I breathed out. My bracelet. I’d tried to forget about it and luckily Harry hadn’t noticed it was missing. I flushed as I remembered him holding my wrists down that night. When I’d wriggled, it had rubbed against my wrist and he’d taken it off and put it on his bedside table. “You have my bracelet?”

“I do. It’s perfectly safe.”

“Give it back to me, please.”

“I will. Of course I will, but not yet.” There was a long pause. “How would you explain that?” he asked. “How could it be in my house unless you were there, too?”

I had no answer. I could feel I was about to start crying out of sheer temper and was determined not to let him hear that.

“I’m sure Harry would like to know how willing you were,” he said in a soft voice. “You came to my house. You slept with me. I just want to tell him about the baby.”

“He knows about the baby!”

“He doesn’t know it’s my baby, though, does he? He doesn’t know that you’re carrying my baby. That he was cuckolded.” He laughed. “I have to tell you I am really looking forward to telling him that.”

I ended the call, shaking. When I went to Tom’s house that night to tell him about Harry and Ruby, I’d wanted revenge on Ruby. It had backfired on me.

CHAPTER 48

Emma

Annie called me a few days later, just after Harry left home to go to London. It had rained all night and the sky was still heavy with clouds, but she was as bouncy as ever.

“You sound really tired,” she said. “Once you’re through the first trimester you’ll feel a lot better.”

“I hope so. I’m exhausted.” I didn’t know whether it was my pregnancy that was tiring or the constant thinking and worrying about dates and times and who was more likely to be the father. I’d lie awake most nights now, while Harry slept beside me, chatting to women on online forums, checking figures and charting little graphs. I felt ashamed of myself that I was in this situation; it was something I might expect of a teenager, but I was in my late thirties. The results would take a few days to come through and I felt as though I couldn’t relax until then. At least if I knew, I could do something about it, I told myself, but all I could think about was that if it wasn’t Harry’s baby, our marriage was over.

“Why don’t I come to your house now and we can go through everything that needs to be done?” said Annie. “You could work from home today. There are plenty of things you can do there if you’re up to it.”