A Part of Me
Anouska Knight

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Also by Anouska Knight

SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE

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For my sisters, who I love more than Marmite

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I have to thank Anna Scott, ITV producer extraordinaire, blonde bombshell and all-round good egg. No, you didn’t have a hand in this book; however, in my typical buffoonery I neglected to thank you in the last and, after all the laughs and fabulousness you brought with you, a thank you was the very least I owed you. Thank you!

As always, gargantuan thanks galore to my rip-roaring ever-enthusiastic, ever-encouraging editor Donna–The Don–Hillyer. I couldn’t possibly bust through the pain barrier without you. Well, you and an endless supply of chocolate-dipped confections and caffeine. The power of three, right there, folks.

Huge thanks also to the powerhouse of office ninjas at Mills & Boon/Harlequin UK for your massive support throughout the last twelve wonderful months. I must’ve caused at least one of you an epic headache so, to that person in particular, a very hefty thank you. And soz! I’m going to roll the lovely lot at Cherish PR into that too. Thanks gang! Aspirins are in the post.

To my agent Madeleine Milburn, thank you for coming aboard. It feels good already, Agent Milburn! (You might want to get some aspirins in too.)

Jim, thank you for always deserving a thank you, and thanks too for shrugging it off when you didn’t hear one as often as you should have.

To my other brilliant boys, Bodhi and Wolf, for letting me slip away quietly into my room and regress into grimy student-esque habits without raising too many complaints about missed bedtime stories and school projects, thanks, fellas–you’re more awesome than I know how to write.

Mena, thanks, kid, for lending me your ears and telling me which ideas are really too naff to write about. Taz, thanks for lending me your home so I have somewhere else I can shuffle my grimy student-esque habits around. I’ll replace the chocolate-dipped stuff … and the coffee. Mum, thanks for telling me that I can do it. And then telling me again.

Last but definitely not least, an enormous thanks to Clare and Podge. Clare, for helping me to understand a journey that has to be heard, not researched, and Podge for the memory of school-trip oysters, a trauma burned into my psyche. You both rock.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Extract

Endpages

Copyright

PROLOGUE

THERE WAS SOMETHING innately foreboding about waking up at an unknown hour in an unfamiliar room. A childlike fear, fortified by pressing shadows and the mysteries they concealed. Revelations better left in the dark.

Against an unexplained sharpness nestled deeply within my throat, I inhaled the softness of my mother’s perfume from where she sat motionless beside me. Her presence was little reassurance amidst the thick heavy quiet.

As children, she’d once driven us, weeping, through the night to spend the remaining dark hours in the box room of my grandmother’s bungalow. I was reminded now of that long night in the darkness, lying in a bed that did not smell of home, listening to the sounds of my brother’s restless sleep from the fold-out bed next to me. I remember being not quite brave enough to risk disturbing so much as the air around me to call out for my mother.

She was here now, but still this felt a lot like that time. The air heavy with a palpable sense of change. The loss of something achingly irreplaceable.

I opened my eyes with another steadying breath. The pinch in my throat cut the action short. Mum shifted beside me.

It was too quiet.

Intuitively, a cool, soft hand tried gently to reassure with soothing motions over the back of my knuckles. The stirring anxiety in my chest blossomed in response. A warm wave of nausea rushed past the scratchiness in my throat then, lacing my mouth with a pitiful flurry of saliva. It hurt when I retched. Across the bleak grey room, the sound was enough to pull the attention of the figure standing quietly there.

I felt my mother’s hand close around my own.

‘Sweetheart? Try not to move too suddenly.’ In the dimness of the nightlight, I couldn’t see that she had been crying, but I could hear it, there in the fragile reserve of her voice. Another retch and Mum took back her hand, adeptly lunging forth with a cardboard bowl. The sickness heralded an immediate thumping in one side of my head, forcing closed my eyes again as she wiped the bitter residue from my lips. They hurt too. And my teeth, clenching behind them – sore from the assault of medical intervention. I swallowed to remind myself of it. The pain lessened the further down it travelled. Beyond the neatly folded edges of crisp white hospital bed sheets, pain seemed to disappear altogether.

I couldn’t bring myself to look down there.

A faint squeak of shoes on linoleum stirred across the other side of the room. The sounds grew as their owner began making his way tentatively over. James’s hand, heavier than my mother’s, ran gently over my head. For a moment, it soothed the angry thump of ache there.

‘It’s okay, baby,’ he whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

There was something fragile in James’s voice too, something that didn’t belong. He leant in and kissed the straggled brown mess of my hair. His whiskers were long, scratchy, with none of his usual cologne to cocoon me as he closed the distance between us. He smelled the way he sometimes did after his run – of strain and exhaustion. Something in the way he kissed me now paved the way for inevitable memories of the previous morning to filter back home.

The day had begun like any other. The same dull ache I knew would subside from my hips once I was up and showered; enough mischievous nudges to wake me long before my alarm had chance to. And then, the unexpected as I’d pulled back the duvet, revealing that this day would punctuate all others in the last thirty-one weeks.

There hadn’t been that much blood at first. During the frantic time that followed, I’d stayed calm – we both had – listening to plans being made as the professionals poked and prodded, recorded and conferred. James had focused on their reassurances, while I’d stacked all my chips on the nudges. That was the practical thing to do. No panicking unless the nudges stopped. All the while I’d kept calm, thinking such practical thoughts, as if thought alone could keep us safely centred in the eye of the storm building around us. Now there was only quiet.

James moved his head beside mine, his breathing shallow against my ear. I listened to it. But there was no relief in him. I knew then. This was the aftermath of that storm. The stillness after the chaos. The changed landscape waiting to be considered. Here in this too-quiet room, the devastation would be met.

Mum took my free hand again, the other engaged in tubing and tape. She was squeezing it tightly now, holding onto it as if one of us might be blown to oblivion otherwise. I lay quite still, suddenly afraid again of disturbing the air around me.

‘Amy? Do you know where you are?’ James asked quietly, straining to hold the evenness of his voice. He was still holding himself awkwardly beside me, his face hidden from mine. I nodded against him, willing him to stem the rest of his words. He was trembling. ‘Amy … We lost him, baby.’

My mother’s grip loosened as she broke beneath a subdued shudder of anguish. James’s voice cracked against me. ‘We’ll be okay, baby,’ he promised. ‘We’re gonna be okay.’

CHAPTER 1

Five years later

AS FAR AS uncomfortable experiences went I was pretty good in the saddle, I thought. Calm. Controlled. Cool under fire. And these traits had come in handy over several tumultuous years working within a fast-paced architectural practice. But this? This gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘pressure’. This whole set-up was geared towards breaking a person. A relentless tap-tap-tapping at the walls of our resolve, thinly veiled attempts to expose our weaknesses so that they could finally tell us what I’d prepared myself to hear all along – that we weren’t worthy, that we’d make awful parents, and that this had all been a horrific waste of everybody’s time.

A heavy wooden door clattered shut somewhere off the corridor where we sat, fidgeting like apprehended schoolchildren. We both listened to the patter of daintily heeled shoes as they echoed away from us to some other inhospitable depth of the building. I knew it wasn’t Anna, she’d been wearing flats when she’d briefed us this morning. I’d watched her tapping them nervously on our behalf before the panel had called us in, then I’d focused my eyes on the bejewelled toes of those same shoes while James answered the questions each panel member had put to him.

I let out a long silent breath, surprised that I couldn’t see a grey plume as it hit the chilly air in this fusty old building. James’s knee resumed its impatient bobbing. That James, the epitome of unflappability, was this jumpy only jangled my own nerves.

Every other meeting, interview and session had been conducted in a purpose-built room. A conference suite, an office, our home, even – where there were carpets and coffee and heating. But the Town Hall, this last checkpoint on the home straight, was about as inviting as a Dickensian institution.

I checked my watch. It had been nearly fifteen minutes since the panel had dismissed us to await our fate out here. You could cram an impressive amount of mental self-flagellation into that timeframe, I’d found. I knew James didn’t want to hear it, but I needed to blurt out something, and words seemed preferable to anxious blubbing.

‘I shouldn’t have said we’ve been looking at bigger houses,’ I groaned quietly.

Exasperatedly, James pushed a flop of dark blond hair back from his face and gave his left knee a reprieve from all the jiggling. I’d made him grow his hair out a little after one of the other women on the prep course had said we looked corporate. She’d made it sound like a swear word. James couldn’t understand why I was taking any sort of advice from a woman who was actually choosing single-parenthood. When she’d told us that she was hoping to adopt more than one child by herself, James had whispered that even if she made it to the medical stage, they’d probably find she was certifiably nuts.

I hadn’t noticed until just now, but longer hair didn’t really suit James.

He turned to face me. ‘They didn’t ask us anything that they hadn’t already read in our report, okay? And there’s no rule that says we can’t move house one day.’ James’s right knee took over the bobbing.

I tucked precision-straightened hair neatly behind my ears and began to fiddle with one of the small diamond studs he’d bought me for my twenty-ninth last month. One of the few nights we’d actually gone out together and not fallen out.

‘Stability, James. That’s what they want to hear, not that we’re planning to up sticks and disrupt our home—’

James held a hand aloft to cut me off. ‘Amy, forget it. We’re not doing this again. We’ve jumped through every sodding hoop imaginable over the last year just to get to this point. We’ve just met ten people in there we don’t know from Adam, yet they know every last sodding thing there is to know about us.’ He was already pointing an accusing finger down the corridor towards the room where the panel were still discussing and dissecting our lives. ‘They’ve been through our income, our childhoods … our sodding body mass indexes, for Christ’s sake! If it’s all going to come tumbling down now because you said you’d like a bigger garden one day then they can shove it up their pedantic arses.’

‘Shh! Someone might hear you!’ I sputtered, nervously eyeing both ends of the corridor. James stood. I watched as he moved away from me over to the tired lead window opposite. This journey hadn’t been an easy one, but on some level I knew that James had found it harder than I had, and ultimately would find it easier to walk away from, if it was about to come to that.

We’re nearly there, I wanted to say to him, but everything about him looked so uneasy. He’d never wear that jumper again. I’d bought it from M&S because walking in wearing his favoured Ralph Lauren might’ve been read as ‘part-time yacht-enthusiast’, when what we were aiming for was ‘full-time crayon-enthusiast’. I blew out a cheekful of air. Subliminal messages through the medium of casual knitwear – how was that for cruising close to certifiable nuttiness?

James shook his head as he looked out onto the dismal March morning. We’d asked for the earliest slot available, I knew I’d be a wreck otherwise. James began jostling the keys in his trouser pocket before turning cool blue eyes on me.

‘Anna wouldn’t have put us forward to panel if she didn’t think we were ready, you know that. Just … try to relax, okay?’ I nodded, reluctantly leaving my earring alone before I pinged it onto the floor again. I decided to chew at my lower lip instead. There was less chance of that ending up on the floor and, unlike diamonds, skin was self-regenerating. Beyond the corner of the corridor, softly striding footsteps were making their way towards us. James’s chest rose with a deep intake of breath as he turned back to the window.

The Chair of the panel, a forty-something chap with thinning hair and a name I’d been too flustered to catch, rounded the corner towards us. Awkwardly, I got to my feet and straightened my clothes. I’d gone for a pale blue blouse and pretty cardigan in lavender. Depending on how the next few minutes went, I probably wouldn’t wear them again either.

‘Miss Alwood, Mr Coffrey. Would you like to come back in?’

I gave a small, unassuming smile and convinced myself he had smiled back. I looked to James for affirmation, but he was steely eyed.

I watched Mr Chair’s elbow patches all the way back into the musty room where Anna sat at one of three chairs set in front of the panel. We’d got lucky when Anna was assigned to us. Not everyone liked their social worker but, thankfully, we did. I waited for her to look at us, but only the back of her short blonde ponytail faced our way. My stomach churned. Beyond Anna, the panel of four men and six women looked as though they were sitting at the top table of a wedding reception, with a very small congregation of three with which to share their joy.

I crossed my fingers at my side. Please, let them be about to share joy.

‘Hey, take a seat,’ Anna whispered, gesturing at the chairs we’d sweated out our interrogation on just half an hour ago. I was sure I saw one of the panel members, the adoptee, smile too, but it was so much warmer in here the temperature change was making me feel fuzzy at the edges.

The Chair settled himself into his seat again and fumbled at his papers the way officials with official business like to do. ‘Mr Coffrey, Miss Alwood.’ A new thudding was taking up residence in my chest. ‘We know this can be a rather fraught experience, so we don’t wish to subject you to any further unnecessary tension.’ James reached over and took my hand assertively in his. We’ll be okay. Whatever happens, we’ll work through it.

‘Therefore, we would like to offer you both our congratulations. It is this panel’s recommendation that you be approved as joint adoptive parents to a child under the age of four years.’

Thud, thud, thud …

The pulsing inside my chest was the only thing telling me I hadn’t keeled over and died on the spot, but even that was beginning to wane. The trembling inside me was being swallowed up by something else, something shocky and numb – a sensation sweeping through my insides chased by a warmer, welcome feeling …

Joy.

Could this really be happening? Finally, were we nearly there? I glanced vacantly through each of the warm expressions of the panel members. Had I correctly understood what had just been said?

I looked at Anna. Her face was rosy with controlled delight, which made something loosen in me, some invisible hawser rope that had kept me steady all these past months, suddenly letting me go enough that I might keel over yet. James nuzzled a kiss against my cheek, his thumb chasing the first wet track as it coursed down my face. He said something to Anna as a broken message began organising itself in my mind.

We’re going to have a child. Somewhere out there, our little boy or girl is waiting for us to bring them home.

Skirting along the periphery of my thoughts, I was aware that Anna was saying something in reply to James. She patted my back reassuringly, just a small gesture of comfort but enough to trigger the domino effect. I hadn’t meant to dissolve so whole-heartedly in the middle of that room, to be so completely disabled by my own happiness and rendered such a useless blubbering mess, but after twenty-one months of being cool under fire I couldn’t keep it inside another second.

There was room for only one thought, one thread of coherence in my mind, and each time it lapped around my brain, so began a new wave of uncontrollable sobs, muffled only by James’s M&S jumper. The jewel-like embellishments on the toes of Anna’s shoes shone and danced like a kaleidoscope refracted through my rather impressive deluge of tears, and then James leant back in to my hair and said the words. Said them out loud so that we could hear the truth in them.

‘We’re going to be parents.’

CHAPTER 2

‘WELL, YOU KNOW what they say.’ Phil grinned, chocolate eyes peeping from under her blunt designer fringe. All around us, the city’s populace of on-trend urbanites basked in the funky basement atmosphere of Rufus’s Cocktail Lounge. It had always been our favourite place.

‘Go on, Phil, what do they say?’ I asked, indulging her.

‘If your sex-life is crap and you argue all the time, you might as well have kids.’ Phil finished her words of encouragement with a blood-red smile and a playful shrug of her shoulders.

‘I think you mean get married, Phil. If your sex-life is crap and you argue all the time, you might as well get married, isn’t it?’

Phil hooked a long glossy fingernail around a hair that had affixed itself to her newly reapplied lippy and swept it back in with the others. ‘Whatever. They’re both bad ideas.’ She winked.

‘Well, I know which one I’m interested in,’ I said, over the mellow beats of Rufus’s in-house DJ. ‘And it doesn’t involve a big white dress.’ I smoothed out the creases of my silk pewter vest while Phil let her eyes follow a group of men towards the bar. In the dimness of the club’s ambience, her dark brown bob looked closer to black, giving her an air reminiscent of a Japanese doll. Whatever had caught her attention at the bar wasn’t enough to hold it there.

‘We’ll see,’ she cooed. ‘Once junior arrives, you’ll be all loved up and Viv will be banging on about nuclear families, and you’ll buckle. I’ll put money on it. You’ll be Mrs Coffrey before the end of next year.’

Phil knew my family too well. Mum had already tried every angle she could to talk me into the virtues of marriage, despite my father having put an abrupt end to theirs after falling for mine and my brother’s babysitter. It wasn’t that I was against marriage exactly, and in fairness to my father after eighteen years it seemed to be working for him and Petra, but as far as commitment went, I just couldn’t see that there was anything more binding than raising a child together.

‘Mum just wants the whole wedding faff, Phil. She missed out when my brother married Lauren because Lauren’s mum did it all. That’s why she’s going nuts with this bloody party she’s talked us into having. Did I tell you that she’s made me order a massive cake for it?’

Phil broke into a husky giggle. ‘If she’s content with throwing you a mock-wedding reception, Ame, cake and all, take the deal and run.’

‘It’s not a mock-wedding reception.’ I shuddered. At least not outside my mum’s head it wasn’t. ‘It’s just a small gathering to celebrate our new status as …’ What were we now, exactly? ‘… parents-in-waiting.’

‘It’s your last chance at a big mash-up before you go all boring on me is what it is. I suppose we’ve had a good run, though.’ Phil sighed. ‘You’ve been pretty good fun, for someone who’s already been stuck with the same ball and chain, for-ever.’

James wasn’t the ball and chain. Ball and chains didn’t keep a mental itinerary of all the things we wouldn’t be able to do over the next few years. Like skiing holidays, and city-breaks. If anyone was shackling anyone else, Phil probably had it back to front. ‘Eight years is hardly forever, Phil.’ I smiled.

‘Sex with the same man for eight years and you’re not even thirty yet. It’s heartbreaking,’ she said absently.

I shook my head, spearing a slice of lemon with my straw. ‘You never know, Philippa. You might settle down yourself, one day.’

Phil grimaced at the horror of such a thought. ‘And wake up to the same guy for the rest of my days? No. There isn’t a man who could swing that deal. I mean, how utterly depressing. No wonder women turn to chips and chocolate once they settle down. You’d better buy yourself some loose joggers now, Hon, you’ve done well to last this long. In fact, I’d been wondering what gift I should bring you guys to your “kissing-our-lives-goodbye” party. I’ll get you his and hers jogging bottoms … with pockets, for your chocolate wrappers.’

Phil smiled while a couple of our remaining cohorts, still lucid enough to follow the conversation, joined in.

‘I can’t imagine Amy in jogging bottoms,’ chirped Hannah, Cyan Architecture & Design’s newest office junior. Hannah’s wispy blonde hair had become steadily more wispy as we’d worked our way through the cocktails list. ‘You’re always so … polished,’ she continued.

Sat beside Hannah, Sadie Espley – niece of Adrian Espley, Cyan’s founding architect – looked as though she might actually contribute something for the first time all night. Then her phone flashed again, reeling her face back down behind a curtain of honey-blonde tresses.

‘You do know that Amy isn’t your boss, right, Hannah?’ Phil enquired, drily. ‘You haven’t got to kiss her arse. And before you say it, yes, even though it is indeed a perfectly honed and perky size ten.’

‘Twelve now,’ I corrected. James had mentioned Christmas excess twice since my birthday.

Tom and Alice, Cyan’s computer-generated-imagery techie and marketing primo respectively, flopped down onto the right side of the booth, squashing the rest of us four bodies closer to Phil.

‘Did I hear something about a perfect arse?’ Tom asked, a glaze of dance-induced sweat sticking loose fawny curls to his forehead. ‘You talking about my booty again, Philippa?’ He never changed out of his hipster jeans and casual shirts, not even for Friday-night cocktails.

‘Not this time, hot stuff,’ Phil replied. ‘Amy’s arse, not yours. Hannah’s grown fond of kissing it.’

‘Cool it, Phil. Hannah’s just being nice. Remember what that feels like? Being nice?’ I stuck my tongue out playfully and was rewarded with another danger-red grin.

‘If you think Phil’s got a big mouth, Hannah, wait till you go on a night out with Dana and Marcy,’ Alice said glibly. ‘You’ll think Phil’s a pussycat.’ Phil blew Alice a kiss. Over the last few years Cyan Architecture & Design had grown enough that the women in the office now loosely formed two groups. Us and Them. Dana and Marcy were definitely thems. Phil said Sadie belonged with them too, and wasn’t impressed that I’d asked her out with us tonight. Sadie’s relentless preoccupation with her phone wasn’t exactly winning her any points. Sadie lifted her head and briefly looked big blue eyes out from trendy rectangular glasses. ‘Dana and Marcy are all right, Alice,’ she declared.

Phil cocked an unconvinced eyebrow. ‘Well, they’re not going to be bitchy with you, are they, Sadie? Not with Uncle Adrian paying their wages.’

‘I earn my keep, Phil,’ Sadie retorted. ‘I work all the hours you do.’

‘Er, you’re in the studio the same amount of hours, Sadie, I’ll give you that. But that’s not quite the same thing.’

The atmosphere dropped a few centigrade. ‘I don’t get any special perks, Phil.’

Phil smiled. ‘But you don’t see Uncle Adrian letting us lot get away with a fumble in the samples library with the lighting rep, Sadie. That poor guy, he only came into the office to show you their new product range.’

Tom began tittering. ‘She saw more than that!’

Sadie glared at Phil. ‘So who are you, Phil, the sodding fun police?’ She tried to meet Phil’s glare, then, obviously thinking better of heading further into the argument Phil had started, returned to her text-a-thon. Fortunately, her phone had more life left in it than Leah from reprographics, who’d been face down on the glass-strewn table for at least twenty minutes. Phil stopped glaring at Sadie and muttered something under her breath about dodgy CVs and loose knickers. They’d always jarred. Phil disliked Sadie for the same reasons I couldn’t bring myself to – Sadie was twenty-three, with legs up to her eyeballs, and seemed to have way too much fun for just one person. I hoped it would last as long as possible for her. I’d been like Sadie too, once. Phil still was, she just wasn’t twenty-three any more and it annoyed her.

Phil shook it off just as a sticky round of Cosmopolitans touched down on the table next to Leah’s face.

‘So, who’s up for going up town?’ Alice enthused.

‘You guys get stuck into those,’ I said, nodding at the drinks. ‘I’m just nipping to the Ladies’.’ I nudged Tom and Alice so I could wriggle out past them.

A few minutes of peace in the loos and I was glad not to be part of the clubbing debate. By the time I’d re-emerged from my cubicle, I was already flagging. The door into the Ladies’ swung open and a familiar head bobbed into view. ‘So? We going with them?’

I pulled a face and pumped on the soap dispenser. ‘I don’t think I’ll be out much later, Phil.’

Phil pouted. ‘Nah, you’re right. I don’t think I could listen to Hannah blowing any more smoke up your arse anyway.’

‘Give her a break, Phil. She’s a nice girl.’

Phil acknowledged me sourly then began retouching her lippy in the vanity mirror. ‘I’m a nice girl too, you know,’ she huffed indignantly.

‘I know! Just … be cool. Give Hannah a chance to know that too.’ I finished rinsing the soap from my hands. ‘And lay off Sadie. I know you’re not keen but she’s not so bad. Plus, I don’t want to wind Adrian up. He’s strung out enough.’

Phil watched me in the mirror. ‘Adrian’s always strung out. Since when did you roll over for him, anyway?’

I pulled a few paper towels from the dispenser and bent down for a quick cubicle check. ‘Since Claire Farrel told him she’s taking a partnership with Devlin Raines. She leaves in six weeks.’ Devlin Raines were Cyan’s main competition in the city. They were a bigger company than us, with offices in several UK cities, and Adrian hated losing anything to them, especially staff.

‘Claire’s leaving? She kept that quiet. So that’s why Adrian’s been so uptight.’ Phil began tidying her fringe. ‘But why does that affect you?’

‘Because a few days before Claire gave Adrian notice, he agreed to consider James and I sharing the adoption leave. Claire’s leaving has thrown the surveying team up in the air, I don’t want him to clamp James down and change his mind about us sharing the time off.’

‘How much time is it?’

‘A year.’

‘A year? Adrian agreed to that? Well, at least now I know why you asked Glitter Knickers to come out tonight. Keep Uncle Adrian on side then, hon.’

‘That’s not why I invited Sadie, Phil. She’s been a little out of kilter lately. I think she’s having man trouble.’

‘Man trouble? Sadie! You are joking? Jeez, Ame, you are such a sucker. She’s been sexting some brain-dead beefcake all night. I bet you any money, she dumps us soon to go cop off with him.’

I watched Phil carefully in the mirror. ‘Jealous, much?’

She was trying to keep a straight face. ‘You’re damned straight, I am,’ she conceded, tumbling into husky laughter. ‘I could do with a good snog.’

Phil tugged me back out into the throb of Rufus’s. Leah from reprographics was now propped up between Tom and Hannah. They were chatting to each other as if it were a bus stop and not a human body sandwiched between them.

‘Where’re Sadie and Alice?’ Phil asked.

‘Clubbing’s a no-go with this one,’ Tom huffed, repositioning Leah’s limp arm through his. ‘Alice’s gone to get a head start on the pizzas and Sadie, er … she left when you guys went to the loos.’

‘Sadie left? By herself?’ I asked.

Tom shrugged. ‘Said she didn’t fancy sharing a pizza, or a taxi, with Phil. She said she was going to grab a cab at the rank.’ I threw Phil a reproachful look and checked my watch.

‘What?’

‘Come on, it’s one thirty in the morning. We’re not leaving her to wait for a cab on her own.’

Phil grimaced again. ‘But what about the pizza?’

I narrowed my eyes at her. ‘You don’t eat pizza, Phil. It’s not macrobiotic.’

Phil was better at narrowed-eyes than I was. ‘Oh, sod it, Amy. Why do you have to be such a sodding Girl Guide?’ she huffed, starting off towards the doors. She waited there impatiently as I said goodbye to the others.

‘Come on, then,’ Phil called, ‘let’s go rescue Glitter Knickers.’

*

Ten chilly minutes later, the end of the taxi rank queue snaked into view.

‘I don’t see her, Phil,’ I said, trailing my eyes over the queue of scantily clad girls and kebab-wielding lads vying for the next available taxi.

‘She’s a big girl, Ame. She probably got the beefcake to pick her up.’

‘And what if she didn’t?’

Phil gave the queue a once-over. ‘She’s not here, Ame.’ A commotion broke out in the line, the timeless cocktail of testosterone and alcohol. ‘Sod this,’ Phil scowled, ‘I’m not waiting here with this lot. Work’s only five minutes away, let’s call a cab from there. Quicker and warmer.’ As soon as Phil mentioned the cold, I could feel it, seeping in through my jacket.

‘We can’t, Phil. No unauthorised access at weekends any more. Adrian was pretty clear on that.’

‘Again with the Girl Guide thing, Ame! You’re such a do-gooder these days.’

I held my hands up. ‘Okay, okay! We’ll go to the office. But I’m not getting labelled as the Nightshagger, okay? So if we get caught, I’m just gonna flat out say that I know it’s you, Phil.’

Phil’s face flourished at that. ‘Let me tell you now, if I was the one who’d been flushing the un-flushable down the men’s loos, I wouldn’t risk getting caught there now. The cleaners are on the warpath. Anyway, everyone knows it’s Stewart from reprographics, the dirty little monster. No wonder Leah drinks so much, it must be awful working next to Stewie all week.’ Phil huddled into me, walking us away from the crowd.

‘So Stewart’s been slipping into the studios at night! Are you sure?’ Honestly, I didn’t think he had it in him.

‘Yeah, I’m sure. You see, Ame, while you spend your time keeping abreast of promotions, and job restructuring, the rest of us keep track of the important stuff – like who’s sneaking into the office at night for a bonk. It would almost be romantic, if the little weasel wasn’t married.’

‘Stewart’s married? I’ve never noticed a ring.’

‘That’s because he never wears it outside the marital home, the sneaky shit.’

Comical though the saga of the Nightshagger had been, I felt bad for Stewart’s wife, whoever she was. I’d seen the flip side of extra-marital fun, and it wasn’t much fun at all. Phil shivered as we crossed the deserted courtyard of the immaculately landscaped business square where Cyan Architecture & Design’s studios dominated. The studios were housed in part of what was once an old biscuit factory, deep red brickwork dating back to an era when even industrial buildings were beautiful.

We came to a standstill between the two potted box bushes standing sentry at Cyan’s sleek glass entrance. Phil was already ordering the taxi by the time I’d silently punched the code into the door keypad, letting us in to the perma-lit reception. It was marginally warmer inside the lobby, but the blast of cold air outside had already highlighted the fact that I was not as sober as I thought.

Phil finished the call as I flopped down into the swivel chair behind Ally’s reception desk.

‘They said fifteen minutes. We could go and revise a drawing while we wait, if you like?’

I swatted my hand dismissively. Okay, so I’d become a bit of a slave to this place over the last few years, but taken with Phil’s abandon it made for a necessary balance within the interiors team.

I began swivelling my chair slowly. ‘Why does Ally need so many mini Post-it notes?’ I whispered, glancing over the array of neon-coloured squares framing Ally’s computer screen.

‘Probably so she can tell her arse from her elbow?’ Phil leant over my shoulder to read the little memos. ‘File nails, stick boobs in Adrian’s face, practise counting to ten …’

I pushed her away. ‘Don’t be mean, Phil. Ally’s okay. I like her eyelashes. They’re so big, and …’ I tried to think past the effects of too many mojitos for the right word ‘… lashy.’

Phil grinned. ‘Oh, you like that, do you, Hon? Allow me!’ Phil took a luminous-pink Post-it note from the colourful stack of pads beside Ally’s keyboard and began fringing it with a pair of scissors from the pencil pot. She leant over the desk and stuck it over my eye. I waited while she did the same to a neon-green Post-it, and slapped it over my other eye. Then she stood back to admire her work. ‘How’s that for a degree in product design? Give them a whirl, then!’

I began power-blinking and grinning in alcoholdefying unison. It would seem that Phil’s cocktail intake was finally taking effect too and an explosion of laughter burst from her throat.

‘Ha-HA! That’s funny!’ she cackled. ‘You should defo wear Post-its on party night, Ame, you look priddy.’

‘BFFs should match, Phillypops. You’ll need some too!’ I chortled. I held off flapping my new eyewear just long enough to fashion Phil a pair of the same, sticking a set of bright orange paper appendages over her smoky grey eyelids. Once we started laughing again, we were infected. Phil hung over the reception desk in silent convulsion while I threw myself back across the swivel chair, somehow still batting mismatched neon eyelids while struggling for breath.

Had we not finally broken for air, we probably wouldn’t have heard it. I caught it first. Somehow managing to hold my snickering long enough to listen a while.

There it was again, someone else’s laughter, deep within the design studio. I held my breath and began flapping my hand at Phil, signalling frantically for her to stop giggling.

Phil caught on and shushed. We both heard it this time, a woman’s laughter. Definitely.

Slowly, I released my breath and watched Phil’s expression sober as she strained to hear. The culprit was already taking shape in Phil’s mind, I could tell. ‘That randy little sod!’ she whispered. ‘Come on, let’s bust the Nightshagger!’

I was too drunk for this, so was Phil. I could feel that last bout of laughter still sitting high in my chest, threatening to erupt. I watched Phil cock her ear and wait. The giggler had no idea they had company.

‘And do what?’ I whispered.

‘Just bust him! Ame, we’ll never have to wait our turn for printouts again, or panic about getting things print-ready before the repro lot clock off! Stewie will do anything to keep this from Adrian! How good’s your camera-phone?’

She didn’t wait for an answer. Phil grabbed my hand and hoisted me up before we both tried to tack delicately in heels across the reception’s polished floor. As we slipped into the darkness of the first studio, whispers at the far end of the office gave way to another ripple of laughter. This time, Stewart joined in with his guest, a muffled masculine growl of a laugh, rising and disappearing in waves as he buried his face somewhere that most likely did not belong to his wife. Whoever did own those places was enjoying his visit. It made the laughter rise in me. I yanked on Phil’s hand to slow her Royal Marine-like lead across the darkened office before my lungs erupted into ear-shattering laughter.

What? she mouthed as I held her back. One of Phil’s orange non-Marine issue eyelashes was coming unstuck. The grunting was coming from the boardroom, just the other side of a few shafts of moonlight spearing the office windows. Phil yanked us on, passing our own workstations to slump ourselves just the other side of the glass boardroom wall, blinds mercifully shielding us from view.

It probably wasn’t the most appropriate time, but the alcohol in me saw fit to roll off a few more comedy blinks. Phil clamped a hand over her mouth, and for a few more moments, we both stayed that way – crouched in darkness and silent hysterics while the grunter grunted on. Over his groaning, Stewie’s guest was delivering a running commentary on her talents. Listening to dirty talk was too much. I clamped my fingers and thumb over the end of my nose, trying to hold down the pressure of burning hilarity before it leaked noisily from my face.

Phil was at it too, straining to remain quiet as she leant against the glass wall, but unlike me, Phil was focused–determined to take Stewart down commando style. From behind her makeshift lashes, Phil fixed me with determined eyes. She raised her free hand, aggressively pointing two fingers at her own eyes then mine. Then she signalled the count.

Three fingers …

Two fingers …

One …

We half exploded, half fell into the boardroom. Phil had clearly done this before, going straight for the lights.

‘GREEN BERETS! EVERYBODY FREEZE!’ she shouted as the half-naked blonde skittered from where she’d been straddling her friend.

The laughter that had been waiting for its escape jumped from my body towards the dazed couple before I could stop it.

For a few seconds, the room became like a vacuum, a spinning black hole sucking away the air. A queasiness immediately filled the void my laughter had left behind. I swayed on my feet.

Sadie looked younger without her glasses.

Disorientated, I watched the groaner lurch from his chair, yanking at his trousers.

‘Amy!’ James, baffled, running a hand over his muddled blond head. ‘Shit! Amy, I can explain …’

CHAPTER 3

‘ARE YOU SURE this is what you want to do, honey? Why not leave it a little while, just until you’ve given yourself a few days to think everything through?’ This was the third time Phil had called. It was a rare occasion that saw the softness beneath her prickly veneer, but I guess she thought the situation warranted it. Somewhere in the murky recesses of my mind, I knew it wasn’t a good sign.

‘All I’ve done is think, Phil. My head hurts from it. I just …’ I watched the rain silently streaming down the windows overlooking the executive homes opposite. So far April had been unseasonably cold. All morning the sky had promised snow, but there was nothing on the horizon now but miserable grey inevitability.

Phil waited for me to get it together, but I’d already forgotten what I was saying.

‘You can’t just walk, Amy. You’ve worked too hard at that place. Don’t tell Adrian anything, not yet. Just … call in sick. Think about all that later.’

Later? Because later would somehow suddenly mean I didn’t work at the same company as the man who’d just car-crashed our life? Or the woman he’d chosen to go joyriding with? What could later possibly offer? My focus shifted from the streaks of rainwater, breaking my view of the new sandpit in the garden, to the faint reflection I could see of myself in the cold grey glass. I turned away–away from it all, back to the house James hadn’t returned to last night. Apparently, he couldn’t explain. Other than a flurry of missed calls at 3 a.m. there had been nothing.

‘Ame? Are you still there?’

I leant my back against the bookcase and scanned the rest of the lounge. My own home suddenly felt foreign.

‘I’m here.’

Anna had advised us to replace the old glass coffee table with this wooden one. Wood was safer, easier to affix corner cushions to. I’d bought those the same day. And the socket covers, the kitchen drawer catches and the fire guard. All deployed and ready for action. We were fully accident-proofed. If you wanted to hurt yourself around here, as in really cause yourself gut-wrenching pain, James’s idea of love and loyalty was probably going to be your best bet. I tried to shake his name from my head but, from nowhere, the turmoil of the last twelve hours saw its chance and rushed me again. I covered my face with my sweater sleeve, holding the lower part of the phone away so Phil wouldn’t hear.

‘Why don’t I come over?’ she tried.

Quietly, I breathed through it. I felt my chest release again, reluctantly unclenching like an angry fist, and risked a steady lungful of air.

‘I can’t stay here, Phil. I’m going to Mum’s once I’ve packed some things.’

‘Is Viv picking you up, or do you need a ride?’ she asked softly.

‘No. Thanks. I’ll get a cab.’ My voice faltered.

‘Are you crying? Because if you’re crying I’m coming over right now.’ A warm rush streaked down either side of my face again. I wiped the tears away, as if that might somehow hide the evidence from my friend.

‘Stand down, Phil. I’m not crying,’ I lied. ‘I have to go. I don’t want to be here much longer in case he turns up.’

Phil let out an unappeased breath. ‘Okay. Call me, will you?’

I nodded at the phone and set it down on its post before Phil could hear me lose it again.

I hadn’t been sure that I couldn’t stay here until I’d said it out loud. Now I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t think he’d have brought her here, but it wasn’t impossible. I booked a cab and skipped upstairs, pulling closed the first door I passed. The lingering smell of recent paint was reason enough to shut off that bedroom. James said we should wait, see who we were matched with, but I’d started painting the nursery in neutrals the day we’d returned from panel. Maybe I’d jinxed it. There were superstitions about that kind of thing.

My bedroom felt just as foreign as the rest of the house. I began stuffing a few handfuls of clothing into James’s overnight bag before lunging towards my dressing table. The bottom drawer slid out easily, revealing the prettily decorated firebox nestled safely on its cushion of winter sweaters. I couldn’t remember where the idea had originated from, my grandmother probably, but I was glad for it now. In the event of a house fire or other major catastrophe, letters, keepsakes – anything of irreplaceable value–would all be to hand in the firebox. All in one place, ready for salvation.

I lifted the découpaged box from the open drawer and regarded it. Dedicated teacher that she was, there wasn’t much Mum couldn’t achieve with PVA glue and patience. My fingers briefly reacquainted themselves with the delicately placed art nouveau motifs in muted blues and greens, the subtle unevenness of the layered images she’d painstakingly crafted. She’d made the firebox for us that August, busying herself in the kitchen while I’d pretended to sleep up here. James had to return to work eventually, for normality’s sake, if nothing else. She’d said such precious things deserved to be kept somewhere nice.

I let my fingers rest on the lip of the firebox. As if I needed to look. As if I didn’t know by heart the remembrances kept safely inside. The pitiful testaments to our son’s tiny life.

He’d have been at school now. Greenacres Primary in Earleswicke, where his grandmother, headmistress there, could have kept an eye on him for me. Made sure he ate his sandwiches; comforted him if one of the other kids was mean. Something like anger flared in my stomach. I fed the firebox gently into James’s bag, pulled on my jacket and skipped out across the landing for the stairs.

Thoughts of Sadie knowing the inside of my home almost sent me into a delirium. The firebox wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t bear her to have been anywhere near. I padded from the pale stairwell carpet onto the milky polished tiles of the hallway. We’d spent months fattening out the file I’d kept safely in the kitchen cupboard. The file that demonstrated the family we could offer to one of the thousands of children awaiting a home. Every last detail of our lives was in there, including our copy of the prospective adopter’s report Anna had put together on us. The PAR was the result of months of countless assessments, interviews with friends, family, diagrams of our support network, income, medical backgrounds, and it was not being left here. Sadie probably knew it all anyway, pillow-talk while I sat at home, oblivious and foolish. Well, it was all coming with me.

A car horn papped outside as I strode into the white tundra of our clean-lined kitchen. I stood the overnight bag against the wine fridge and stalked over to the last cupboard at the end run of units.

I yanked open the tall, sleek cupboard door. The door clattered clumsily, opening only a little way before jarring back against my fingers, denying me access. The handle pulled my fingernail with it and a hot pain drew a hiss from my throat.

I still wasn’t used to the cupboard locks, designed to prevent inquisitive little hands from finding their way to trouble. A searing pain flared where I’d snagged my nail. It was already bleeding happily, a burning sensation spreading not just through my fingertip, but it seemed completely through my core, too. I held it up for inspection and found I’d torn the end of it clean off. It was only a fingernail. Anyone looking in would’ve thought I’d just severed a major artery. I slumped pathetically against the unit doors to the cold tiled floor. Something had been severed, it just wasn’t anything that could be tackled with a tourniquet and fast thinking. At the sight of a silly bleeding finger, something tight in my chest, like an over-stretched elastic band, suddenly gave way. I tried not to, but it was futile. It was as if every muscle in my body wanted to cry for itself too. So I let them, right there on the kitchen floor as the taxi papped on outside.

CHAPTER 4

THE WALLS OF my old bedroom weren’t magenta any more but an inoffensive cream and peppermint pinstripe where Mum had done away with the bohemian décor of my youth. My once beloved tie-dyed swathes had been replaced with crushed silk drapes in her favourite sage, more befitting of the 1930s home Dad had left us with. For the last week, hiding out here from my life, I’d been fifteen again.

‘Sweetheart? Are you coming down? They’ll be here soon.’ I stopped studying the abstract patterns in Mum’s artexed ceiling and rolled over on my pillow. More clattering sounds of saucepans being thrown into service echoed up the stairs.

Mum’s Sunday lunch was ritualistic as far as my brother was concerned. Since Lauren had given birth to their second child two months ago, Guy had tried to blag Mum to lay on a regular midweek curry night, too. He’d complained that mealtimes with a mischievous four-year-old had been chaotic enough; add a newborn to the mix and Lauren was beginning to lean towards quicker, easier, less-washing-up meals. Mum hadn’t gone for it. She’d told him to be grateful Lauren was still cooking for him at all after delivering two nine-pounders, epidural-free.

‘Coming,’ I called, stepping out onto the landing. The morning had been fairly sedate, with Mum busying herself with her latest crusade on behalf of the WI and greater good. She’d taken my reluctance to talk about James and my crumbling adoption hopes as her cue to lead the conversation. Earleswicke community centre was soon to be levelled because the parish council shrewdly thought it made more sense to sell the place on than stump up the cash for an upgrade. I was with them on that. The community centre had smelled of damp and lost property when Mum used to drag me off to Brownies there. I was eight at the time and to my knowledge, it hadn’t seen a lick of paint since. No doubt I’d hear the whole sorry tale again once Guy and Lauren arrived. I’d use the opportunity to huddle up with Samuel and catch up on all things creepy-crawly and dinosaur. Mum had put them off coming last weekend. A few concerned words from a well-meaning cabbie and Viv had gone on lockdown, prescribing a week of peace so I could lick my wounds. That and endless home-cooking.

The rich homely wafts of roast beef floated up the stairs to greet me. This was how Mum swung into recovery mode, as if food could fix whatever had been broken. She’d launched herself into maniacal cooking when Dad had first left. All of his favourites, every night for weeks, just in case he walked back in through the door. He never did.

‘Okay, sweetheart?’ She was carrying a tray of tea through to the conservatory as I crossed the kitchen towards her. The conservatory was cooler than the kitchen, the rattan armchair creaking beneath me like a groaning shipwreck as I settled into it. ‘How are you feeling today?’

Outside, the garden had held onto the morning’s frost, as though the lawn had accepted its abandonment by the sun, stoically contenting itself with ice instead. ‘Fine. Thanks. Lunch smells good.’ I smiled.

Mum nodded approvingly as she poured a drop of milk into each of the cups. Her hair would redden in the autumn, but until then it would remain nearly as dark as mine, with only the beginnings of grey featuring just where she would clip her corkscrew curls over one ear. Miraculously, I’d dodged the full severity of Mum’s curly genes, though I realised now how youthful she still looked because of them.

‘A good meal will set you up, sweetheart. Tomorrow isn’t going to be easy, but I think you’re doing the right thing.’

Thoughts of a Monday-morning showdown with Marcy and Dana heading up the office gossips made my stomach lurch. I’d gone over all the reasons for and against going back there, trying to find a way around it, but the fact was if I just walked out now, I couldn’t think how I’d explain my sudden change in circumstances to Anna. Not that job-security alone was going to be enough to dupe her into seeing through our application.

‘She should be the one clearing off,’ Mum declared, vigorously stirring the tea.

I never thought that James would do this. He’d pleaded for a chance to fix things, to undo the undoable. I’d listened as Phil had coached me through the week on the evils of the unfaithful, but through the malignant mass of bitterness and hurt churning away at my insides, there was something of me that desperately wanted James to fix it all. But we were on social services’ schedule, not Relate’s. We didn’t have time to delve into our brittle relationship and gently nurse what had been broken.

‘And should James clear off too, Mum?’ I asked.

She tapped her spoon on the rim of her cup, ignoring my accusation of her lopsided justice. ‘You know, sweetheart, James has done a terrible thing. But it doesn’t make him a terrible person.’

I watched as she set the hot drinks in place between us, then looked away through the glass onto the garden. A little robin flitted down onto the lawn and began pecking away at the grass. Maybe I was the terrible person. Maybe I’d pushed James out, neglected him. There hadn’t been much room left for anything that wasn’t either work or adoption related for longer than was healthy for anyone.

Mum held her cup to her face and blew over it, settling herself back into her chair. ‘He called again this morning.’ I carried on watching the determined little bird. James had been calling all week, leaving texts and voicemails, apologising, asking that we talk, offering to take some of his annual leave if that made my returning to work any less humiliating. ‘He said he needs to talk to you, sweetheart, before you go back into the office.’ I hadn’t accepted James’s offer but still he’d anticipated I’d go back to Cyan. I hated that I was so predictable.

‘Mum, please, don’t. I’m not ready to speak to him yet.’

‘You can’t avoid him for ever, Amy. You need to talk to him. Before the social worker catches wind of all this. Won’t you see him in the office tomorrow anyway?’

An unfortunate creature caught the attention of the robin, suddenly transforming it from Christmas icon to ruthless killer. I’d never been great with birds, they seemed all beady eyes and sharp bits to me. ‘He has site meetings on Mondays. It’ll be easier for me to go back there tomorrow while he’s not there.’ While I still have a job. That’s if I didn’t lose my bottle first, which was more than possible.

Mum repositioned her glasses on her head. ‘For what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing. I know he’s hurt you, sweetheart, but if you’re both serious about trying to salvage this, you’re going to need to work together. Children need stability, and this situation is far from stable. You need to be very careful you don’t jeopardise everything you’ve achieved over these last months because of one … indiscretion.’

Indiscretion. That was one word for it.

‘It’s not that simple, Mum. He didn’t just slip up.’

Mum took a sip from her cup. ‘James shouldn’t have fooled around with that girl, Amy. But men … they do slip up, lose their way. Sometimes, sweetheart, they just can’t help themselves.’

It was only ever a matter of time before parallels would be drawn between James and my dad. I inhaled deeply and rolled into the inevitable. ‘That’s just it, Mum, they can help themselves. It’s a choice they make.’

‘No, not always, Amy. Sometimes they just … they fall into an unexpected situation, and then before they know it they’re not sure what they want.’

I wondered if after telling herself the same thing for so long, my mother had somehow erased the basic principles of betrayal from her understanding. Eighteen years on she was still hanging onto the ghost of a notion – that Dad’s departure was somehow not of his choosing.

Mum looked out onto the garden. I let my eyes fall to the teacup steaming on the table between us. It felt intrusive somehow to look outside while she did also. She sighed and turned uncertain eyes back to me. ‘I’m not trying to be insensitive, Amy. I know how much hurt you must be feeling, I do. But, you and James have been through so much together. Experiences that have bound the two of you. He hasn’t led you to believe that he wants a relationship with this woman, has he?’ I searched the garden for something to concentrate on. The robin was nowhere, abandoning me to the conversation. The answer to her question was no. No, he hadn’t. In every one of the messages he’d left these past seven days, James had said that he loved me. He loved me, and that he was sorry.

Mum was still waiting. I shook my head to answer her.

‘James knows how complicated things can be, Amy. Hear him out, see what he has to say. Life isn’t a walk in the park for anyone, sweetheart. It’s complicated and messy and at times, ruddy heart-breaking. But, you have to press on.’

‘So what? I should just forget what he’s done?’

‘No, not forget. James has done wrong, but he is trying. Doesn’t that count for something?’

It did count for something. Mum had never met another man, waiting for my father to show a fraction of the regret James had shown over this last week. It would be cruel to say to her that it didn’t count, I just didn’t know whether it counted enough.

‘I can’t go through with the party, Mum. I’m sorry. Even if we were on speaking terms, I couldn’t stand in front our friends and family and … fake it.’

‘You haven’t got anything to be ashamed of, Amy. Lots of people learn to carry this sort of burden. Relationships are all about accepting each other’s imperfections. Goodness knows, we all have those.’ I couldn’t argue with that. Imperfections didn’t exactly encompass that which James had accepted in me.

‘The party was a nice idea, Mum, but it was your idea. I never wanted a fuss about the adoption, I just wanted the …’ I couldn’t say the word; it stuck in my throat like a rusty barb. I had to get around this or I’d never make it through a single day at Cyan. I tried to think of something, anything, else, but I was already losing again. I looked outside, hoping the shift in position might slow the inevitable but the tingling was already there behind my eyes.

‘Oh, sweetheart. Don’t cry. You’re tougher than this, I know you are.’ Mum leant over and began rubbing my knee reassuringly. I shook my head. I wasn’t tough. I couldn’t survive a broken fingernail or a mistimed buzzword.

‘I’m not, Mum. Guy’s tough, not me.’ I couldn’t recall a time I’d ever seen my brother cry, not even during the catastrophic fallout after he’d walked in on my father and Petra. Guy had glued the three of us together until Mum had finally realised that we didn’t need to keep eating Dad’s favourites any more.

‘Oh, Amy, you’re tougher than you think.’ She reached for my hand, clasping onto it as she always had whenever I’d brought a crisis home with me.

‘What am I going to do, Mum?’ I asked steadily, trying not to set myself off again. She was making small circular motions over the back of my thumb.

‘Well, first you need to work out what’s most important in your life right now, sweetheart.’

‘I know what’s most important. That part hasn’t changed in the last five years.’

‘Right. Well, that only leaves one other question. Has James’s part in that changed in the last five years?’

James had always been part of that picture, but tensions had been growing lately. Somewhere along the line, we’d stopped laughing and making plans. I realised that there had only been one plan for a long time now, and what had started out as a joint venture had at some point turned James into a back-seat passenger on my much diverted road-trip to parenthood. But never had I imagined him not being there, somewhere, with me. Never had he said he wanted to get off this journey. Or maybe I just hadn’t been listening.

A bustling through the front door and my brother’s cheerful voice throbbed through the open hallway. ‘Hey, hey! Somethin’ smells good! Sam … don’t push! You’ll knock somebody over.’ Sam scrambled into the kitchen making a beeline for the biscuit jar.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ Mum warned, leaping from her chair to intercept him. A waft of cool air came in with them as Guy plonked Harry’s car seat down on Mum’s pine kitchen table.

Lauren followed them all in, rosy cheeked, puffing mousy-brown strands of hair away from her face, arms full of the things Harry couldn’t possibly need in just a couple of hours. She dumped her bags and came straight over with an embrace, then reassuringly rubbed my arm. ‘Hey. How are we doing?’ I smiled crookedly letting her hug me for a second time. ‘I’m so sorry, Ame.’ I shrugged my shoulders. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t blub in front of the kids.

Guy scratched his short-cropped curls and threw me an unimpressed look. I glared back at him, in case he was under any illusion that dealing with Mum’s counsel wasn’t taxing enough. He arched his eyebrows and held his hands up briefly in submission. He wouldn’t say anything about James, for now. I let out a breath as he came over and planted a kiss on my cheek. ‘Just say the word,’ he said quietly. ‘He needs his arse kicking.’

‘Samuel Alwood! What on earth have you done to your face?’ Sam peered wide brown eyes out at Mum from underneath the hood of his duffel coat, a strange purplish bruise beneath his eye.

Lauren huffed as she pulled him from his coat. ‘He stuck a Tic Tac up his nose, didn’t you, buddy? Pushed it that far up there, burst a blood vessel.’

Sam grinned at his achievement. ‘I made Mummy’s legs go funny!’ he said triumphantly. Lauren was squeamish, which made it all the more baffling to understand how she’d had not one, but two children with my heathen brother.

I bent down beside Sam. ‘Let me see, Curly.’ He lifted his chin to allow me a better look. ‘Ew, gross. At least you’ll have minty fresh nostrils for a while, kiddo.’ I stole a kiss before he could make his escape.

‘Daddy said I can’t put anything else up my nose now, Aunty Ame. Not even my fingers.’

I ran my hand over the softness of his curls. ‘Good to know, kid.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s good advice.’

‘I’ve got some advice for you too if you want to hear it?’ Guy asked me.

The timer on the oven began bleeping urgently, answered with a grizzled response from the kitchen table. I ignored Guy as Lauren peered into Harry’s car seat and groaned. ‘Harry! We can’t spend all day in the car! It’s not practical.’ She began to unclip him from the seat harness as Harry’s protestations grew. ‘Guy’s taken to driving him around the estate to get him off!’ she said, scooping him from the chair.

‘You’ll want to get out of that habit, Guy,’ Mum warned, repositioning the oven trays. ‘He’s got to learn to settle himself sometimes, or he’ll grow up expecting the world to do it for him.’ She looked over at Lauren peeling Harry like a banana from his snow suit and completely lost track of what she was doing. ‘He is scrumptious, though,’ she cooed. ‘Here, I’ll get him off for you.’

Something began boiling over on the hob, sending a crackle of spitting water everywhere. Mum looked over at the veg.

‘I’ll take him,’ I offered. Harry bunched into himself like a hedgehog as Lauren handed him to me. I settled him into my chest and grazed my nose over his downy dark hair. He was going to be curly too. I took the deepest lungful of air I could manage. He still smelled of that something only new babies did. Of softness and milky cotton.

‘So? Have you seen him since you moved back?’ Guy asked tartly. Harry grunted softly next to my ear. I nuzzled into him, into all that cotton-softness and rocked him gently, unsure as to who was really comforting who.

Mum began mashing the potatoes with unnecessary vigour. ‘Have I mentioned the parish meeting at the community centre to you both yet?’ It was a transparent attempt to change the subject.

‘I haven’t moved back, Guy,’ I said, rubbing my cheek against my little friend’s. ‘I just needed some breathing space.’ I knew it wasn’t me Guy was angry at, but the situation. He was friends with James, he had him down as a good guy too. Guy was always going to struggle with that. He was black and white that way, always had been, but I had other things to consider – a whole spectrum of grey.

I walked away from my brother and lifted Harry’s tiny hand to my lips to press a kiss there. There was a reason new babies’ hands were sized to match an adult mouth. Kisses were meant for tiny fingers. Tiny, delicate fingers, so perfect it was almost inconceivable that they could be created so easily. So easily for so many. I held Harry’s hand against my mouth.

We’d never meant to fall pregnant. I hadn’t even missed a pill. It had just happened, and everything had changed, irrevocably. The doctor had told us ours was a determined little egg, the one in a hundred to outwit the advances of contraceptive science and bed down for a chance at life. By some twist of fate, we’d been shown something wonderful, and then, once we’d fallen in love with our tiny stowaway, fate had seen fit to take him away again.

Mum intensified her attack on the spuds. I indulged in another hit of Harry’s inimitable scent. ‘Come on, handsome.’ I clucked, strolling towards the conservatory windows. ‘Let’s see if we can find that little robin.’

CHAPTER 5

THERE WERE MANY days I’d have rather forgotten during my career as lead designer at Cyan Architecture & Design, but this one was already shaping up to go straight to the top of the leader board. A cyclist with a death wish had just committed the cardinal sin of cutting us up and Mum was still growling at his disappearing reflection in her mirrors. ‘Sunshine always brings the idiots out,’ she huffed, catching up with the traffic ahead. I was making a point of not looking up there: the city buses were all running the same campaign, posters plastered above their bumpers showing three beautiful children in a tricolour of races, begging the question, Could you adopt?

‘Stop fiddling with your ear, sweetheart.’

‘I’m not fiddling with my ear. Watch the road.’

Mum threw me a sideways glance. ‘You’re bound to feel nervous, Amy.’

‘It’s not my first day at school, Mum. Thank goodness. Could you have bought a more obscenely coloured car?’

‘You’re supposed to be a designer – embrace the alternative. Anyway, madam, there’s always the bus.’

The bistro-lined streets were already alive with coffee-wielding officebots on their way to work as Mum pulled us over into the bus lane. I eyed the small private car park over by the biscuit factory. James’s car wasn’t there. Good. Thoughts of what our first encounter might hold had me turning myself in knots. It had been the same for days now, I’d try to work out what I was going to say to him, but even within the controlled parameters of my own mental monologue, it all got messy and jumbled. First the hurt of what he’d done would hit all over again, then the anger at his timing (because if your boyfriend feels the need to bonk one of your colleagues, timing made all the difference, of course). Thinking of James and Sadie together had invariably been enough to trip off further unsightly bouts of snotty crying each time I’d played it through my head. Not being able to remember the last time I’d driven James wild with a single kiss, or was woken in the morning with a kiss of his own, triggered my growing sense of inadequacy just as effectively.

One of the city buses honked and pulled around us into the lane.

‘All right, all right. I’m going!’ Mum snipped.

I tried not to look at the advertisement plastered across the rear of the bus, but eyes have a habit of seeking out what the mind knows isn’t good for it. I’d never been so glad so see an ad for broadband.

I jumped out of Mum’s lime-green Honda before I could change my mind. I needed to talk to James, I knew that much. But walking back into the office was a big enough hurdle to deal with today.

‘Amy?’ She was ducking to better see me as I straightened myself out on the pavement.

‘Please, Ma. No more advice.’

‘I just wanted to say, good luck. It takes courage to walk in there, Amy. You hold your head up.’

I stopped fussing with my clothes and smiled feebly. ‘Let’s just see how it goes, Mum.’ If I could get this out of the way, anything was possible.

I shut the car door and turned for the courtyard, power-walking towards the cluster of businesses before my feet had a chance to change direction. This did indeed feel like a first day at school. Only worse. The gusto of my power-walk pushed me straight through the glass doors and swiftly across the lobby where two figures loitered at Ally’s desk. ‘Morning,’ Dana called politely. Ally sat open-mouthed.

‘Morning,’ I called back, rounding the far doors into the offices. I was unwavering in my path.

I shadowed the wall intersecting the office, following it past the first pod of workstations where Alice and her team were already settled into their workload. The marketing lot had a good corner position on the studio floor, made cosy where red bricks remained resolutely exposed before running into the sleek white plasterwork flanking the rest of the studios.

The next group of workstations were all vacant, basking in sun where tall industrial windows stood like a row of guards, flooding the studios with natural light. The view they offered across the courtyard gave my eyes something to focus on while I made it past Sadie’s empty desk. I’d nearly traversed the first studio, past the kitchen where more bodies were loitering for morning coffee and gossip. I didn’t look inside.

The boardroom lay directly ahead of the interiors team’s workstations. I kept on with the power-walk then abruptly veered left, slinking into my chair. My heart was a little racy when I punched the button on my pc.

Not a word from any one of the seven bodies around me to compete with the lethargic hum of my computer. I resisted the urge to fidget. Across the low partition separating our desks, Hannah’s face was locked on her monitor. She was being careful not to look at me. Nine days on, it was safe to say even the cleaners knew that Stewart from reprographics was not the Nightshagger.

The other side of Hannah, Phil spun her chair around and sat casually back into it, grinning like a Bond villain. Hers was a unique brand of solidarity, but an effective one. At that predatory smile, a tension eased. You can do this, Ame. One awkwardness at a time.

‘Amy?’ boomed a voice from the office beside the boardroom. ‘A word.’ My next awkwardness was well over six foot tall and looming in the doorway there. Adrian Espley was an imposing man, with a near-military-grade haircut and the build of a person who had enjoyed rugby in a long forgotten youth, before the Guinness had taken over.

Phil’s smile never faltered. Be cool, she mouthed, as I waddled past her. There wasn’t enough of a distance to deploy the power-walk, damn it.

‘Close the door behind you,’ Adrian instructed, holding a huge hand out towards the chair beside me. I did as he asked, pulling on the hem of my fitted waistcoat before sitting down in the hot seat. ‘I’m not going to dance around, Amy. I’m not happy about this … situation.’

My face suddenly felt awkward and rubbery.

‘I don’t want to know who’s done what, all I give a toss about is will it cause me any problems?’ My hands felt clammy in my lap.

Be cool. ‘Of course not, Adrian.’ That was what he wanted to hear, after all. Adrian cleared his throat, a sound I’d come to recognise as his acceptance of a satisfactory outcome.

‘Excellent. Right, leave what you’re on and get Phil to run you through the Bywater file. New client, just bought a nice place out near Briddleton. Got it for a song, too – the vendors ran out of money before they had to sell up. Managed a nice job on the conversion, very nice, but it’s basically a sexy shell, nothing going on inside.’ I thought of the comparisons I could draw. ‘He’s got a fairly healthy budget and the mill would look fantastic in our residential portfolio. I want you to win us this contract, Amy. Get your teeth into it.’

Good. Work was good. I could feel myself relaxing. ‘Where are we at with it?’

‘He’s emailed over a few photos, and a set of AutoCAD plans that the previous architects drew up. He’s bringing everything else he’s got into the office this morning.’ Yes. This was what I needed. ‘Right then, I think we’re done here. Phil’ll get you up to speed.’

And like that, equilibrium resumed in Adrian’s company.

Phil was getting one of the architects up to speed on her drawings when I made it out of Adrian’s office. I began picking over the papers on her desk. ‘Hannah? Have you seen anything for a Mr Bywater? There should be a file?’

Hannah looked sheepishly over her shoulder at me. I sighed quietly. ‘Hannah, this morning’s awkward enough. I know how the jungle drums work around here, don’t worry about it, okay?’ Hannah nodded as I took a cursory glance back down the studio.

‘She’s not in today,’ Hannah whispered. ‘I heard Dana telling Marcy that Sadie phoned in sick again.’

A slap of papers hit the end of the desk. ‘Rohan Bywater. Has Adrian talked you through it, or was he too busy checking the balance of his applecart?’ Phil stood leaning with one hand flat on the desk, the other on her hip. ‘He’s due in this morning, you want me to do the meet-and-greet or—’

‘No, I’ve got it.’

Phil straightened up. ‘Is anyone booked into the boardroom? I could talk you through the file, more room to spread out.’

Adrian thudded from his office, shoving balled fists through the sleeves of his jacket. ‘Site meeting. I’m on the mobile,’ he declared, clumping out of the studio.

‘I’ll get the coffees,’ Phil said, following Adrian out as far as the kitchen. Phil had suggested the boardroom for privacy, not space. I gathered the file and walked through into the boardroom, fighting off the images of James’s naked groin in each of the chairs there. To distract myself, I laid out the photos of the Bywater property on the conference table. I still had my snout in the paperwork when the boardroom door clicked closed.

‘I’ve been leaving you messages,’ he said, placing the drinks he’d hijacked from Phil down on the long glass table. ‘I’ve been going crazy, Amy. Please, let me talk.’

He wasn’t supposed to be here. Funnily enough, that was what I’d thought the last time I’d seen him.

‘I can’t say anything in my defence, I know, but … it was a stupid mistake. A stupid, one-off mistake.’

‘One-off?’ I croaked. ‘You expect me to believe that?’ I choked on my words, an instant trembling firing up in my chest. Already, the conversation wasn’t going as I’d imagined it.

‘It was never meant to happen, I wish it never had. Please believe me, Amy, I love you. I need to make this right with you. Mum’s so excited about flying in—’

‘Forget the party, James!’ I yelped.

His expression changed. The blue of his eyes growing cooler. ‘So what? That’s it now? Just like that? You’re going to throw everything away? Everything, Amy?’

My head began to thump. Me throw it away? ‘You slept with another woman! You watched me go out, like a big idiot, celebrating our plans, and you – what? Bumped into her here? It was you she was on the phone to, wasn’t it?’ The thumping was intensifying.

James’s voice lowered. ‘I only agreed to meet her because she was going to tell you. She was going to do as much damage as she could. I couldn’t let that happen.’ I’d played this conversation through my head all week. Pointless preparation. ‘I swear, it had only been one time … I told her it was a mistake, and then—’

‘And then what?’ I snapped. ‘You met her to call it all off?’

‘Yes!’ James exclaimed, circumnavigating the table.

‘And what? You accidentally fell into her?’

James darted towards me. I stepped back to accommodate it. ‘Amy, shit! I know what I’ve done is as bad as it gets, but please! Let me fix this, we can get over this if you just … let us. Please, don’t throw away our life together. We’re so close to getting what we want, Amy.’

‘What we want, or what I want, James?’ The tingling was there again, threatening to render me useless and emotional. He stepped closer.

‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want our life, Amy. You know that.’

I could feel the burn, reaching the edges of my eyes. ‘But you betrayed me, James. You slept with her, and now everything’s falling apart. They’ll never give us our child now—’

‘Amy, Anna doesn’t need to know about this. Not unless you tell her. I don’t want to tell her, I want to make it right.’

Don’t cry here. Do not cry here, I warned myself. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew that James was playing to my weak spot, but knowing it didn’t make the words any less seductive. I grabbed onto the only thing that would keep me steady. The ugly truth.

‘How did it start?’ I asked, taking a sharp breath. He tried to take my hand but I hadn’t offered it. ‘Where?’

‘Amy, please. We don’t need to do this.’

‘When, and where, James? Has she been in my house?’

Outside, the studio had grown very quiet. A phone rang out, the sound rising above the diminishing volume of the voices around it. He moved over to the glass wall and closed the blinds. I remained where I stood, tense and unyielding.

He pushed both hands through his hair. His was that shade of blond that didn’t quite make it through childhood without acquiring a duller, muddier undertone. ‘Shit, Amy,’ he huffed, looking to his feet. He knew I’d hear it eventually. He approached the table again and idly moved one of the mill photos around under his finger.

‘She started coming on to me a while ago. I laughed it off, ignored her. And then she turned up at the gym.’

‘The gym?’ I sputtered. ‘You haven’t used the gym since your membership expired. That was before Christmas!’ I could hear something like hysteria, sprouting in my voice.

‘It wasn’t that long ago—’

‘Yes it was.’ The calculation reran quickly through my head. ‘You stopped going there because of your shin splints. That’s why I paid a fortune for your bloody bike! So you could exercise without your shins hurting!’

‘Amy …’

‘You’ve been seeing her for six months? Six months!’ Hysteria was giving way to red rage. All that time, he’d let me prattle on about us becoming a family.

‘She’s the reason I stopped going to the gym, Amy! She was there – and here at work … I couldn’t get away from her! She pursued me. I made one mistake, and I couldn’t shake her off!’ I started to feel giddy. ‘Amy, listen to me. I didn’t mean to sleep with her—’

‘Didn’t mean to? Didn’t mean to?’ I growled. Somebody knocked gingerly on the boardroom door. It wasn’t Adrian, he’d have kicked it down if he wanted to.

‘How are your shins now, James?’ I trembled, a disconcerting calm settled into my shoulders. Six months. Not a momentary mistake at all. Another rap on the door. ‘Did the bike I spent a month’s wages on – while you were at it with Glitter Knickers – did it help ease the pain in your shins?’

Another phone started ringing on the shop floor. No one answered it this time.

‘What are you talking about?’ James asked as the boardroom door handle began to rattle.

‘Your shins, James? How are they shaping up?’

James looked perplexed, so I saved him the hassle of asking again. I launched the toe of my red Mary Jane hard and sure into James’s leg. James yelped, grabbing at his assaulted limb. It hurt me, but it hurt him more.

‘AMY! What the f—’

‘I’m sorry, James!’ I retorted mirthfully. ‘I didn’t mean it! That deliberate, hurtful, action … I DIDN’T MEAN IT!’

‘Er, sorry to interrupt …’ The uncertainty in Phil’s voice rendered it almost unrecognisable.

‘What?’ I growled, the threat of tears driving on my anger. How could he? How could he sit through all of those meetings, the panel hearing, pretending that he wanted a family with me when all the time…?

Phil shifted awkwardly, taking in the spectacle of James sat on the photographs, purple-cheeked and clasping at his leg.

I quickly appraised the dark stranger standing next to Phil. Jeans and T-shirts didn’t usually feature this far from Tom’s end of the office. Baseball caps didn’t feature anywhere at Cyan. ‘Can’t you take delivery of those, Phil?’ I said breathily, nodding at the cardboard tube poking from the stranger’s backpack. Drawings were usually emailed in, but occasionally someone paid to have them couriered instead. ‘James and I are just … having a meeting.’

The delivery guy considered James, who was trying unsuccessfully not to grimace where he sat. Delivery Guy looked away, the beginnings of a smile eking across his boyish face. ‘I think she likes you, mate,’ he said, turning strangely pale hazel eyes this way. They were startling next to his dark hair and lightly tanned complexion.

Phil looked at James and began fighting a grin of her own. Delivery Guy pulled his cap from his head, revealing a choppy brunette crop that made his eyes all the more staggering. He instantly looked older. James winced and got to his feet. ‘Shin splints,’ he volunteered to the other man.

Delivery Guy pouted his acknowledgement. ‘Nasty old business, shin splints, my friend. Painful stuff.’ He was taller than James. Broader, too – his shoulders wide beneath the black tee, framed by the straps of his backpack. James couldn’t make him out either. He looked at me only briefly before hobbling out between the two adults trying to remain straight-faced in the doorway.

Phil moved further into the boardroom. ‘Um, Amy?’

I began absently tidying the photos on the table. ‘Yep?’

Six months. It was a lot of sex-time. A lot of time for hand-holding and secret-sharing.

‘Your next meeting …’ Phil said.

I looked up at her. ‘Hmm? What about it?’ Phil was smiling awkwardly, trying to convey something in the set of her lips. I frowned. ‘My next meeting what? Are these for me?’ I said, holding out my hand out for the tube of drawings.

Phil gave up. ‘Amy Alwood, Rohan Bywater. Mr Bywater is your next meeting. Shall I get Hannah to bring you some fresh coffees?’

I felt the colour drain from my face. Phil shrugged, pairing it with an I tried rise of her eyebrows. Mr Bywater sunk hands into his jean pockets and cocked his head, a dazzling smile reaching over his face as I squirmed on the spot. The drawings I’d practically snatched from his hands felt red-hot in mine now.

‘Er, Mr Bywater … sorry, come in … take a seat,’ I stuttered.

‘Should I grab some shin pads first?’ he asked, jabbing a thumb at the open doorway. An angry bruise leached purplish-red across his right elbow. I felt my cheeks flush a similar colour. Phil slipped back out of the boardroom leaving me to fend for myself.

‘About that, Mr Bywater.’ He was smiling. Amused lips, putting me off my already pathetic attempt to redeem myself.

‘Call me Rohan.’

‘What you just saw, regrettably, was er … not the norm, Mr Bywater, I can assure you …’ A white peep of teeth slowed me again.

‘Call me Rohan.’

‘Er …’ I nodded to expedite myself back to my point. ‘It’s no excuse … and I won’t bore you with the finer details, but …’

Rohan Bywater moved around the table to look at the stack of photos I’d neatly ordered in front of me. I waited for him to gather them up and take his business elsewhere. Adrian was going to go berserk.

‘Have you had a chance to look through these yet?’

‘Er, just a quick look,’ I bumbled. ‘To try to get a feel for the scale of the project.’

‘If you want to do that, you’ll need to come and see it for yourself.’ His skin was the colour of the many contractors I’d worked with – bronzed from daily exposure to the elements. He looked serious now, I wasn’t sure I didn’t prefer the smiling. I felt the back of my earring give under my fingers.

‘So, how does this all work?’ he asked, leaning back against the table’s edge.

My brain found a foothold. ‘Well, we can arrange a site meeting, take a look at the spaces involved. You already have plans and ellies drawn up—’

‘Ellies?’

‘Sorry, elevations. We’ll measure up and check them, talk through your requirements, put a fee proposal together for you.’ He was listening intently. ‘If you’re happy with the quote, we’ll get a contract of works drawn up for you to sign and then we can get down to the bones of your project.’

‘Get down to the bones of it?’

He folded his arms in front of his chest. It was an impressive bruise he had.

‘Starting with a meeting so that we can formulate an in-depth design brief together.’

‘Together? As in …?’

‘As in, yourself and a representative of Cyan’s interiors team.’

‘Uhuh,’ he said, lolling his head again. ‘And do all the representatives of Cyan’s interiors team wear red heels? I’m just asking because, hey, I like a challenge, but I’ve seen first-hand how you get down to the bones of things around here … as in directly through your friend’s trouser leg.’ He wore an expression of nonchalance now. He found my discomfort amusing. I found his amusement … annoying.

A knock at the door and Hannah provided a welcome distraction. ‘Sorry to interrupt. Can I get anyone any coffees? Teas?’

‘Er …’ I turned back to face Rohan Bywater.

‘No thanks. I have to get going. I’ll call the office to arrange a site visit then, Miss Alwood?’ He pushed himself off the table and stood before me. ‘I’ll leave these with you?’ He nodded at the papers he’d brought.

‘Um, yes. Thank you, Mr Bywater.’ I offered my hand to conclude our unorthodox meeting.

‘Call me Rohan.’ He reached for my hand, but instead of shaking it he turned it over in his, carefully placing my silver stud on my palm. I hadn’t even seen him pick it up.

‘It’s been nice meeting you, Miss Alwood,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

I felt my naked earlobe as I watched him follow Hannah out into the office to where James was talking to the marketing team. Rohan Bywater playfully slapped James on the back, pointing to the leg I’d kicked. He laughed, his hand on James’s shoulder. James began to laugh too, all boys together. Then Bywater pulled his trouser leg up. It was hard to tell from here, it could’ve been a birthmark or a graze perhaps, but I reckoned it to be another bruise that engulfed Bywater’s knee. Whatever it was, it was large and painful-looking. James stopped laughing, outdone where I hadn’t kicked him hard enough for him to compete with the bigger boy’s injuries. James looked defeated.

Rohan Bywater put his cap back on and with a parting glance almost caught me watching. He gave James a last friendly slap, then disappeared through the studio doors.

Common assault wasn’t what I’d been aiming for, but I’d have taken a sore leg over the sickening weight of revelation. Six months. Had they been sleeping together all that time? Or could I cling pathetically to the delusion that they might’ve been building up to it with a chaste courtship? Yeah, right.

I leant against the door frame, watching James across the office, already flexing his charisma, holding court once more. I must have been mad to think that if I could just stick it here, act normal, things might have a better chance of getting back that way. It hurt just to look at him. The way I’d felt when he’d walked into the boardroom made me wonder whether or not I should just get my things now. But I’d never loved anyone except James. Anna would be contacting us at some point, and I couldn’t do any of it without him. I wasn’t even sure that I knew who I was without him.

Phil’s face bobbed round the boardroom doorway, startling me with an expectant stare.

‘What?’ I grimaced.

‘Oh, I just wanted to say, well done on the cool, Ame. You nailed it. You were cooler than cool. In fact, I think you might have just knocked The Fonz off the top spot.’

CHAPTER 6

APRIL HAD HAD a change of heart. It had decided it didn’t want to be a rubbishy month of late frosts and wet winds any more, it wanted to be daffodils and crocuses and bugs venturing onto the breeze for the first time since last year. I didn’t expect the sun would hold, but it was nice to see the lush green of young wheat fields rolling past the window.

I sat in the passenger seat, looking for signs pointing to Briddleton Mill while Hannah hummed along to the tune crackling from the stereo. It was pretty here. Just ten minutes’ drive south-west of Earleswicke, I’d enjoyed bike rides with my dad on the public footpaths near here before Jackson’s Park had become our agreed rendezvous point on the weekends Petra could spare him.

‘Is that it?’ Hannah called, slamming her brakes on. I lurched forward, the plush cheeseburger and fries toy dangling from Hannah’s rear-view mirror flapped into the side of my head. I batted them aside and read the sign.

‘Yeah, that’s it. Where the lane forks, we need to take it all the way round to the left, and the mill should be there.’ Trusting Hannah had enough information, I rooted around my bag for my compact. Sleeplessness took its toll on the over twenty-fives and I was starting to look like a panda. I swept a little more powder beneath my eyelids. Warpaint in place, I was ready to pretend to the world that I hadn’t stayed up into the early hours this morning, reading and rereading the messages James had sent me before he’d gone to bed. I was also ready to show Rohan Bywater that I really wasn’t a complete psycho.

‘Wow,’ Hannah said bluntly. ‘Welcome to my crib, MTV.’

I clasped shut the compact and slipped it back into my satchel. ‘Pretty beautiful,’ I agreed, taking in the tree-lined millpond stretching like a mini lake across the foreground. The mill itself, rising from the far edge of the black waters, seemed to double in size as Hannah pulled the car closer to the two VW vans parked out front. One was an old battered orange affair, a campervan like those I’d lusted after in my carefree student days; the other a very sleek and shiny truck you could easily imagine the A-Team exploding from.

‘Right then, you ready to measure this place up?’ I asked, cranking open the door.

‘It’s massive!’ Hannah laughed. ‘We’ll be here all night.’ Not if I could help it. I still wasn’t convinced Bywater wasn’t wasting our time but he’d booked the survey anyway, so here we were.

I climbed out of the car and reached for my things. ‘You all set?’ I asked, checking Hannah had hold of the drawings. Hannah nodded, agog over the grand design in front of her.

‘Okay, let’s do it.’ I said, slipping into my jacket, pulling my hair free. Dry weather was preferable for the artificially straightened.

Hannah followed me to the only obvious entrance. Further to the right of the door, the original water wheel was turning steadily – fed, I assumed, by the River Earle somewhere over the far side of the mill. We stood there expectantly for a minute or so before I tried the door knocker again.

‘They did say ten, right?’ Hannah asked, checking her watch.

I knocked again. ‘We’ll give it a minute, then I’ll call the office.’ Who was I kidding? That was the last number I wanted to call. I’d thought the sideways glances were bad enough on Monday afternoon, but the whispering had gone into overdrive after a large bouquet had landed on my desk yesterday. Sadie still hadn’t shown her face.

‘Wait,’ Hannah said, ‘do you hear that?’ I listened for the sounds of somebody approaching the door from the other side. I couldn’t hear anything over the gentle gushing sounds of the water wheel. ‘They’re round the back,’ Hannah said. ‘I can hear them yelling.’ Hannah’s bionic hearing led us from the stone path onto the timber walkway reaching out over the millpond where small clouds of insects hung like mist above the water.

We took the timber gangway wrapping itself around the mill’s water side, leading us over the pond into a gravelled yard the other side of the mill. I could hear it now: men’s voices, laughing from somewhere over the grassy ridge that ran a sweeping line around the yard here.

A crunching on the ground behind us and we both turned to find Rohan Bywater stepping from the mill’s rear double doors stained black to match the cedar cladding above them.

He looked less boyish today, pushing navy sweater sleeves up over olive forearms. ‘Hey. You found it then?’ He was already smiling. Hannah’s cheeks seemed to be getting redder. I cleared my throat, striding confidently towards him until I’d made it within hand-shaking distance. There was an approach that went with being female in this industry, forged by enough years of burly builders attempting to make me blush. Phil had never struggled but I’d had to learn how to show no fear.

‘Hello again, Mr Bywater,’ I said, offering my hand. Hannah ambled up behind me, perplexed by my sudden burst across the yard. ‘This is Hannah, one of our interns. Shall we get started?’

Bywater looked a little perturbed too. I realised I was probably overusing the power-walk.

‘Sure.’ He smiled, taking my hand. His skin was rough against mine, not smooth like James’s. We broke contact then, him reaching to casually muss the back of his hair. ‘Come on in.’

Inside this first room, whatever this room was, it was just as Adrian had described it, well-proportioned and spacious, but with nothing to punctuate the endless wheat tones of newly-plastered surfaces.

‘Blank canvas,’ Bywater said, walking in after us. His voice lost some of its smoothness as it echoed off the bare concrete floor. Other than protruding cables and the occasional socket fascia hanging off a wire, there was nothing in here to suggest anybody called it home.

‘Are all the rooms like this, Mr Bywater? Plastered, wired …?’

He folded his arms and leant back against the door reveal. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Electrics and plumbing all working?’ I asked, taking the papers from Hannah’s arms and opening them out on the dusty floor. Mr Bywater nodded. ‘Do you know if these drawings are accurate? Just the general layout, I mean.’

He moved to look down at the drawings beneath me. ‘They look right. But I’d like this and the next room to be knocked through,’ he said, crouching beside me. I followed his finger over the plans. Nearly all of his knuckles were grazed.

‘The kitchen is next door?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, but I’d like to open it out across the back of the building. I have friends over, they eat a lot. Makes sense to make all this back here bigger.’ I began scribbling notes on the drawing under us. Bywater watched as I wrote. I hated that. It always seemed to render my handwriting illegible for some daft reason.

‘Nice pen.’

As soon as he spoke, I scrawled kitten instead of kitchen.

‘Thanks. And upstairs? Are you planning any structural changes up there?’

‘I’m leaving the second floor as storage, for now. As you can see on the plan,’ I caught a waft of something faintly spiced as he reached across me to the second drawing, ‘there are four bedrooms on the first floor. The previous owners intended to make this bedroom the master, overlooking the river on the north side, but I’d like to take the south bedroom, overlooking the millpond. I know I’m spoilt for choice, but that’s definitely the best view in the house.’

I glanced over the general layout of the south bedroom. ‘Is the existing en suite in there sufficient?’

Bywater straightened up. ‘Actually, I’ve seen something I wanted your opinion on,’ he said, pulling a brochure from his back pocket. He began thumbing through it, finding his page then passing it straight over my head to Hannah. ‘What do you think?’

Hannah, surprised that he’d addressed her, studied the image. He watched her, expectantly waiting for her feedback. I hadn’t worked with very many clients who bothered to include the juniors. Often they simply looked straight through them. ‘Well, you’re on a private road.’ She shrugged. ‘Why not?’ She passed me the brochure. The room in the picture was some sort of alpine chalet, doors flung open revealing the snowy vista outside. In the middle of the scene a Nordic beauty lounged in her bathtub, looking out onto the views.

‘Showers are for office types. I’m more of a bath guy.’ Bywater smiled, burying his hands into his jean pockets. ‘So do you think we could do something like this up there?’ He lifted his chin towards the exposed beams arching like a ribcage above us.

James was definitely a power-shower kind of person, but I knew he’d drool over a bedroom tub like this. When I thought of bathtubs, I thought of rubber ducks and no-more-tears shampoo, but James was all about the lines. ‘I’m sure we could. Are we okay to go take a look?’ I asked, getting to my feet.

‘Sure. Would you like me to show you around? I can’t be in too much danger,’ he said, peered down at my shoes. I ignored him. I didn’t know why he made me so uncomfortable, other than acting like a total idiot in front of him at Cyan two days ago, which technically was my fault, not his.

It could be worse, I supposed. I could be back at the office.

‘That’s okay.’ I smiled passively. ‘We’ll come and find you when we’ve finished measuring up.’ Hannah gave him a warmer smile and followed me towards the door.

‘I’ll be in the back if you need to talk bathtubs,’ he called after us.

We’d soon found our way around the upper floors, each room offering its own astounding views over the countryside – the tumbling river, the still millpond and the woodland encircling much of the property. It was almost impossible to resist fantasising about what your life would be like to live in a place like this. Hannah had already given me the lowdown on what her friends would say if the mill were hers; I’d found myself imagining Anna here. Showing her around the endless lawns, and the playroom I’d put in next to the kitchen. It was a fantasy all right. Right now, I’d be lucky if I could show her a rational couple managing to stand in the same room as each other. And yet this was the only plan I had – pretending everything was fine, bluffing our way through it long enough to complete the adoption. We could work out all the ugly business afterwards. Simple. I just had to find a way to be around James again without wanting to kick him.

I could not lose another child. Not even a child I didn’t know yet.

*

An hour later, in possession of every measurement we could possibly need, Hannah and I stepped out into the back yard. Ahead of us, a grassy bank obscured the source of the commotion we could hear emanating from the other side of the hillock. ‘He said he’d be out back. Come on, I’m curious.’ Hannah shrugged, walking up towards the brow of the hill.

The sounds of men messing around grew significantly louder at the grassy summit. ‘Bloody hell!’ Hannah exclaimed, staring across the meadow. I watched them open-mouthed too, flying up one side of the curved structure, launching themselves into the air before careering back down it again. I counted three men, throwing themselves recklessly up and down the arrangement of ramps. A fourth person, unconcerned by the bikes whizzing past his shaggy head was sitting at the top of one vertical incline, legs hanging over the edge as if he were just perching on a garden wall.

‘Go on, Max, I can get more height on my hair than that!’ the shaggy one hooted. Max threw himself fiercely into the drop. He made it into the air next to his shaggy friend but miscalculated whatever it is that these guys with no sense of self-preservation are supposed to calculate when gravity yanks them back down to earth. Max left his bike in the air above him, crashing down onto the vertical, sliding all the way back to the bottom of the ramp on his knees. A heartbeat later, the bike followed his slipstream, slumping hard into him.

‘That is so dangerous,’ I murmured, but he was already scrambling back onto his bike.

‘That is so cool!’ Hannah yelped, edging closer for a better look. I followed, looking around to see which one of these big kids was Bywater. I knew he’d be one of them, despite his grown-up house, there was something distinctively adolescent about him. It was his eyes that gave him away, piercing beneath the shadow of his black helmet.

‘Mr Bywater?’

The shaggy spectator was still yelling his encouragement. Bywater’s black helmet whizzed past again. ‘Mr Bywater?’ I repeated, louder this time. I let him pass twice more before I felt the stirrings of irritation. ‘Mr Bywater! Could I just have a quick word, please?’ Still nothing. He manoeuvred himself through the air over above the shaggy one’s head. I thought I caught him looking my way, but still he didn’t stop.

I gave a small discreet sigh. ‘Come on, Hannah. We’ll wait for him at the mill.’ Hannah followed, reluctantly. We hadn’t walked far through the spongy grass when there was a sickening clatter behind us.

We both snapped around to see as Rohan Bywater let out a sharp cry.

The biker with the beard yelled something, skidding in on his knees beside his friend. We were still close enough to them that I could see what they were all staring at.

‘Oh no,’ I panted, hurrying to where Bywater lay writhing on his back. One arm shielded his face while the other grabbed uselessly at his left thigh. I tried to understand which part looked wrong, what it was that my eyes were struggling to process.

Hannah groaned as we came to stand, uselessly, at the edge of the ramp. The contours of Bywater’s left trouser leg suggested something was grossly broken. I followed those lines to his black trainer, realising with sickening clarity that his foot was completely misaligned with his body.

I wasn’t as squeamish as my sister-in-law, but this was pushing it. I felt the nausea growing. Blood I was okay with, but tendons and bones … not so much.

Bywater yelped again, skipping my heart along at a quicker rate.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ I tried, darting to the floor beside him, but he reminded me of a Barbie doll I’d abused as a child, his leg twisted spitefully past the point of repair.

Bywater began groaning steadily, unearthly sounds emanating from deep within his chest. The ashen expression on each of the other bikers’ faces galvanised me. Somebody needed to be in charge here.

‘Hannah?’ I yelled, turning to find Hannah wide-eyed and quite green beside me. ‘Hannah, call an—’ A clammy hand grabbed my arm.

‘Is it broken?’ Bywater demanded, his face filled with panic.

I was suddenly locked by desperate hazel eyes. I could feel the shock etched into my own expression and made a conscious effort to disguise it. ‘Just lay still, try to stay calm.’ Ignoring me completely, Rohan Bywater began trying to sit up. His foot tugged with the movement like a lifeless strand of flotsam not quite free of its mooring. I wasn’t convinced the nausea wouldn’t get the better of me after all.

‘Please! You need to stay still!’

Rohan looked at the bearded guy in the red helmet. ‘Billy, help me,’ he pleaded. Billy looked panic-stricken too.

‘What do you want me to do, mate? She’s right, you need to keep still until we can get you some help.’

Rohan hid his face beneath his arm again. ‘Have I broken it, Bill?’ Billy cast his eyes over his friend’s lower body.

‘It’s not looking good, mate,’ the shaggy spectator offered solemnly. ‘Bill, see how bad it is,’ he instructed.

Rohan put his other hand over his face too. He was coping remarkably well, considering. His pain threshold was incredible. I tried to second guess what the symptoms of shock were. ‘This has happened before,’ the shaggy one said calmly, casually nibbling on a stick of liquorice he’d produced from somewhere. I was processing that last statement when Rohan groaned again, clasping at the back of his knee while Billy began to cradle the twisted foot. ‘On three?’ Billy asked.

Still hidden beneath his arms, Rohan nodded.

I scrambled to my feet. ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! On three, what? What are you going to do?’

‘Just do it, Billy!’ the shaggy guy said. ‘He’s ready, aren’t you, Ro?’

Rohan Bywater nodded again.

Billy took a deep breath. ‘One …’

‘Wait a minute!’ I squeaked. ‘What the hell are you doing? He needs an ambulance!’

‘Two …

I looked at Hannah for help of some kind but she was already shielding her eyes. She’d even shuffled back a few paces from the chaos unfurling in front of us.

‘Three!’ I snapped my head round as Billy sickeningly yanked hard on Rohan’s contorted leg. I watched, dumbstruck, as he pulled Rohan’s leg completely free of the trousers.

My stomach went into a death-roll. Rohan fell silent. Everything fell silent but the pulsing in my ears. So this was what shock felt like.

‘Good news, brother,’ Billy said cheerily, examining the contents of his hands. ‘You haven’t trashed it. But I keep telling you to watch the drops, man. It’s gonna hurt if you hyperextend.’

Billy was examining a metal prosthesis in his arms. At one end of it, Rohan’s black trainer remained neatly tied to its foot, the laces in a perfect bow. I eyed the scene. Rohan Bywater lay back, casually propped on his elbows. He was smiling at me.

‘You’ve … your leg,’ I managed. Hannah remained soundless.

‘Surprise.’ Rohan smiled.

His left trouser leg lay flat from the knee down. One of the others began to laugh. It was Billy, Bywater’s best supporting actor. The shaggy one with his mass of hair and Cat Stevens tee carried on chomping at his liquorice stick, Max – all blond and boyish – shook his head, allowing himself a smile. They were all waiting for my response.

I looked down at Bywater and couldn’t help myself. ‘You jerk.’

Behind me, Hannah gasped. I turned and stormed across the grass to where I’d discarded my satchel, somewhere near her feet. ‘Come on, Hannah,’ I snapped, stalking back towards the bank, trying to outpace the flutter of laughter breaking out behind us. Hannah caught up, laughing nervously beside me.

Bywater’s voice followed us over the meadow. ‘Oh, come on, don’t be mad. I was only pulling your leg!’

‘Ignore him,’ I instructed. We were nearly at the brow of the ridge.

‘At least I didn’t play dead!’ Bywater added. ‘You might have given me the kiss of life!’

He’d be dead a long time before then. I did not need this right now. I did not need joker clients adding to an already tense work situation. Who even does that? What kind of sicko thinks that’s funny?

‘I take it this means we won’t be giving him a fee proposal?’ Hannah enquired timidly, trying to keep pace with me. The colour had returned to her face. There was a very good chance that mine was somewhere past mid-pink too.

‘Oh, he’ll be getting one, Hannah.’ I was power-walking again. ‘First rule of business: if you’re client’s an asshole and you don’t want to work with them,’ I said breathily, navigating the soft earth in office shoes, ‘you price them out of the game.’

CHAPTER 7

TUCKED AWAY IN the dining room, I didn’t hear the front door click to. It wasn’t until Mum had put her things down in the kitchen and given James’s flowers another approving sniff that I heard her at all. I closed down the stack of tabs where I’d wandered off task and had sporadically trawled the net for anyone else who had set a precedent for sabotaging their own adoption application this far in. Surprise, surprise, I hadn’t found anyone that self-destructive. Content that Mum wouldn’t stumble across my findings, I checked the time in the corner of my laptop.

‘Hey,’ I called through, ‘I wasn’t expecting you home until at least half nine.’ I began surveying the information that I was supposed to be concentrating on laid out on the screen in front of me. Rohan Bywater. Just reading his name was enough to make my neck bristle.

‘Hi, sweetheart. We finished early. Karen and Sue suggested we all get off early so we’re full of beans tomorrow evening.’ I saved my document and looked over my laptop at her in the dining-room doorway.

‘Why? What have the WI got on tomorrow? Fruity calendar shoot, is it?’

Mum shook herself out of her chunky calf-length cardigan and slipped the silk scarf she’d nicked from my room from her neck. ‘I wish. I quite fancy myself wearing nothing but a pair of currant buns and a smile. Alas,’ she sighed dramatically, ‘we’re preparing our argument for this ruddy council meeting at the community centre. We’ve got less than a fortnight and Karen and Sue want to rally as many faces as possible to show the officials that there are people, like us, who really do value the place. The community ruddy values it.’ Mum stopped folding her cardigan, an expression of illumination warming her features. ‘You should come, sweetheart! We could do with someone there to suggest how to give the place a facelift on a budget. They do it all the time on the telly, everyone coming together and chipping in with a few pots of paint.’

‘Earleswicke community centre? Ma, the place doesn’t need a facelift, it needs an identity. Or a bulldozer.’

Mum leant on the back of the dining-room chair opposite. ‘And where do you think the mother and toddler group is going to convene, young lady, once the council bulldozes it? Or the youth club kids, hmm? Where will they have to go? Or the Macmillan coffee mornings or flower-pressing night? Just because you don’t use the centre yourself any more, Amy, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be taking an interest in it.’

‘I am interested, Mum.’ I probably wasn’t that interested. ‘But the community needs to come together if they want to hang onto it. A handful of WI members aren’t going to cut it. Not unless you go smaller than a current bun.’ I swallowed my smile. She didn’t look impressed.

‘Just remember, Amy, you may have been off enjoying city living these last few years, but Earleswicke is still your community. There’ll be nothing for anyone here to do if they take the community centre. Well, they can go whistle. They’re not having it.’ I felt my eyes widen before falling back to the screen and that name again. The WI was supposed to keep Mum out of trouble. Give her some blue face paint and a kilt and she was about ripe to give Mel Gibson a run for his money.

‘If it’s not viable, Mum, it’s not viable. Buildings cost money to run,’ I said, reviewing the figures for Bywater’s building on screen. The numbers did look a little offensive, but that was the point. There was no way he was going to ask me to work on the mill, not at these fees. Good. It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough on my plate at work.

Mum huffed wearily. ‘The council absolutely has the money to run the community centre, Amy.’

‘So? What’s their issue, then?’ I asked, copying Bywater’s email address from the papers on the table next to me.

‘What do you think? What is always the issue, the stingy swines?’ Vivian asked.

I gave up concentrating on my task until Braveheart got through with her rabble-rousing. ‘They can get more money for it if they just get rid?’

‘Bingo. They’ll flatten it, and build a car park, or a ruddy pole-dancing club.’

‘Probably,’ I agreed absently ‘Although on the bright side, it’d give you somewhere more lively to hold your WI meetings.’

‘You could at least pretend to be interested, Amy. It would be different if it were your gym that was about to close down. You practically live at the place, you’d have something to say then.’

‘Not any more,’ I reminded myself. James had killed that one for me. I sucked in a deep breath and sank back against the hard dining chair. ‘I’ve got to get through these emails, Mum,’ I said, nodding at the screen between us.

She took the hint. ‘Right then, I’ll leave you to it. Would you like a nice slice of this key lime pie Sue’s sent back for you?’

I rubbed a new tension from the side of my head. Did everyone know about my failed personal life? ‘Not until I’m back at the gym.’

A run-down of all the meals Mum had watched me eat since I’d been staying here flashed through my mind like some sick calorific version of The Generation Game. No gym meant I was going to have to start jogging. I hated jogging. Mum lingered in the doorway. ‘You know, you don’t need to be so controlled all of the time, sweetheart. It’s okay to loosen the reins from time to time.’ I smiled to pacify her. It was quicker than going into the finer details of my fitness regime and the reasons for it. Mum had gained a little after her menopause, but she’d taken it all in her stride. What my mother constantly seemed to forget though, was that I wasn’t in my fifties yet. It probably wasn’t the best idea I’d had at the time, but I’d immersed myself in the horror stories, endless forum threads, post after post about the average weight gain in that first year after surgery. Twenty to thirty pounds, I’d read. Twenty to thirty pounds.

‘Have you thought any more about how long you’re planning on staying, Amy?’

I shook my head.

‘You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you wish, darling, and I’ll support you in whatever you choose. But it would be good to know what your plans are.’

‘My plans aren’t really working out at the minute. But I’ll let you know if any light bulbs appear over my head.’

‘I know, sweetheart. I’m just worried about you. I’ve been quite excited about having a new grandchild, too, you know. If that’s not going to happen, I’d like to know, Amy.’

I was suddenly tempted to go and comfort myself with a huge wedge of Sue Shackleton’s key lime pie. Mum had only been home two minutes and I was already in need of a sugar rush. I began pretending to tap out the email to accompany Bywater’s fee proposal, in hopes my bad influence would finally take her cue and bugger off.

Dear Mr Bywater,

Please find attached quote. Hopefully, by the time you receive this email, you’ll have done yourself a real injury, and will no longer be in need of our assistance.

I ran back through the text. I wish. I sunk my finger into the delete key and watched the words disappear again. Mum hadn’t moved. I tapped away.

Dear Mr Bywater,

Work for you? I’d rather pull my own eyelids off.

I deleted it again and sneaked a glance at Mum. She was thinking about leaving me to it, I could tell. Third time lucky.

Bywater,

I’d love to see someone kick your arse with your own peg leg.

I bit at the smile forming on my bottom lip and squinted at his name again.

Mum had just skulked off into the hallway when the doorbell suddenly echoed to life. She always locked the door after nine, Guy was probably trying to get in after driving a sleepless Harry around. I listened for the sound of their voices. Then I heard him, asking like some vampire to be invited in.

Mum began dithering in the hallway over her choices. I held my finger on the delete button and cleared my throat. ‘It’s okay, Mum. He can come in,’ I said, apprehensively rising to my feet. James was still in his suit when he appeared in the dining-room doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other fidgeting around his keys. I watched him pull that vulnerable dip of his head, glancing up with uncertain cherubic blue eyes. It didn’t have the same effect it used to.

‘Can I come in?’

I took a few steps backwards and leant against the radiator on the wall there. James took it as invitation.

‘Can we talk?’ he said softly. ‘Please? Somewhere … private?’

I slid my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. ‘Where would you suggest, James? You know all the best spots for privacy. We could go to the gym, or the boardroom, if you like?’ I couldn’t help myself. This was the stuff we didn’t have time to hack our way through on our fast-track to relationship recovery, but I just couldn’t help it.

James looked up at the ceiling and sighed. ‘Please, Ame. Let’s not do this again. I want to make it right. I love you. You know I do.’

‘And have you informed Sadie of that too, James? Or are you keeping that option open?’ James closed the dining-room doors behind him.

‘Sadie’s nothing, Amy. I told her that night, that you’re the only one. Now you know, she hasn’t got anything over me any more. I haven’t spoken to her since, I swear it. Not even at work.’

At least that last bit was probably true. Sadie had been off sick most of the week. My stomach tightened thinking about her. James came a little closer. ‘I need to be with you, Amy. I need us to be together again. A family.’

James knew how to knock all of the air right out from inside me. The radiator was too hot behind me, but I tried to hold on to it anyway. I needed something to take my focus from James’ sugar-coated words. ‘I can’t talk about this now, James. Not here, like this.’

‘So come home. Please, Amy. We can work through this, I know we can. We’re a team. We’ve pulled through worse because we stuck together. Come back home with me, Amy, please?’ James leant in and cradled my head in his palm. There were lines to his face that hadn’t been there when we’d met. He was no less handsome for them. I realised that this was everything Mum had ever hoped for. The man who had wronged her pleading for another chance, promising a lifetime all neatly wrapped up in a white picket fence.

But it felt wrong.

It was going to be hard fighting our way back to okay, but I realised it was going to be even more difficult pretending we were already there. I gently moved James’s hand. ‘I need some time, James. I need to be sure of what’s happening here. I don’t … trust the choices I might make right now.’ I’d never been like this, unsure as to what move to make, which path to take for the best solution. I didn’t like feeling so out of control, bad things happen when you’re out of control.

James held his position. ‘That’s fair, Amy. It’s more than fair. But we don’t have time, do we? Anna could call any time now, we both know that. What do you want us to say to her while you’re thinking on everything?’

Cool nervousness swept over my neck. James knew he had me in a corner, just as I knew it was the best I could hope for. Bringing our child home was the priority, everything else we could sort through after the adoption was finalised.

James knew what I would say before I said it. ‘We say nothing, James. She only wants to arrange a meeting to talk through the matching process.’

‘And what if we’ve already been matched?’

‘Matching can take months, James.’

‘And sometimes it doesn’t. You know that, Amy. They could have had a child in mind for us for months, you know it happens. If Anna turns up with a child’s file, are you going to turn around and tell her that you need time?’

He was right. These were the thoughts that had been banging around my head when I didn’t fill my mind with other things. It had been a month since the panel had approved us, Anna would be in touch any time now. James turned at the movement out in the hallway. We watched my mother’s broken silhouette move past the mottled glass. ‘Let me make you dinner, tomorrow night?’ he said. ‘We can talk properly, without company.’

This was what I knew had to happen. It had to, or there was no chance of Anna not suspecting something was going on with us. But the offer of dinner nearly had me breaking out in a nervous sweat. My scrawny plan was already falling down. Put a brave face on to the world – yes. Jump back into dinners for two and bed-sharing? I didn’t think I was ready to do that. ‘No dinner, James. No distractions. Just talk.’

He was watching me, careful blue eyes trained on their target. He seemed more than ready to slide right back into normality. The thought of it made my skin prickle, but that was what we needed, after all. To pretend Sadie had never happened, our family never jeopardised.

James nodded. It was a small victory for him and we both knew it. I felt as though I’d just been handed my own heart to hold. ‘I have to get back to this fee proposal, James. I’ll come over, but not tomorrow. I’m behind at work, I have contractors waiting on me. After the weekend, things will be quieter.’ James nodded again, resuming a more rigid posture. He glanced at the papers on the dining table.

‘The proposal’s not for that tit in the baseball cap, is it? What was his name?’ James began to play with his keys again. He’d achieved his goal.

‘Bywater.’

‘Bywater? What’s a guy like him doing at Cyan anyway?’

Outshining James on the big-boy injuries, if I remembered correctly. I moved past him and opened the dining-room doors. James followed me slowly across the hallway. ‘Who wears a baseball cap over the age of fifteen, anyway? Knob.’

I didn’t give the obvious answer of James’s golfing buddies. Instead, I opened the front door for him and watched him through it.

James turned on the step, his eyes cautious. He was sizing me up, surveying me like one of his buildings, working out where was safe to tread. ‘Look, I’m mostly on site for the rest of the week so I won’t hassle you, Ame. But we are gonna talk soon, right?’ I was still nodding when he leant in unexpectedly and kissed me chastely on the mouth. I watched, rigid and ineffectual as he turned and walked away. James was efficient in the art of closing deals. For some reason, I remembered the time I’d nearly been had by a smarmy car salesman.

I closed the door after him.

‘Everything all right, sweetheart? I was just coming to put the kettle on.’ Mum was about as subtle as an atom-bomb.

I nodded and passed her into the dining room. She knew not to ask, leaving me to tidy up my work things in peace. I didn’t spend long at my laptop, I didn’t even sit. James had thrown my head for the rest of the night, so I fired off Bywater’s email and, much to Mum’s dismay, headed upstairs.

I was hoping sleep would find me more easily tonight, but the hours soon slipped away as I replayed James’s visit through my mind. At least the time issues we were facing with Anna were something we were both aware of. A small voice had been whispering to me that James might take the upheaval of the last couple of weeks as his opportunity to change his mind, to pull out altogether, but he’d sounded genuinely concerned tonight that we be ready for our next meeting with Anna.

I tried to visualise it all being okay, the two of us and the child we didn’t yet know, living somewhere picturesque and wholesome, like the mill. Fishing on the riverbank, balloon-adorned birthday parties on the lawns, friends and family coming over with their own kids. We didn’t need a super-home. We didn’t need anything but the people in that picture, yet still it felt like an unreachable fantasy. And still sleep evaded me.

CHAPTER 8

‘ER, HOUSTON? WE have a problem.’

The delicate issue of cohabitation was always going to have to be tackled at some point. This morning, that time had come. With my back to most of the office, I couldn’t see Sadie without swivelling my chair, so for nearly three hours, I hadn’t, locked in position like a stiff neck. Sadie had proven Phil wrong and had made it past the eleven-thirty benchmark, the time by which Phil had bet a fiver that Sadie would’ve cried off sick again.

Hannah was admiring a crisp five-pound note, Blu-tacked to her monitor. It was a momentous occasion that saw Phil lose a bet. One small step for Hannah, but a giant leap for office junior-kind.

Phil’s chair squeaked again. Hers hadn’t stopped swivelling all morning. It wasn’t yet noon and so far, her hawkish monitoring of Sadie’s end of the office had produced a near constant commentary of whispers and tuts.

‘Ame!’ she muttered for the umpteenth time. I carried on with the lighting plan the contractors were patiently waiting on. I didn’t need to know what Sadie was doing now. ‘It’s work-related, I promise. You really need to deal with this before Adrian does.’

That wasn’t necessarily good to hear either. ‘Don’t tell me the shop-fitters are working from superseded drawings again?’ Someone was in trouble if they were. I skipped around the workstation to Phil’s desk. Open on the screen was Phil’s cc’d copy of the email I’d sent to Rohan Bywater.

‘What about it?’ I asked. Phil gave me a few more seconds to work out what the problem was. ‘I had to give him your details, Phil, because I can’t work with him! The guy’s a big kid. Please be the point of contact on this if he takes us on?’

Phil pursed her lips as if about to whistle through them. ‘Er, I don’t think he’s going to take us on, Ame.’

Off the back of Phil’s expression, I tried to remember the figure I’d ended up quoting him. ‘I gave him a second option on the fees.’ I shrugged. It wasn’t like I’d priced him out of using Cyan completely.

‘The fees? Amy! I didn’t get as far as the attachments! I’ve just scrolled down the email to get to them and, and …’ Phil actually appeared lost for words. ‘Are you mad?’ She jabbed a pen at her monitor. ‘Read,’ she instructed. I skimmed over the email I’d hastily sent the night before, mumbling through the text.

Dear Mr Bywater,

Further to our earlier conversation, please find the attached fee proposal outlining our costs for the interior redesign of Briddleton Mill House, areas as specified on the accompanying plan. We have drafted two fee options for your consideration, as attached.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact my colleague, Philippa Penrose, on the above number.

Best Regards,

Amy Alwood

It was only a little buck-passing. It usually took a lot more to get Phil’s knickers in a twist. ‘I don’t see the problem? It’s polite, professional …’ I joked.

Phil had that rarest of gifts, the ability to bestow a full-bodied smile that held absolutely no warmth to it. ‘Scroll down the page, Miss Polite Professional,’ she instructed.

I exhaled and began scrolling through the screen. Beneath my message, a large blank space stretched out several lines further down the screen. I carried on moving down through the whiteness, until that name appeared again.

Bywater,

I’d love to see someone kick your arse with your own peg leg.

A whoosh of breath rushed into my lungs. It wasn’t unlike a scene from Indiana Jones when someone opens the crypt and the air gets sucked away before all hell breaks loose. ‘Oh shit! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!’

Phil sat open-mouthed. ‘You got that right. Why the hell did you write that on the end of a client’s email?’

I stared panic-stricken at the screen, willing the words in front of me to change. They didn’t. Well, that was that then. I slapped a hand against my stupid forehead. ‘Adrian is going to hit the roof. He’s going to sack me. I’ve just given him the perfect excuse to get rid—’

‘Calm down,’ Phil soothed. ‘You didn’t copy Adrian in on it. You’re just gonna have to call this guy up, quick, and, er …’

‘And what, Phil? Apologise for insulting him? Or for being so professionally inept that I didn’t check my own email before hitting SEND?’ I slumped into the free chair beside Phil, covering my face with my hands. ‘I must have pressed the return button, instead of delete. I moved the words out of view,’ I said shakily. I began to tap the heels of my hands against my forehead. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid!’

*

My desk phone began ringing out behind us. We all ignored it. All morning I’d wished for something, anything, to take my mind off Sadie sitting a few yards further down the office, flanked by her own team of whispering chair-swivellers. Now I had it. I was going to lose my job. I’d managed to pluck up the guts to come back here, and now I was going to have to explain to Anna anyway that I’d been sacked for abusing a guy with only one leg.

The ringing at my phone cut out, promptly replaced by a tinnier ringing at Hannah’s desk.

‘Hannah speaking?’ Hannah turned in her chair to face me. ‘Yep, she’s just talking to Phil.’ Hannah’s eyes widened. ‘Hang on a sec.’ She covered over the mouthpiece. ‘Ally’s got Mr Bywater on the reception phone. He’s asking to be put through to you.’

I stood bolt upright. ‘Now?’ I yelped.

‘Uh-oh.’ Phil grimaced.

Hannah was drawn back to her phone. ‘Oh … okay.’ She covered the mouthpiece again. ‘She’s putting him through now!’ she whispered, thrusting the receiver at arm’s length towards me with an apologetic frown. My arms were flapping hysterically, ferociously pointing a finger at Hannah, pleading with her to take the call. What do I say? Hannah mouthed, but it was too late. ‘Er, hello, Mr Bywater …’

My silent gesticulations continued as Hannah trod water for me. She quickly caught the gist of all the arm-flapping. I was out of the office. No, I was out of the office ill. I’d call him back.

‘No, Mr Bywater, it’s Hannah. We met yesterday. I’m afraid she’s not currently in the office, she’s … on site.’

Ill, Hannah! You should’ve said I was ill, with some horrible disease of the mind!

‘Can I take a message and get her to call you back as soon as she’s in?’ I winced at the thought of having to call him eventually. ‘Oh,’ Hannah said, contemplatively. ‘Er, okay?’ I watched her return the phone to its base.

Phil looked at me, then Hannah. ‘Well? What did he say?’

‘Nothing.’ Hannah said sheepishly. ‘He, er, he didn’t say anything.’

‘What?’ Phil demanded. ‘What the hell was he calling for then?’

Hannah began to flush. There was something she wasn’t saying. ‘What do you mean, he didn’t say anything, Hannah?’ I asked, already feeling a resurgence of Bywater-related apprehension.

Hannah looked down the office nervously. ‘Adrian started talking to him and he ended the call.’

‘Rohan Bywater is with Adrian?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘Adrian Espley?’ Hannah looked positively flustered now, darting uncertain eyes to Phil, then back to me again. The flush in her cheeks had deepened to an even cherry-red by the time she looked over to where Adrian’s hulking frame loomed into the far end of the studio. At first, I didn’t recognise the client beside him. His tan seemed not quite so deep, his shoulders bigger set inside the crisp lines of a slate-grey suit.

‘Shit, indeed,’ Phil muttered ominously.

Rohan Bywater’s dark mussed hair was no different, but teamed with stylish formal wear it came off as a deliberate trend, rather than the messy crop he’d sported yesterday. I felt as though somebody had just plunged a hand into my chest cavity and squeezed what it found lying around in there. Dropping into a crouch wasn’t a conscious move, but there I suddenly was, seeking refuge between Hannah and Phil’s legs.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Phil demanded.

I felt the colour drain from my face. ‘Hannah’s just told him I’m out of the office!’ I cringed.

‘You told me to say that!’ Hannah whispered defensively.

‘I know, I know!’

‘Yeah, don’t listen to her, Hannah. She kicks people and tells lies,’ Phil quipped. I’d have jabbed her in the leg had I not have been in the latter throes of a meltdown. ‘Holy hotbuns, Batman!’ Phil whispered excitedly. ‘He did not look like that when he was last in here.’

‘Flipping heck!’ Hannah agreed. ‘He looks better than he did on his bike too.’

I was about to succumb to a full-on panic attack. ‘Phil! What am I gonna do?’ Phil cocked an eyebrow and looked down over me. ‘Under the desk?’ She shrugged. Phil rolled her chair back a little, allowing me the option of shuffling into the alcove. For a second, I actually considered it.

‘And here they are!’ boomed Adrian, coming to a stand still between the backs of Hannah and Phil’s chairs. ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ I scrunched my eyes closed. Adrian could be like an embarrassing uncle at times. Like I needed any help with the embarrassment right now. ‘Is that you, down there, Alwood?’ he called, a forced joviality in his voice.

Phil cleared her throat. ‘You found that earring yet, Ame?’ she asked nonchalantly. I quickly pulled the stud from my lobe before wriggling backside first out of my inadequate hidey hole.

‘Found it.’ I smiled gingerly, holding the stud up in my fingers.

Hannah graduated from cherry-red to scarlet. ‘Oh … there you are, Amy!’ she tried. Phil rolled her eyes.

I tried not to look, but some part of me actually hoped there would be something of Bywater’s perpetual smile on his lips. I glanced up at him. His face was more angular when it was serious. His features statuesque and solemn, as if they should be made of marble, not flesh. I think I preferred the smile.

‘Amy, do you have a minute? In the boardroom?’ Adrian moved off towards the meeting room without my answer. Rohan Bywater watched me get to my feet. ‘Local site visit, was it?’ He nodded towards the boardroom.

‘Shall we?’ He didn’t wait for my answer either.

The look on Phil’s face said it all. See you on the other side … maybe.

Why had I even come back to work again? I mouthed a few expletives to myself and followed the two men into the boardroom.

Adrian was wrestling with the window blinds, trying to lessen the light streaming into the conference room when I walked in after them. Rohan Bywater moved beside me, the scent of his skin reaching me just before his voice did. ‘Cheer up, you look like someone’s about to get their arse kicked.’

I swept my skirt underneath myself and slipped into one of the chairs, waiting for the inevitable.

‘Right,’ Adrian started, ‘fantastic news. Mr Bywater is happy with your fee proposal, Amy – thanks for organising that so efficiently – and would like you to get started.’

What?

I checked Adrian’s expression. He always exuded elation after securing a new client. Bywater’s face was harder to read.

‘The senior design-led option,’ Bywater added. ‘That would be you, right?’

I tried not to grimace as I attempted to piece it all together. That email was beyond offensive. ‘You’re hiring me? As project leader?’

Bywater remained cool in his chair, eyes piercing against his darker features. ‘I read through your email last night. Top to bottom,’ he added carefully, ‘and I can tell I’ll be in safe hands.’ Bywater watched my hand move up towards my ear. I stopped myself and sat on it instead.

‘And you’d be right, Mr Bywater. Amy’s one of our best.’ Adrian sounded like an over-proud parent.

I tried not to squirm in my seat as Bywater fished to make eye contact. ‘I can see why you hold her in such high regard, Adrian. Professional, conscientious … I’m excited to get going,’ he said coolly.

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