on the first record deal. We got out of London, and I put her out of my mind. I didn’t know she was pregnant, Bev. I hadn’t even thought of her in over three years. If I could go back—” He broke off, thinking of the child in the next room with her crooked tooth and little dimple. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Bev drew up her knees and leaned over them. She was a young, practical woman from a stable family. It was still difficult for her to understand poverty and pain, though those were the very things in Brian’s background that had drawn her to him.
“I guess it’s more to the point what you’re going to do now.”

“I’ve already done it.” He stubbed out the cigarette in a nineteenth-century porcelain bowl. Bev didn’t bother to mention it.
“What have you done, Bri?”
“I’ve taken Emma. She’s mine. She’s going to live with me.”
“I see.” She took a cigarette. She’d cut, out drinking and her dabbling with drugs since her pregnancy, but tobacco was a harder habit to break. “You didn’t think we should talk it over? The last I heard we were going to be married in a few days.”
“Are going to be.” He took her by the shoulders then, shaking her, afraid that she, like so many others, would turn away from him. “Goddammit, Bev, I wanted to talk to you. I couldn’t.” He released her to spring up and kick at the sample books. “I walked into that filthy, stinking flat intending to do no more than threaten Jane if she didn’t stop harassing us. She was exactly the same, screaming one minute, pleading the next. She said Emma was in the bedroom, but she wasn’t there. She was hiding.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Jesus, Bev, I found the kid hiding under the sink like a frightened animal.”
“Oh God.” Bev dropped her head on her knees.
“Jane was going to beat her—she was going to beat that tiny little girl because she was frightened. When I saw her … Bev, look at me. Please. When I saw her, I saw myself. Can you understand?”
“I want to.” She shook her head, still fighting tears. “No, I don’t. I want things to be the way they were when you left this morning.”
“Do you think I should have walked out on her?”
“No. Yes.” She pressed her fisted hands on each side of her head. “I don’t know. We should have talked. We could have arranged some sum of settlement.”
He knelt beside her to take her hands. “I was going to leave, drive around a little and think before I came home to talk to you. Jane said she’d kill herself.”
“Oh, Bri.”
“I might have handled that. I think I was furious enough to egg her on. But then, she said she’d kill Emma, too.”
Bev pressed a hand against her stomach, over the child that was growing inside her, a child that was already beautifully real to her. “No. Oh no, she couldn’t have meant it.”

“She did.” He tightened his grip on her hands. “Whether she would