He has trapped her into staying alive. And she hopes against hope now, that maybe he is right about the consequences of that: that someday she will find all this behind her and be glad of her existence again.
She feels the kick against the side of its soft balloon home and she finds herself wondering: does it know her heart?
It’s not like it’s uncomplicated.
When Adam’s parents come round with Adam, and they sit, the six of them, Becky comes close to breaking.
They are so kind. They offer to help out with expenses, like post-natal care. They offer to contribute to Becky getting some help with therapy, if she wants it.
Adam’s mum suggests, tearfully, that maybe if Becky changes her mind and decides to keep it then they will help, they’d love it, really they would …
‘Mum,’ says Adam sharply.
‘I’m just saying that it would always be loved. I’m sorry, but I have to say that. But I won’t say it again. I’m sorry.’
‘Becky’s going to university,’ says Bill. Becky tries to picture herself in Freshers’ Week, running riot with her new friends in student halls. But she can’t see it. There is no future where she is so light, and free, and rootless.
All she sees is Scott’s expression as she steps back from him and he lets go of her wrist. As she readjusts her jeans. Pure disappointment. Had he planned everything from that moment onwards? Was it always going to be her? Would the same have happened with another girl in that room or was it something about her?
‘What are the arrangements for the birth?’ asks Adam’s father. He has brought a notebook with him so that he can capture any to-do items that he agrees to take on. He volunteers to drive Becky and Adam in, when it’s time.
‘You don’t have to be there,’ says Becky to Adam, and she means it. In fact, she wants him not to be there. She wants nobody there.
‘I’ll be there,’ says Adam.
‘Fucking right you will,’ says Bill.
‘I’ll give you all my mobile number then,’ says Adam’s dad. ‘I read that women often go into labour at night, so … I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘We’ve cleared the diary,’ says Adam’s mum, blinking back tears. She wants to ask: Can I see the baby? Can I hold it? Can I take it home? When it looks like my son, can I refuse to let anyone take it away from us? And instead, she looks down at her lap.
Two weeks before the baby is due, Bill leaves his family.
One morning, the three of them are sitting round the kitchen table, plates of burnt toast and cups of cold tea in front of them.
Janette leaves the room and comes back in brandishing a thin cardboard box. Janette has spent money on an expensive cream for stretch marks. She thinks it will gee everyone up.
‘It’ll help her get back to normal,’ she says.
Bill stares at the receipt. ‘Forty quid? For that?’
‘It’s a good one. We want her to have a good one, don’t we?’
He goes upstairs and Janette calls after him, ‘I’m not taking it back. And anyway, you’ve already taken the top off, so I bloody can’t.’
Becky wishes the ground would swallow her up. She wonders if she could move into Adam’s parents’ house, at least just until this is all over with. And then she remembers the look on his mum’s face and that love will ruin everything. Love will persuade and cajole her to keep the criminal’s baby and turn one blacked-out moment into the rest of her life.
What if the baby looks like Scott? The thought of it makes her sick.
Bill returns thirty minutes later, carrying a suitcase. He doesn’t announce his departure. He just goes.
‘Is he going?’ Janette asks Becky. ‘Is he actually going?’
Janette chases after him, calling him a selfish prick all the way down the street.
When her mother returns to the kitchen, Becky is bent over and throwing up all over the kitchen floor. Janette goes to her quickly and scoops handfuls of her daughter’s hair back up and around her neck. ‘There, there,’ she says. ‘There, there.’
Adam comes round and they sit on her bed watching eighties comedy movies, eating popcorn. They don’t talk much. What is there to say now? They are waiting out their lie together.
Word has got out at school. Mary gets in touch to say: Adam??!
Becky doesn’t reply.
‘Have you seen Scott?’ she asks Adam.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not even sure he knows.’
Here comes life. This screaming, wriggling, red-faced hungry thing. Becky feeds her, only because it seems cruel not to. The milk is there. Her breasts hurt. The baby latches on. The tightness of the connection surprises her. The baby’s other hand rests on her breast.
She looks nothing like Scott.
None of them are meant to come, not Janette or Adam’s parents, but they come anyway. And what can she do? Turn them away?
On the face of it, Adam looks like a little boy himself. All that steel going. He wants to protect her and he doesn’t know how.
Janette holds the child and its tiny red fingers clamp round her little finger. ‘I can’t believe your dad’s missing this,’ she says, blunt to anything but the truth of what she feels.
Adam’s mother changes the baby’s nappy, with quick expert movements.
‘You haven’t forgotten anything, have you?’ says Adam’s dad.
‘You don’t,’ she replies, stooping to kiss the baby’s belly. ‘Are you going to hold her?’ she asks Adam.
And the moment Becky sees Adam kissing the child’s head, holding her in his arms, she knows without doubt that something catastrophic has happened.
They have all fallen in love, and so fast.
It will fall to her to cut these ties. To break one, two, three, four hearts, not including her own. To hand this baby over to someone else, someone who will smell unfamiliar. Who can offer her a bottle where she had a breast. Will the
