“It could be one of the girls who was here for Vic’s hen party.” Amelie stood behind Seph, a hand on his shoulder. Clearly she was going down the route of feeling sorry for him.
I looked around my sisters and Katie. Katie shook her head. She’d had a boy around the same time as I’d had Eliza, which brought her and Nick’s family to three. She’d said she’d love another, but not until the twins were at school full time and settled. Common sense.
If we had any common sense, we’d have waited until Eliza was a little bit older, but as soon as she stopped being a baby and became a little girl, I wanted another. Killian had only looked slightly scared when I told him, and added that it might take a while for me to get pregnant.
It hadn’t.
Note to self – Killian shows me his abs and I conceive. It really had been that fast.
“I do have news.” Amelie stood up a little straighter.
She was our oldest friend having grown up with her two brothers in the house next to us. Her relationship with her father had been severed, when at eighteen she’d been told she needed to get engaged to one of her father’s business acquaintances.
It was archaic and abusive; my blood had boiled ever since and when her father had died a couple of years ago, I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral, not when I knew that her father was the man my birth mother had an affair with, had wanted to leave us to be with him.
At eighteen, she’d been disinherited and cut off by her father. Her mother had barely stayed in touch, and Amelie had gone her own way, travelling and then settling in London where she ran a café that moonlighted as a speakeasy.
“You’re pregnant?” Seph removed his hands from his face and blurted it out.
She laughed. “No sugar, you need to get hold of sperm for that. I’m moving.”
“House?” Seph stood up.
I saw Marie give a sigh of relief now he was off the slipper chair.
“And everything. I’ve bought a pub and appointed a manager for the café. I move to Anglesey in February, once the works are completed.” She beamed brighter than I’d seen her for months, years maybe. “I was going to tell you after Max’s wedding but now seems like a good time.”
Seph looked even more flustered now, slightly panicked. This was his morning routine totally blown; gym, shower, coffee from Amelie’s, start work, another coffee at nine with breakfast – he’d struggled when she’d been on holiday.
“The manager I’ve appointed will be great. He’ll make sure you get the beans you like and the right amount of froth.” She put a hand on Seph’s forearm.
He still looked petrified.
“Why Anglesey, Amelie?” Callum sat down on Marie’s slipper chair. “I think Payton and Owen have left the kitchen if we want to go back in there.”
“Wise idea,” Marie said. “That chair was not designed for someone of your weight and size to plonk their arse on it, so up you get.”
Callum grinned and pulled Marie into a side hug. I saw her melt a little because there was very little Callum could ever do wrong, including sitting on her favourite chair.
We headed back into the kitchen, several glances going in the way of the downstairs bathroom as we passed the corridor that led to it. The positive pregnancy test in there was still the elephant in the room, a large baby elephant.
I hadn’t seen it; I doubted Killian would’ve even registered it, had he been in it. “Seph, are you sure you saw it – the test in there?”
“What else would it be?”
He looked at me with puppy dog eyes. “I know what one looks like and, because I’d seen Payton’s, I probably actually noticed it and assumed it was hers – that she’d just taken another one to check.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I really am dense sometimes. I didn’t know she hadn’t told Owen. He’s going to hate me.”
“I think he’s far too happy to hate you.” Maxwell patted him on the back. “But you’re probably on baby-sitting duty for the rest of your life.”
Seph shrugged. “That was going to happen anyway. I need to go and apologise.”
I grabbed him before he could leave the kitchen. “I think they’ll be busy doing other things right now and you knocking on the door willnotbe appreciated. And you need to find out where Amelie’s off to.” And whoever had left that test there was clearly not in the mood for outing themselves right now. “Sit.”
For once in his life, Seph didn’t argue, sitting down on one of the barstools instead.
“So tell us about this pub you’ve bought.” Marie sat herself next to our dad, patting his leg and gesturing for him to top up her glass.
Amelie curled up on the sofa, looking even more like a tiny blonde pixie than she normally did.
