‘I think that sounds a brilliant idea! You haven’t really seemed … yourself. I’m sure it will help to meet some other mums.’
Kate wants to tell him that she doesn’t even know who ‘herself’ is anymore.
But then she pictures her sister’s face. In a rush of memories she recalls the day she told Erin that she was pregnant.
Her sister was the second person she told, after Jay. She hadn’t planned on telling her the news in the middle of a soft-play centre on a Saturday morning, but it was hard to pin Erin down since she had her boys. It was 10.30 a.m. and Erin was eating a full lunch in the café as they watched Ted and Arlo thrashing about in the luridly coloured ball pit. Kate felt nauseous and couldn’t believe that her sister was about to tuck into a tuna sandwich. As Erin lifted the bread to her mouth, she caught her eye across the table as Kate sipped her tea and raised an eyebrow.
‘I’ve been up since five,’ Erin explained, wiping mayonnaise from her chin.
Kate had lifted a hand subconsciously to her stomach, thinking about how she would soon become part of the sleepless-night brigade and feeling strangely excited by the fact that she would finally be joining her sister’s club. Kate had spent most of her life trying – and failing – to catch up with her sister. Now they would be on the same page at last.
But telling her sister hadn’t gone at all how she’d intended. When Kate made her announcement, Erin’s face had dropped.
‘I didn’t even know you were trying.’
‘Well, we weren’t reallytryingtrying. But I stopped taking the pill a couple of months ago.’
It happened when she and Jay were on holiday in Slovenia. One morning, they woke early in their little cabin and headed down to the lakeside beach. They were the only people there, except for a couple and their young baby. She had tiny pigtails and chubby cheeks and kept lifting handfuls of sand and attempting to eat it, much to the despair of her parents and the amusement of Kate and Jay.
‘I think we’d make cute babies,’ Jay had said teasingly and Kate had smiled. But then his face grew more serious. ‘Honestly, though, what do you think? I know we’ve talked about it before, but it feels like now could be a good time? I love being a team with you, but maybe it’s time to allow an extra member? A really tiny and cute one?’
Later, when they got back to the cabin, they reached for each other with an added fervour, as though making a decision without even saying the words out loud, and Kate knew that the next day she’d throw her pills in the bin.
‘You’ll make an amazing mum,’ Jay had whispered into her ear. And, back then, she hadn’t even thought to disagree. She’d felt ready. She loved this baby that didn’t even exist yet …
‘Just a couple of months?’
Erin’s eyes had filled with tears and, in a horrifying rush, Kate’s memories from back when Erin was trying for a baby had flashed through her mind. Her sister crying on the phoneto her because her period had come yet again. About the pain of having to buy another gift for another friend’s baby shower. The scrimping and saving to afford IVF treatment and then all the terrified waiting that came after.
‘We’ve been really lucky,’ Kate replied quietly, her earlier excitement replaced with guilt. How could she have been so insensitive? She should have found a better way to tell her sister the news, but then, was there ever an easy way to tell your sister that while you might share fifty per cent of the same DNA, when it came to the fertility lottery, you’d been the one to win the jackpot?
‘Yes,’ Erin had replied. ‘You’re really, really lucky.’
Over the past few months, whenever Kate has considered telling someone, anyone, some of the dark thoughts that have been circling her mind, she pictures her sister’s face and hears those words repeating over and over in her head.You’re really, really lucky. And she shuts her mouth again, because she knows that her sister was right. She issolucky. She has the very thing she desperately wanted.
‘I’m looking forward to trying the group,’ Kate says now, as much to herself as to Jay.
Because, instead of sneaking out to the river every morning, maybe she should take the advice of her family and the health visitor. Instantly, she decides that she won’t be going to the river tomorrow. Or the next day. She can’t keep running away from her life like that. Going to a mum and baby group will be good. It’s the kind of thing other mothers do, isn’t it?
She glances at her phone on the counter. Still no reply from Emma and Leonie. She gets it. They’re busy. They have theirown lives. But maybe Erin was right about needing to make friends here, too. It might still feel strange, but this is her life now and it’s time she started treating it that way, rather than feeling as though she’s on some weird holiday that she will surely come home from eventually.
CHAPTER 10
The sound of banging jolts Phoebe awake. For a second, everything looks red and then she realises it’s because her hair is tangled in front of her face. She tucks it behind her ears and pushes herself up from the sofa, groaning.
‘Oh God!’ Her mouth feels painfully dry and her head throbs. She takes in the empty wine bottle and the discarded piece of toast she must have made herself at some point last night but forgotten to eat.
The banging intensifies, coming from the floor below. There’s a whirring noise and then the radio kicks in too.
‘It is too fucking early for this,’ she says to herself as she struggles to standing.
She scans the room, taking in how much it has changed just since yesterday.
Max’s rucksack usually sits on one of the dining chairs, ready for him to take into work, but today it’s not there. Neither are his running shoes, which are always piled by the flat door. Buthis books are still there on the bookshelves, his biographies and historical novels leant against her medical textbooks and the odd escapist romance bought with the intention of being read on a weekend to unwind, but pretty much all have never been opened.
She isn’t sure which is worse – the empty spaces that Max has left behind, or seeing his other things still there, a reminder of the shared life that was shattered by his announcement yesterday. Part of her wants to throw all his things out the window. Another part wants to use them to build a fortress around herself. But … there’s a third part that feels quietly resigned to what has happened. When he told her that he was leaving, it had been painful, but deep down she hadn’t been completely surprised. It reinforced something she has always feared about herself – that she is terrible at relationships and is ultimately destined to end up alone.
Her longest relationship before Max was with a dietician called Luke who she dated for six months, meeting him in the hospital where she used to work. But he broke up with her after yet another evening when she’d returned home late after an emergency at work.
