And it was a mess because of what had happened in the past.
Rosie was right—what mattered was the future. But the past’s sharp talons held Courtney in their painful grip and wouldn’t let go.
She waited for sleep to come. It refused to oblige. Despite her exhaustion, perhaps she’d napped too much over the last twenty-four hours and was now paying the price.
Her mind began whirling, a maelstrom of spinning thoughts about her life and the hard knocks that had brought her down so low. The nightmare she’d had while napping downstairs on the sofa wasn’t far removed from the actual experiences she’d lived through, despite the morphing of fact and fiction that had happened while she slumbered.
Now, with sleep remaining elusive, Courtney couldn’t help but think about all that had happened to bring her to this place and to this moment…
3
For as long asshe could remember, it had been just Courtney and her mother trying to make their way together in a cold, tough world.
Sharon Flynn was a hard-working single mother and the centre of Courtney’s universe. Life wasn’t easy, but they made the best of things and managed to make ends meet. Their rented terraced house in Southampton was no palace, but they kept it clean and tidy and homely. Sharon worked two, sometimes three, jobs to put food on the table, and although there was never any spare money for luxuries like holidays or a car or expensive gadgets, Courtney was never hungry growing up and never without decent clothes to wear at school.
It was only later when she thought back and remembered all the times her mother had passed on mealtimes, claiming she wasn’t hungry or had to rush off to work, that she understood that Sharon had certainly sacrificed her own needs for her daughter’s. Courtney ached to think of her mother’s selfless acts, performed too many times to count, and ached to think, too, about what they might have cost her.
As a child, Courtney thought her mother was invincible. A force of nature. But once she reached her later teenage years, shebegan to see the cracks in the façade. By the time she was in her twenties, her mother’s fatigue was impossible to miss. Years of working multiple jobs, hard physical jobs like cleaning and care work and waitressing and pulling pints in busy pubs all took their toll. Skimping on meals in order to feed her daughter only added to the burden.
Even once Courtney left school and found a job working in an office and was able to bring home a decent wage, Sharon still had to keep working multiple jobs. Bills kept going up, prices kept going up, and things only seemed to get harder. Sharon’s insistence that Courtney save some of her wages so she could afford to attend college and earn a proper qualification one day only made Courtney feel guilty.
But her protests fell on deaf ears. Sharon refused to accept more of Courtney’s wages to help cover their household costs and kept working as hard as ever. Not even a nasty spell of winter illness earlier that year stopped her turning up for her early morning shifts as a hotel cleaner before putting in another shift in the late afternoon and evening working behind the bar in a pub.
When Courtney, alarmed by her mother’s pale skin and obvious exhaustion, begged her to see a doctor and get some treatment for her lingering illness, Sharon refused, insisting it was just a routine winter bug that would vanish in its own good time.
Of all the ‘what ifs’ in Courtney’s mind, perhaps this one loomed the largest. What if she’d insisted her mother see a doctor? What if she’d dragged her to the GP surgery herself? What if she’d forced her mother to take time off work to recover from her bout of ill health, and damn the financial consequences?
Those what-if questions would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Perhaps if she hadn’t been wrestling with the completely unexpected drama she’d tumbled into herself, Courtney might have acted differently when faced with her mother’s poor health. But by the time Sharon was battling with the winter virus that showed no signs of leaving her alone, Courtney was already five-and-a-half months pregnant and terrified out of her wits.
Falling pregnant was an accident. Falling for Oliver Redman was the mistake that caused it.
She’d only known Oliver for a few weeks before she found herself head over heels, if not in love then certainly in infatuation. Oliver was charming and handsome, a car salesman who knew how to persuade with silky and lethal efficiency. Not that it had taken much persuasion to talk her into bed.
Courtney had jumped in willingly. Eagerly. Boys had never paid her much attention in school, and despite a few scattered dates here and there as a teenager, by the time she hit her twenties her experiences with the opposite sex remained few and far between.
And then along came Oliver Redman, who flattered her and made her feel special and told her she was beautiful, and she lapped up every word.
Three months after they first got together, Courtney discovered she was pregnant. Sitting in the bathroom staring at the pregnancy test as tears streamed down her face, she couldn’t understand how it had happened. They’d been careful. She wasn’t a fool.
But being smart or foolish apparently had nothing to do with it, because there were two lines on the pregnancy test and no matter how many tests she did, those same two lines just kept appearing.
Shock set in. For a few days, she tried to pretend those two lines had never appeared on those pregnancy tests. If she ignored it, perhaps the problem would go away.
Once the shock passed, realisation dawned. This wasn’t a problem she could ignore. And it wasn’t a problem she should face alone, either.
On a rainy afternoon in late September, Courtney met Oliver at the car showroom where he worked, and during his lunch hour he drove them both to the quiet country park where they often went to be alone. Summoning her courage, she told him she was pregnant.
Oliver stared for a long beat, his eyes growing wide. Then he let out a sharp laugh and said, “It’s not mine, is it?”
If he’d stabbed her through the heart, it couldn’t have hurt more than those harsh words and that cruel laugh.
“Of course it’s yours!” she said. Remembering her own stunned reaction to the discovery, she reminded herself that Oliver would need time to absorb the news she’d just given him.
But it turned out she was wrong about that.
“You’ll have to get rid of it,” Oliver said, his tone implacable. “That’s all there is to it.”
