Come Back to Me

right now.

What had she been thinking of, that secrets could ever be benign? They were nothing of the kind – they were poisonous shards of glass that were trapped just below the skin, twisting and turning with every movement a person made, threatening to break through the surface.

Some dark thing began to rear up in her then, towards the surface of her consciousness. It was her mother, sitting like this against a doorway, and sobbing like she would never stop.

What had happened? It seemed she had pushed the memory down – although now something came to her – a darkened room she didn’t want to look into. She forced the image away, fought it off until she was sure it was vanquished, made herself focus on Alex’s ugly, buried secrets as she curled up on the floor.

There came a beeping sound from her pocket. She fumbled with the phone as she lifted it out, and looked at the screen. There was a text message.

I WILL CALL YOU TOMORROW.

TRUST IN ME. I LOVE YOU.

I WILL COME BACK TO YOU.

64

For the rest of the week, Chloe’s world seemed to revolve around one question:

‘Have you told him yet?’

Mikaela had asked first, when she’d rung Chloe to see how she was and got more than she’d bargained for. Her mother had then outdone herself by ringing at least four times in one day, the same question bursting continuously from her lips. Chloe had almost ranted at her after a while, wanting to shout, ‘How can I tell him about the baby if he isn’t even bloody here?’ but she didn’t. While no one knew Alex had gone, she could still pretend this wasn’t real, and avoid the awkward silences and pitying stares.

She’d made an exception for Mikaela. Her cousin had heard the quaver in her voice immediately, and once Chloe had started crying down the phone she couldn’t seem to stop, so Mikaela had immediately insisted that Chloe came to stay. They had been holed up together for the past few days. Chloe brought home bad food for them both after work, and to start with they talked, then progressed to watching sitcom reruns while slating the perfect- looking actresses that swanned on and off the screen. It was an odd throwback to their teenage years, and initially Chloe had found comfort in that; then gradually it had begun to disturb her. She didn’t want to go back to being one of the girls, sharing her broken heart and letting others help her to mend it. Her despair was something she couldn’t even articulate, let alone allow others to pick over.

Tonight she would be going home. For a few days it had been a relief not to have to face the empty house, now devoid of its loving atmosphere; but Mikaela was away with work from today and Chloe had begun to miss some of her home comforts, not to mention clean clothes.

Alex had been persistently ringing her mobile, but she was still too hurt and confused to talk to him. When he’d tried her at the office, she had hung up as soon as Jana transferred the calls. She needed to clear her head first; she was scared she wouldn’t be able to stop her mouth from spitting vile accusations and insults at him right now. He had left voicemails too, but she hadn’t replayed them. She didn’t want to hear his voice, so she deleted them instead.

This morning she’d already spoken briefly to her mother, who had been most affronted when Chloe had cancelled the next trip to the Lakes. As Chloe spoke she was aware of the irony – this was what Alex had been begging her to do for weeks, and it had taken his leaving to push her to it. Her mother spent the rest of the call making snide comments about how she hadn’t realised she was such a burden to them. In response, Chloe had told her that now she was pregnant it might be more difficult to come quite as often, to which her mother had laughed and said, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Chloe. It’s not an illness, you know.’

As she tried to shake off that particular conversation, Chloe walked through the office doors in a daze, still absorbing the fact that she was further on in her pregnancy than she’d known, rubbing her stomach, unable to comprehend that a new life had taken a firm shape of its own in there before she’d even been aware of it, and that her husband still didn’t know that he was going to be a dad.

As she walked out of the lift and past reception, she saw David Marchant striding towards her. With no time to avoid him, she turned and attempted a smile.

‘Morning, Chloe.’ David made no effort to hide the long look he took at his watch as he approached. ‘Good to see you this morning. Don’t forget you have a meeting with Neil at eleven. The Abbott case is looming large for us now. If you see Mark popping in at any stage this morning, be sure to pass the message on to him as well, won’t you?’

‘Yes, David.’ Chloe sighed as she made her way towards her office. She tried to imagine the look on David’s face when she told him she was four months pregnant. Normally it would have terrified her, but right then it made her almost laugh out loud. Great, she was becoming hysterical.

As she walked past the secretaries’ pool, Jana noticed the smile on her face and gave her a shy, friendly hello. It took Chloe aback. Jana didn’t often talk to her; in fact, Chloe didn’t think the secretary liked her much. It hadn’t bothered her overly, as she’d made a rule that her relationship with her secretary would be strictly business after what had happened with Charlotte. Spending a few years working with her former boyfriend’s one-night stand hadn’t been much fun.

She noticed Mark’s office was dark, and the door was shut. She turned back to Jana.

‘Where’s Mark this morning?’

Jana shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Has he got anything on?’

‘Well, his diary’s clear,’ Jana replied.

‘He hasn’t phoned in?’

‘No,’ Jana said.

Mark was never later in for work than she was. What the hell was going on with everyone? Chloe wondered with tired exasperation. She usually felt she was a good judge of character, but she didn’t seem to know anyone at all at the moment.

In her office she lifted her bag onto her desk and took out the number of the ultrasound unit at the hospital. She rang it and asked for an appointment, having to repeat herself when the lady couldn’t hear her whispers. She watched the glass wall of her office closely, waiting to see either David or Neil appear there looking cross, but nothing happened.

They could fit her in tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d see their baby for the very first time. Alone.

As she sat down, she reluctantly looked at the in-trays piling up behind her with legal documents waiting to be drafted and letters needing to be written. The court applications to be made. Half-heartedly, she pulled a case file towards her, but instead of opening it she tried to re-examine just why she hadn’t told Alex about the baby. If she had, surely he wouldn’t have left. She thought back to the Lakes, and that fateful conversation when she’d only just found out herself. ‘We’re not ready for that yet,’ he’d said dismissively. If he hadn’t said those words, would she have told him by now?

Possibly, as since then she had certainly been worried about how he would react. When the baby had been on the tip of her tongue so many times, one question kept recurring in her mind.

What if it changed nothing?

That was the core of it. And so their poor baby had become the trump card in its parents’ marital problems before it was even born. She pushed away the thought that they would make terrible parents. But really, what chance did their child have when its mother was being torn apart by worry just as the very cells of its tiny, amorphous body were furiously dividing and multiplying and trying to get the act of creation right?

She tried to distract herself by going to Mark’s office. The lights were still off. She frowned: it was past ten o’clock. She didn’t think Mark had been late since the time they’d broken up. Her brief affair with Risto flitted through her head. Mark hadn’t spoken to her much for quite a while back then, even though that relationship had fizzled out as quickly as it had started when Risto had had an unrefusable offer from a head-hunter.