Count On Me

Part Forty Seven

Chapter Forty Seven

It was bizarre to wander around the house with no one to talk to and nothing to do. THe appointment with their respective legal teams was growing ever closer, and Lizzie had to admit that she was extremely nervous. For all her postulating and posturing, she was in effect shitting herself. Suddenly she was about to face the man who had the ability to break her, not once, but twice.

She looked around the house, every inch reminded her of Nate, his chubby-handed paintings stuck to the fridge, the five of six footballs that littered the house, the Paw Patrol beakers...then there were the photos. Of him. Him and his mother...the three of them.

But she's recently added a snap of her with both Oscar with Nate, taken at a restaurant back in New York. The three do them were smiling at the camera, a large ice cream in front of each of them. She remembered how happy they'd all been that day, after sightseeing and a lovely meal. Before everything got so complicated, before they muddied the waters and changed everything.

She wished she could teleport back to then, when the future was so much more simple. When she could have all that she wanted and her heart was still in one piece.

Then her eyes cast over a picture of Janis. There were loads in the house, but the one her eyes had landed on was the first one of Janis and Nate in this house, just days after they arrived, out of the blue. She sighed, reaching out to run her fingers over the image of her sister. She'd marched into her house, taken over everything, thrown her whole life upside down - bled her dry of both time and money, only highlighted more obviously her disastrous relationship with her parents, yet despite all that she'd give everything for her to be back there. Janis had never given her advice, she'd been away for years, but she still managed to leave a huge gaping hole in Lizzie's life, and she wanted to fall into that hole. She wanted to be anywhere but there...waiting for a huge meeting with legal people that would mark her future life permanently.

She was scared.

Terrified.

She got the bus into town, she couldn't cope with parking and the stress of the traffic, instead she slipped on her earphones and lost herself in music. Cheryl Martin's office was across town, overlooking a small park. As Lizzie sat in the waiting room, she watched a mother try to control two small children in the park, both running in opposite directions, making the woman tear her hair out. She couldn't help but smile. Nate was bad enough in that situation, let alone another one. She was still smiling when Cheryl's assistant called her through to the office.

Cheryl was sat behind her desk on the phone nodding frantically as she jotted equally as frenetically on a large jotter pad. She glanced at Lizzie and gave an awkward half smile half grimace, gesturing to a seat. It wasn't the boardroom that she was expecting, the high powered meeting across a table...instead she was perched across the desk from a legal representative who was struggling to hold things together seemingly.

She relaxed back into the seat and studied the blonde woman; she was everything that Lizzie wasn't. Confident, glamorous, and successful.

Lizzie had slumped into the seat when Cheryl finally ended the call; she gave a dramatic sigh, then shrugged.

"Well, if that wasn't the strangest conversation. That was Max, Max Phillips. He's representing Mr Wicker...Nathan's biological father..." She glanced at the pad in front of her, "well, the 'alleged' biological father. Sorry Lizzie, this is all rather strange."