I snapped back to myself. ‘Sorry. Just thinking of the best way to move you.’ I braced myself, holding on to a tree branch, and squelched down the muddy side to help her to her feet. She had mud on her face and all along her jeans, and moving her was like dragging a dead weight. How vulnerable she was. If I hadn’t been there, what would have happened to her?

I felt jittery with adrenaline afterwards. I had forgotten what I was capable of, all the different people that lurked inside of me.

Suzi

Suzi

The next morning, exhausted after falling asleep around six, the birds already cheeping outside like the bloody Hallelujah Chorus, I was just finishing up my list of household chores, which somehow seemed to get longer every day, and worrying over everything like a dog with a bone, when the phone rang. Immediately, I was flooded with terror, as I had been every day since you went. Was this it, the one I’d been dreading? Her. Or another silent call, so unsettling.

‘H-hello?’

‘Hello, dear. Just calling to see how my grandbaby is?’

My heart calmed, then sank. ‘Hi, Joan.’

Nick’s mother, a widow of barely sixty with nothing to do beyond sudoku and haranguing the parish council about parking, called almost every day. Not to ask about me, but about the baby, who wasn’t even born yet. What would she say, Joan with her Radio Times reader offers and her book club, if she knew what I was really like? For perhaps the thousandth time that week, I wondered how I’d ended up here. ‘I was just thinking about Christmas, dear?’ Fishing for an invitation, clearly. I could hardly think that far ahead, though I knew it was coming on fast. I was supposed to be with you now. Not making plans for another year with Joan going through the listings mags and circling every programme she wanted to watch, usually involving Alan Titchmarsh or Jane McDonald. This was not my life, and yet here I was stuck in it.

I felt jangly with nerves, moving back and forward between contradictory opinions like closing one eye and opening the other. Who was doing these things, the phone calls, the music, taking Poppet? You? But why? You wouldn’t. Would you? Were they even real, or was I imagining them, trapped in my own frazzled, lonely mind? I had to find out. Joan’s call had reminded me time would not stop just because I couldn’t decide what to do. With every step I took, I could feel the baby move with me. This was happening. I needed to act.