Anouska Knight - A Part of Me

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.