Albie seemed to sense something was up because he stopped feeding momentarily and looked up at me. If I wasn’t mistaken, his blue eyes had started to lighten slightly. In some lights they were a clear azure – coincidentally the same colour as Oscar’s. They were not turning green, like Jason’s, as I had once imagined. His forehead was crumpled and he had a puzzled expression, which also reminded me of Oscar.

‘I love you so much, little angel,’ I whispered, as he suckled away happily again. ‘I’m so sorry for this mess. But whatever happens, it will never change the fact that I am so lucky to have you.’

When Albie had finished the bottle, I burped him and set him down on his play mat, rattling the jangly toys above his head and enjoying watching his face light up as he gurgled excitedly, trying to reach them. His blue eyes were still sparkling as he lay directly underneath a spotlight on the ceiling. I tried to view them purely as Albie’s eyes, the windows into the soul of my precious baby boy. I vowed to live in the moment with him for as long as life would allow us.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Aisha

After an immediate burst of anger towards Jason, it quickly fell away and was replaced by pain. The pure, visceral, searing pain of realizing that my world had been rocked to its core and everything had changed in a heartbeat.

Joni was sound asleep in the pram, so I turned my back on Jason, ignoring his loud, desperate pleas for us to talk, and started walking as briskly as I could to nowhere in particular, just anywhere. Eventually his cries stopped. He didn’t dare follow me, judging correctly that it would cause the most almighty scene if he did.

Although I was in a daze, barely registering where I was going, my feet and mind seemed to lead me towards our street on auto-pilot. Once I found myself standing outside our flat, I wondered about not going in. The sun was beating down and I’d forgotten a large muslin to cover the pram. I hadn’t been planning on staying out for long, but nothing about today was normal now. I decided to go inside, hoping Jason would at least be sensible enough to stay well away and give me some space.

Alone in our flat, the building suddenly felt unfamiliar and cold. I left Joni sleeping in the pram downstairs, blissfully unaware of the bombshell her daddy had just dropped, while I went up and wandered from room to room, barely able to focus on finding the muslin, I had been so blindsided by Jason’s news.

How could he have done this to me – to us? To our little bean, Joni, who we created out of love and I grew inside of me. I felt nauseous. Everything we had felt like a lie. It was as though a trail of falling dominoes – one for each day of my life – had been set in motion and I had no idea when its path of destruction would end; whether it would be today, tomorrow, or never. I bit my quivering lip.