‘Nothing in life is to be feared,’ Lizzie added quickly. ‘It is only to be understood.’ Also the wrong thing to say in front of a roomful of women beaten by men for no reason at all. But that was Lizzie, always outside the circle looking in. She gave facts when they wanted feelings, statistics when they wanted advice, nothing when they needed comfort. It had been all right when she was a kid, and facts had been impressive, but as she’d got older, friendships had become more complicated. Both liking horses was no longer enough. People had wanted more than Lizzie’s IQ. They wanted her opinion, her emotional response. They wanted the locked-away parts of her.

Briefly, Lizzie allowed herself to think about the teaching assistant she’d had before it all started. Bright-eyed, early and eager. A brilliant mathematician. Always willing to stay late. Brought in cakes on a Friday. She had asked Lizzie about her weekend plans and met Lizzie’s eye during the daily breakthroughs and heartbreaks of being a teacher. Laughed with her about those little triumphs. Lizzie missed her, and the friendship they’d slowly built.

And then there was Greg. Funny, smart, sexy Greg. Quick as a whip, ridiculously well read, decent to a fault and so incredibly patient. He’d peeled away Lizzie’s brusqueness with the painstaking tenderness of a conservator dabbing at a timeless masterpiece. He’d taken her out again and again, until her brief, frustrated responses had become sentences and her hands had written symbols in the air. ‘I’m hard, Greg,’ she told him, the first time he went to kiss her. ‘I’m not good at this. I …’

Greg had stopped the end of her sentence by delivering the kiss.

‘See?’ he’d said to her, a few dates later, as she lay naked in his denim-coloured sheets, hair like a mermaid’s tail, red mouth swollen, chest still heaving. ‘Nothing cold about you.’

‘I lost the baby,’ Sarah said to no one in particular, but the words had pulled Lizzie from her thoughts and her heart had stopped for a second in sympathy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Lizzie said, and for once it didn’t sound wooden, or insincere.

Last night Lizzie slept deeply. So deeply she has woken forgetting where she is. Half asleep, she thinks she is late for work. Her mind whirs with lesson plans and permission slips; her hands, automatically going to cradle her huge belly, find the flatness of her abdomen instead, and her eyes notice the too-small curtains of the shelter’s bedroom. Then she remembers.

She gets up for her morning wee, and there it is. What she’d been dreaming about, why her back felt bowed. A bright smear of blood. Proof.

George

(Forget-me-not)