I now knew why Adam had begged me to forgive him. What I didn’t know, as I sat for two hours straight in my darkened kitchen, was if I ever could.
Chapter Thirty Five
The café door opened with a jangle from the overhead bell, and I was instantly enveloped in a waft of fried food and warm bodies. I breathed in, practically tasting the calories in the air and an underlying tang of testosterone. The place was packed with its regular clientele: van drivers, cabbies, and builders from the nearby construction site. Every Formica-topped table was occupied, and there was the usual queue at the counter waiting to be served by the café’s cantankerous owner, Fred.
I’d introduced Raegan to this place shortly after she’d taken the job, promising that it made the best sausage sandwiches in the entire world.
‘Bold claim,’she’d said sceptically.
The fact that we still treated ourselves to a takeaway breakfast from Fred’s at least once a week proved me right. We also went there whenever we were hungover, under the weather or needed cheering up.
Raegan had clearly thought me in need of a curative sandwich today after checking out my pasty complexion and the twin dark smudges beneath my eyes.
‘You still look pretty awful,’ she’d observed with her usual lack of filter.
‘Thanks.’
She gave an ‘I call it like I see it’ shrug.
‘Are you sure it’s only a cold? Do you think you should take another test?’
I already had, but it wasn’t the kind that told you whether you’d got Covid.
‘I did, this morning. It was negative.’ That at least wasn’t a lie.
‘Then there’s only one thing for it,’ Raegan said, reaching for her purse.
But I got to mine first. ‘Good idea, but let me go – the fresh air will do me good.’
That too was true. My head was so full of cobwebs it felt like a theme-park haunted mansion. That’s what happens when you only get a couple of hours’ sleep each night, because the rest of it has been spent conducting one-sided conversations with the person who used to share the other half of the double divan.
As hard as I’d tried, I was still struggling to process everything and understand why Adam had kept the biggest secret of all time from me, only to drop it like a bomb when he’d known I could no longer ask him why he’d done it. I’d thought we were better than that, closer than that, and I hated the way I was now questioning ‘us’ in a way I’d never done before. I was holding up every precious memory to the light, checking it for fault lines or cracks.
A brisk walk across the industrial estate, which was home to both Cupcakes and Rainbows and Fred’s, restored a splash of colour to my cheeks, and what the fresh air failed to cure could be fixed by a doorstep-sized sandwich.
I took my place in the queue behind a guy who’d just placed an order that made me fear for his arteries. His waistline suggested that he too was a regular customer.
Unconsciously I ran a hand over my perfectly flat stomach, feeling a twinge of sadness as I realised that, for now at least, that was the way it was going to stay.
It had been far too early to start taking pregnancy tests. Buyingonewould have been bad enough, but I’d single-handedly cleared my local supermarket’s shelves of kits over the past week. My good intentions to wait the full fourteen days before testing had gone out the window after Claire’s unexpected visit, leaving me with a burning urgency to find out if my first round of IUI had worked. Somehow a pregnancy test had found its way into my shopping trolley the very next day. It had nestled there between a carton of eggs and a bag of Fletcher’s kibble, almost daring me to return it to the shelf. I bundled it through the self-service checkout with the speed of a teenage Saturday worker at quitting time.
I hadn’t been surprised the result had been negative. It was, after all, still nine days too early to test. Despite what I’d read on the forums I was suddenly addicted to, there’s a good reason why you should hold fire and do as the medics recommend. Which made it even more bizarre that I continued to test every single morning after that, until today, Magic Day Fourteen, when it had felt all kinds of different as I waited for the two-minute timer on my phone to tell me I could now check the result.
My hands had been trembling as I’d turned over the stick from its face-down position beside the bath and read the words I’d seen every single morning for the last week.Not pregnant. I’d deliberately chosen the kind of test that actually spelled it out in words, as though I couldn’t trust my ability to count the number of vertical lines in a tiny plastic window.
A clicking sound snagged my attention back to the here and now. Fred was leaning across the counter, literally snapping his fingers just inches from my nose, like a hypnotist waking someone from a trance.
‘Not got all day, you know,’ he said in his usual brusque manner.
I flushed, giving my cheeks some much-needed colour.
‘Sorry, Fred. I was miles away.’
‘So I could tell. The usual?’
I nodded, pulling a tenner from my purse. At least Fred allowed me to pay for my sandwiches these days. For the first couple of months after Adam died, he’d pushed the notes I’d be attempting to give him back across the counter.‘It’s on me,’he would say gruffly. He’d never once said he was sorry for my loss, or offered me his condolences; he’d just kept paying for my sandwiches, until one day he’d finally started charging me again and I’d realised my period of mourning, at least as far as Fred was concerned, was officially over.
He prepared the two rounds of thickly cut sandwiches of my order with a speed that always made me fear for his fingers, and yet at the last count he still appeared to have all ten. He had a habit of looking straight at customers while he sliced their order, which frankly was as terrifying as it was astonishing.
