‘Maybe it’s too much to ask of anyone, but I had to let you know how I feel ...’ He gave the crooked smile that I’d fallen in love with decades earlier. ‘How I’vealwaysfelt.’
He didn’t want me to give him an answer straight away, which was just as well because my head and my heart were both in turmoil.
‘I’ve had months to get to this point, it’s only fair you take as long as you need to decide if we’re worth taking one last risk on.’ He reached out and grasped my hands in his. ‘And if you do, we can take things really slowly, get to know each other all over again and see if maybe teenage Josh and Lily were right all along. That we reallyaremeant to be together.’
I’d fallen asleep as dawn was creeping slowly through the shutters, still counting all the times I should have leapt in and told Josh about the fertility clinic and the plans I’d already set in motion. But like an actor with terminal stage fright, I’d missed every single cue.
I’d woken early, with a pounding headache and a new resolve. Iwouldtell him everything this morning when I met him for breakfast at his rental accommodation.
‘I’ll bring croissants,’ I had told him last night.
We were parked by the pavement, outside the mansion-house flats, in the shadows of the life I’d lived before. I hadn’t invited Josh inside, and I knew he hadn’t expected me to. This was still Adam’s home.
But his Airbnb was neutral territory, and I was honest enough to admit that the thought of seeing him in less than ten hours did strange things to my heart rate. And that was even before he kissed me.
With a thoughtfulness and respect that melted my heart, he looked towards my home as his hand gently cupped the back of my neck. He was drawing me slowly closer, giving me all the time in the world to pull away. ‘Is this okay?’ he asked, his voice low in the dimly lit car. ‘Being here? Doing this?’
I nodded.
‘Thank God,’ he murmured, his thumb lightly brushing against my lower lip, ‘because I’ve been dying to kiss you since the moment you walked into the restaurant this evening.’
I swung my legs out of bed, carefully tiptoeing over a softly snoring Fletcher, and padded barefoot into the kitchen. Working largely on autopilot, I set the coffee to brew, my thoughts still caught between everything we’d said the previous night, and all I still had to tell him. PerhapsIought to write a speech too, I thought with a wry smile as I made my way into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
I winced as I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror-fronted cabinet. Hiding the twin panda rings beneath my eyes was going to require skill and some industrial-strength concealer.
‘Moisturiser,’ I murmured as I reached into the cabinet for my favourite brand, and then flinched as something from the top shelf tumbled out of the cupboard and fell with a clatter into the sink. Istared down at the oblong box for several moments before plucking it up. With almost comedic incredulity, I glanced up and down at the shelf several times, knowing I hadn’t disturbed anything on it.
And yet, somehow, in my hands was an unopened pregnancy test. I’d kept the others in a drawer beneath the basin and couldn’t remember moving one rogue box into the cabinet, nor fathom how it had ended up falling into the basin.
I turned the kit over in my hands with the curiosity of an archaeologist on an excavation dig. I didn’t need to check the calendar to confirm that, following yesterday’s negative test, my period was now due.Overdue, corrected a pedantic voice in my head.
Day 14 following the IUI had been and gone, and after learning ten times over that I wasNot Pregnant, the idea that I might be was too huge for my sleep-deprived brain to cope with.
Take the test.
Stress could make you late. I knew that. It had happened to me frequently during Adam’s illness.
But you’re not stressed now. Take the test.
‘I am most definitely stressed,’ I told my reflection, who was now looking even peakier than it had done just a few minutes earlier.
‘Fine,’ I said to no one except the insistent voice in my head. ‘I’ll take the test. But I can tell you now, it’s going to be negative, just like all the others have been.’
I didn’t need to read the instructions – I could have recited them verbatim if asked. And yet I studied them again as though revising for an exam during those excruciating one hundred and twenty seconds for the result to appear in the window.
Like the tests I’d taken before, I set the stick face-down on the edge of the bath, and when my phone’s two-minute timer pinged that it was time to reveal the answer, my hands were shaking in a way they hadn’t done on any of the previous mornings.
I blinked as I read the single word that had appeared in the window, staring intently as I waited for the expectedNotto proceed it. But it never materialised.
I sat down on the edge of the bath, because all at once my legs were incapable of keeping me upright. There was now a second test from the box that was sitting beside the first. They both said exactly the same thing:Pregnant.
The odds had always been so incredibly slight that this first unassisted attempt at IUI would succeed, it had never actually felt real. Until now.
‘We did it, babe,’ I whispered to Adam, hoping that wherever he was he was smiling, because this was what we’d wanted – what I still wanted, I told myself, surprised to find tears were rolling down my cheeks and splashing silently on the two positive tests.
‘This is good news. Wonderful news,’ I said out loud, because it was, it really was.
So why, instead of Adam’s voice in my head, could I hear only the words spoken by another man.
