Chapters (39)
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Epilogue
- Author’s note
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
Anna swallowed hard, but the words still stuck in her throat.
‘Anna?’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘I found out on Wednesday.’
There was a brief silence, and then, ‘Ahh.’
‘You sound oddly relieved.’
‘I am. For a moment there I thought you were going to drop some horrible bombshell about all that extreme tiredness being caused by something else. Something much worse.’
‘Well, it’s not,’ Anna said, tracing her fingers over her stomach, looking down at a non-existent bump. ‘It’s a baby. Or what could be a baby.’
‘Okay then,’ her friend said, carefully. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I don’t know. I mean – physically I’m fine. Everything else…’
‘Yeah. I bet.’
Anna shut her eyes. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘That’s okay. You’ve got a bit of time to decide. Not much, but you can’t be that far gone. And I’m here to listen.’
‘I’m such an idiot.’
‘Accidents happen. Anyway, there’s no point dwelling on that now, is there?’ Cathy said gently. ‘It’s what you do next that’s important. I’m going to ask you something. There’s no wrong answer to it and you can tell me or not, it’s up to you, but it’s something you need to think about. All right?’
Anna’s heart turned over. ‘All right.’
‘At some point since you found out, you had a gut reaction. Maybe more than one. What did it tell you?’
‘That morning sickness is the pits?’ Anna joked feebly.
‘It’s been there,’ Cathy probed. ‘Hasn’t it?’
Anna thought about the shadow that had been lurking at the back of her mind for the past few days.
‘I think I want to keep it,’ she said, and once she’d started the words didn’t seem to want to stop. ‘I think that’s what my gut reaction is. I’ll be forty next year. I’m not in a relationship. There’s no one on the horizon. Maybe this is my one chance to have a child and if I don’t have one now I think I’d regret it. But the father is going back home to the other side of the world, I don’t have a job and I’m living in a shed that could be washed off the sea wall in the next big storm.’
Cathy let out a breath tinged with a wisp of laughter. ‘Okay.’
Anna took a breath, frowning to herself. ‘I don’t – I don’t know where all that came from. I can’t keep it. It’s a ridiculous idea. There are so many reasons why—’