Sara Foster - Come Back to Me

Dr Chen smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Chloe. As you say, they’ve been light, and it does happen with some women. I’m going to get you organised for a scan straightaway, to make sure. But I’d prepare for a baby in about five months, not seven, if I were you. Didn’t you notice your stomach changing?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose.’ She had noticed the roundness to her stomach recently. ‘But only in the last week or so, since I’ve known. I just thought that was what happened.’

‘It does, but normally a little further on than six weeks,’ Dr Chen said kindly.

‘But I haven’t felt sick at all.’

‘That’s a good thing.’ Dr Chen smiled, then paused again on seeing Chloe’s unhappy face. ‘Is something wrong, Chloe?’ She sat patiently, hands in her lap. Chloe wondered if the pose had been taught to her at medical school.

‘It’s my husband…’ Chloe started, but trailed off, unsure how to explain.

The doctor looked briefly at her notes. ‘Is he unhappy about the baby?’ she asked.

Chloe shook her head. ‘He doesn’t know.’

If the doctor was surprised she didn’t show it, but laid a hand on Chloe’s arm. ‘Tell him,’ she encouraged. ‘He needs to know, and you need to be taken care of right now.’

Chloe nodded. It wasn’t as simple as that, but doctors’ sessions usually lasted ten minutes, and if Chloe started pouring her heart out she would be here a lot longer than that. So she just took her referral for the ultrasound and left with a quiet ‘thank you’.

When she got outside she suddenly felt nauseous, as though all the morning sickness she had avoided so far had been stacking up inside her to come in one enormous wave at that moment. She got halfway along the surgery path, then had to lean into some bushes and deposit most of her lunch, thankful that there was no one around to see her.

This was no good. She had to tell Alex about the baby. In fact, it now seemed stupid she hadn’t done so already. Whatever his thoughts about Julia, the idea of being a father would distract him so much that this little hiccup would pale in comparison. Wouldn’t it?

Before her thoughts could take hold of her she tried Alex’s mobile, but there was no answer. That was weird. He normally picked up when he was working at home.

A jolt went through her as she remembered looking at his phone the night before, and before she could question what she was doing, she was dialling Mark.

Mark was walking out of the office when his phone rang. He reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled it out and flipped it open.

‘Mark, did Alex call you at the weekend?’

Mark heard the sharpness in Chloe’s tone and was surprised. ‘Er, yes, he did,’ he said, then paused, not knowing how to follow it up.

‘Oh, okay. What did he want?’

She asked it as casually as she could, but the pause that followed was packed with tension, as though she were holding herself still in readiness for his answer. A strange wave of emotion came across Mark, and with some surprise he found himself saying, ‘He dialled me by mistake, it was a five-second call. I don’t think Alex and I have all that much to talk about.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you do,’ Chloe answered, but the suspicion was still clear in her voice. ‘Okay, then. Thanks.’ And she was gone.

Mark made his way out, thinking of the restaurant last Thursday: Julia’s obvious distress, Chloe’s blatant innocence as to what was going on; and Alex’s shocked face. Then he remembered the man’s haughty voice on the phone at the weekend.

Why should he bloody well get away with it? Anger rose in him, crushing every other thought, and he turned back. He pushed open his office door, pulled out the rumpled piece of paper from his desk drawer, and marched into Chloe’s room, flinging the miserable scrap on to the table. He borrowed a biro to annotate it.

‘ I think this was what Alex wanted ,’ he wrote, the pen scratching out every word. ‘ I’ll leave it up to you whether he gets it or not .’

Alex was exhausted. As he tussled with each waking minute, a dark-haired wraith-woman paced the corners of his mind, darting out before him then back to the shadows again before he could stop her. In his dreams the night before she had been there too, wearing a vest top and a short skirt with thick ugg boots, her back to him, walking fast. Although he was running, lungs stinging with gasped oxygen, he could not close the gap. He had cried her name, but she gave no sign she had heard him. Then fog descended around them and she disappeared.

By the time he had got up, Chloe was gone, just a note from her on the table telling him she had an early meeting at work and signed with a ‘C’ – love and kisses conspicuously absent. He had tried not to read anything into that, but who was he kidding?

He thought about ringing her. At work she was invariably with clients or colleagues, however, so she would hardly want him to start pouring his heart out. He felt terrible that he hadn’t come home until the early hours. He’d ended up finding a panicked Jamie at his local police station, his brother having locked himself out of the house. Not only had they and a helpful constable had to break into Jamie’s flat, but then he’d had to stay with his brother until he’d calmed down enough for Alex to be sure he’d be safe on his own. Looking out for Jamie could be a thankless and depressing task at times, but his parents relied heavily on him to do so. It was they who had decided to buy Jamie a flat close to Alex when their younger son had insisted on moving out. Thinking back, Alex couldn’t ever remember a conversation where he’d agreed to this responsibility, but it seemed to have been handed to him anyway.

Frustrated, he tried to turn his mind to his work, relieved he didn’t have anything urgent today. Making his way through the house, he simultaneously began to effect the mental transition from home to work mode. It was a relief to get down to the cellar, which also functioned as his office and was one of his favourite places. Everything there was set up and streamlined so he could get through the maximum amount of work in a day – working for himself, time really was money. He’d put strip lighting in there, but it rarely went on; instead, spotlights and desk lights illuminated his work space, as well as his top-of-the-range Apple Mac, the machine he spent most of his days in communion with. The walls were peppered with the works of some of his favourite artists – including plenty of Dali and Magritte, a couple of Rousseau’s jungle scenes, and a particularly large print of L’Ange du Foyer by Max Ernst – the latter always causing him to smile when he remembered Chloe’s expression the time he’d suggested putting it up in the lounge. As the house was an old-fashioned one, there was a tiny strip of window at the very front of the room, which allowed a snippet of a view of the front pathway. It was quite grimy on the inside, and Alex had decided that, since cleaning it would involve moving Apple Mac, desk and god knew how many wires to allow access, it would stay that way for quite some time.

As he switched on the computer, the whir of it coming to life was drowned out by the buzz of his fractious mind. He needed to talk to Chloe… and to Julia… He was still fuming from his conversation with Mark yesterday morning, when the arrogant wanker had not only been utterly unhelpful, but had sworn at him and hung up.

Wearily, he turned to his work. There were about half a dozen emails waiting, two of which involved current jobs. When he had quit his in-house job at ArtSpace he had anticipated some time out, and then going back into the fray – never this. It had been Chloe who encouraged him to resign, seeing how unhappy he was with the office politics and backstabbing, which for most people seemed to take up a far larger part of the day than design work. There had been constant frayed nerves and speculation over the next round of redundancies; and an endless succession of ‘bright young things’ coming in, impetuous and overconfident in their abilities to transform the company, quickly becoming bitter and twisted as they morphed unwillingly into the status quo.