Page 56 of Modern Romance July 2025 #4-8

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T HEO WAS MISERABLE . It frustrated him beyond belief he could not deny this simple fact. He had been back in Athens for nearly a month. He did not trust himself to work on anything important, so he simply trudged about the offices, a grumpy, demanding ogre.

And no amount of knowing or understanding what he was doing could get him to stop. Because the only solve was to go back to the island, to face Rebecca, to hear her say I love you every damn day and he didn’t know how to weather it.

She had looked like an angel in white in the chapel. For a blinding moment, he thought he’d finally been saved.

Then he’d remembered. There was no saving. There was only the right choice. The introduction of love to their union, even if it was only her own delusion, made everything precarious when he wanted everything solid and stable.

For the sake of his child’s future, he could not be around her until he got himself under control. Love had been the destabilizing force of his entire life. He would not allow her to love him, to ruin everything.

He would not allow himself to love her, to jeopardize the stability and safety of his child.

Because that was all love ever did. He was certain of it, had lived it. Everything had centered on whom his father had loved and lost. Love made everything quicksand—for him, for his child. He knew that.

But now he had the specter of the Murphys and their cozy, loving life haunting him, poking at all his certainty and life experience.

Could he make love less of a threat? With Rebecca… Could it be good ?

He missed her, with an ache that was bone-deep. He woke reaching for her, even though she’d never spent a night in his bed in Athens. More than once he had lifted his phone to his ear, dialed his assistant to demand the plane and ferry be readied, only to hang up in the nick of time.

He was considering his phone right now. He could go there. He could demand she stop telling him she loved him, since she most assuredly did not. He could demand it. Ensure it. He could…

His office door opened, no knock, which meant the only person brave enough to be the one striding through the entrance was his father.

“Father,” he greeted, surprised by his father’s appearance here after so many months away. Surprised he did not feel relieved this unexpected appearance had kept him from making a mistake.

Atlas walked straight to a chair, settled himself in it and fixed Theo with a stern look Theo didn’t recognize.

“There have been complaints, son.”

Theo winced. At the sentence. At being called son . At his father being the one to bring him complaints .

“Shouldn’t you be home resting?” he asked his father rather than acknowledge the comment.

“The doctors gave me the all-clear to return to work full-time if I so chose. And I think Ariana would like me to find something else to worry about for at least part of the day.”

“Worry about?”

“We didn’t want to say anything that might bring attention to us rather than your wedding, your baby.”

The way Atlas said your baby made it clear. Rebecca had been right. Ariana was pregnant.

Dear God.

“We’ll come back to that,” Atlas said, sounding firm and in control, which was odd. There were no jokes. None of his usual joviality. None of even his pre-heart-attack business focus.

He just seemed serious. “I know you find my change of heart little more than a nuisance.”

“Perhaps because it has been.” An honesty he wouldn’t normally have bothered verbalizing, but he was losing his grip on everything.

He and his father would have a child the same age. Who wouldn’t be a little rattled by that?

“Perhaps it has for you. I apologize. Genuinely, Theo. I have strived to fix my mistakes after the attack, but you are the mistake I could not figure how to handle. I could easily, or at least to me, ease my conscious about greed. But it was the people I had wronged that felt…impossible to rectify.”

“You hardly wronged me, Father. No need to be dramatic about it.”

“I don’t think you understand me, Theo. You think my change of heart was temporary.

Based in fear, and I suppose in a way it was.

But it was more than that. It’s not temporary.

I lay there, before Ariana found me and called the ambulance, thinking I would die, knowing that no one would care.

Ariana was getting ready to leave me, I could feel it.

You… You might have felt a pang or two, but I knew we did not have a relationship that would allow you true grief.

It felt terrifying, to die knowing no one would care.

And none of that fear, that terror, came from business .

It came from the way I’d been with the people in my life. ”

Theo felt…uncomfortable. He didn’t want to hear this. Explanations or heart-to-hearts or whatever nonsense. It didn’t…matter. He didn’t want to mine the complexities of what he felt about it. None of that was…clear-cut. A right way forward. It was just messy and…pointless.

Yes, pointless. Irrelevant. Like love.

“When they told me I would survive, with change in diet and exercise and what have you, I told Ariana I knew she was going to leave, and she should.” Atlas inhaled, looking as vulnerable as Theo had ever seen him.

He wanted to run. Only pride kept him rooted to the spot.

“She told me I should stop trying so hard to stop the hurt before it landed.” Atlas looked up at Theo.

The eye contact with the words was like a spear to his chest. A terrible understanding. As though every step he took, every decision he made for the rightness of it all, was little more than this:

Trying to stop the hurt before it landed.

Theo tried to shove this thought, this feeling, this terrible reckoning away, but Atlas kept speaking.

“I look back at how careless I was. At the wall I kept between us. I didn’t realize it then.

I think it’s something you can only see in hindsight when you’re finally forced to consider your mortality.

But if I look back at it, if I analyze it, I realize that I knew someday, whatever I offered would not be enough.

Just like with your mother. I knew someday you would become old enough to blame her for leaving, because I blamed myself for not being what she needed.

I realize now, older and wiser, that was her choice.

Her title over love. It had very little to do with me . ”

Theo had never believed his mother held any special place in his father’s heart. He had gone on to marry so many times since. Love so many times since. What could she have mattered to him?

But maybe older and wiser and actually giving it some thought, he could see it for what it was. Running away from a hurt.

“Her decision to leave us changed me. Not for the better, and that’s not her fault…something I am learning with help. I’m in therapy, you know.”

Theo didn’t know what to do with any of those words.

“And we’re exploring the ways I have made it harder on the people around me, on anyone who might love or depend on me, on purpose. Namely you.”

Theo couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. The idea of Atlas discussing him with some therapist left him feeling…itchy and vulnerable.

“Therapy was Ariana’s idea, naturally,” Atlas continued. “But I didn’t accept it until Ariana told me she was pregnant. I… I can’t stomach the idea I will make the same mistakes all over again. Especially as old as I am now. I won’t have what feels like a lifetime to try to make it up to this one.”

“There is nothing to…make up to me. We are fine.”

“Fine.” Atlas laughed, but it was not his booming laugh.

It was almost sad. “We are that, Theo. But I would like to be more than fine. I am proud of what you are. In spite of me. In spite of your mother and some of the…less kind women I married along the way. It is clear how much you love Rebecca, and that will go a long way in making you a much better father than I was on the first go-round.”

Atlas stood, skirted the desk behind which Theo stood. Breaking the barricade Theo held himself behind. Even as Theo held up a hand as if to ward off an attack, Atlas wrapped his strong arms around Theo.

“Stop punishing those around you. Go back to the island. Go back to her. Don’t be like me, Theo. Don’t waste years being afraid, pushing real love away and grasping after fleeting feelings that are safer because they end.” He squeezed hard. Stepped back. “We’ll talk more when you get back.”

But Theo wasn’t going. He wasn’t. He wasn’t .

Oh, whom was he kidding?

Rebecca’s parents had gone back to Ireland after the wedding, but that had only lasted two weeks before Mam had returned—insisting on coming and staying when she’d found out that Rebecca was having some false labor contractions.

It had been nice. To have her mother here for the past two weeks. To be fussed over. To talk about baby things. They picked out a room for the nursery, started ordering things and decorating.

If she’d been left to her own devices, she might not have. She might have thought she should wait for Theo. She might have wallowed, like she had the first two weeks. But she wouldn’t wallow in front of her mother, and that made it easy to move on to the next part of her…grief, she supposed.

Determined. Focused.

She could not control Theo. She could not make him feel the way she wanted. And this was familiar. She had not been able to magically heal her hip, make it do what she wanted it to do on the back of a horse after her injury. She’d had to accept her own limitations.

So, she would accept his. And she could accept it without hardening her heart to him, because she would focus on pregnancy, on preparing for the baby, and once they were a family…maybe.

Maybe.

So she did not discuss Theo with her mother, and Sharon never brought him up. They happily planned for the future with a baby and only a baby.

Until her thirty-two-week appointment. Rebecca didn’t tell her mother she’d been having pain all morning, because she figured she could discuss it with the doctor and not worry her mother, but the minute she told the doctor, everything…changed.

The doctor took vitals she’d never taken before. She seemed serious over cheerful. Even though Rebecca had said she didn’t want her mother in the room, the doctor insisted.

“You’re pale,” her mother said quietly while the doctor consulted something on her laptop.

“Mam.”

“I know you’re talking care of yourself, darling, but that does not ensure everything will go well. You need someone here who cares about you, not just for you.”

“I have a doctor.”

“You need love.”

They couldn’t discuss that , because the doctor said her name. In a very serious manner that had Rebecca’s heart sinking.

The doctor’s face was calm, but she didn’t flash her usual reassuring smile. “Rebecca. Between the contractions, the blood pressure, the swelling, I think it best if we go to the mainland.”

The words didn’t make sense. “What?”

“This isn’t false labor, it’s real. And I don’t think I can stop it. You need a hospital. And more importantly, your baby will. Better to go now, while it’s not an emergency, than wait until it might be.”

Rebecca’s hand shook, but her mother took it, squeezed. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” she said to both Rebecca and the doctor. Firmly. Determined. “I’ll go talk to the staff and make arrangements.”

The doctor nodded. “I’ll call the hospital so there’s a room ready for us.” She stepped out of the room first.

Mam squeezed her hand again and then released it, heading for the door to make those arrangements.

But Rebecca knew she’d also contact Theo and… She didn’t want that. She didn’t want him there until she knew for sure she was in labor, and they couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want him…hovering about before the baby was born. “Mam. Don’t call Theo.”

Sharon’s face got pinched with disapproval. “Rebecca.”

She shook her head. Determined. “I don’t want any pity visits. If the baby comes, we’ll contact him. Otherwise, he can wait.”

Sharon sighed. “Very well.”