“Danni, are you okay?”
Clearly I looked as unwell as I felt.
“Mike asked me to marry him . . . I never said yes . . . although I never said no. He asked me one time after things had been, erm, difficult. He already had the ring and forced it on my finger. It was too small but rather than admit he’d got the wrong size he told me I’d gained weight and even my fingers were fat.”
“But you know that whether you had gained weight or not, you did not deserve that treatment, any of it, don’t you?”
I nodded, I did, and I was unsure why the first tear had slid down my cheek, or perhaps I did when the next words left my lips. “I should have had a baby.”
THEN
“I’m your mother,if I can’t pop in for a visit, who can?”
I laughed at the image of my mother on my doorstep, but suspected there was more to her casual visit than met the eye.
“Mum, you live a three hour drive from here, so forgive me if you dropping in has come as something of a surprise.”
“Okay, perhaps not, but I’m worried about you. You didn’t come home for Christmas and I saw Jess. She’s worried about you.”
And there it was, the real reason for her visit.
“Am I going to be invited in or have I wasted my time in coming here.”
Stepping back, making the doorway accessible for her to walk through, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I wondered exactly what Jess had told my mother and how I might explain the events of my life to her.
* * *
We sat eatinglunch and even that caused worry and anxiety to rise in me. I’d always had a healthy appetite but had gained a few pounds of late so was watching what I was eating, something my mother had raised her eyebrows at when I’d ordered an undressed garden salad.
“How is Mike? We haven’t seen him since that first Christmas you were together.”
“He’s good . . . busy.”
“Of course, and you, how is work?”
A loaded question.
“Yeah, good, great.” I wasn’t convinced by my own enthusiasm so I was pretty certain she wouldn’t be.
“Dr Danielle King, it has quite a ring, doesn’t it?”
Fuck! She knew and had backed me into a corner because now I needed to lie to her face or come clean. Maybe I could defer the question, if only for a little while.
“Where did you see Jess?”
One of her beautifully natural eyebrows arched at my obvious avoidance tactic. “Strangely enough, your father and I went to Dublin and Jess happened to be there with some friends.”
The idea of Jess being anywhere with friends and me not being one of them stung, although I knew it was my fault that we were no longer friends, well, not my fault because she had backed me into a corner and forced me to choose, so I did. I pushed down the voice in my head that questioned if I had made the correct decision.
“Your father spotted her first and rushed over expecting you to be with her, after all the two of you are,wereinseparable.”
I shrugged off her pointedwere.
“Mum—”
She didn’t let me get any further. “Danni, what happened between the two of you?”
“We just grew apart, you know how it is.”
