Undertaking Love

Chapter Fourteen




It was just after nine in the morning on the first Tuesday in May, and Emily lay curled in the crook of Tom’s shoulder and relished the decadent pleasure of a long and lazy extended bank holiday. Around them everyone else had gone back to work this morning, but they’d planned otherwise and closed the curtains against the world. She fuzzily contemplated getting up to make coffee as the hairs on Tom’s chest tickled her closer to wakefulness. He traced sleepy circles low on the hollow of her back with his thumb, halfway towards soothing her to sleep and halfway towards turning her on.

She wriggled closer, and he slid his hand between her legs to settle the question.

This was who they were.

Emily and Tom. Tom and Emily.

The coffee could wait.



Half an hour later and fully awake, she slipped out of the warm circle of Tom’s arms and padded downstairs to make coffee. She scooped up the newspaper and letters from the mat as she passed and dropped them on the kitchen table. The last couple of weeks had been amazing, like a second honeymoon. Except for one thing. One painfully huge, enormous elephant in the room.

Dan.

What had happened on her birthday had been a long time coming, an inevitable consequence of the Chinese-water-torture style erosion of their marriage. She had hit rock bottom, and Dan had been her soft landing. A soft landing that she’d paid a daily penance for ever since with the ever-present weight of guilt on her shoulders. She could, of course, tell Tom. But who would she really be doing it for? Did he have a right to know, or was it better to shoulder the guilt and spare him the pain? She’d turned the question over in her mind all day, every day, and each night she’d tussled with it in her dreams.

She skim read the doom and gloom headlines as she waited for the kettle to boil, and her eyes were pulled back again to the date. May 2nd. May 2nd? How had her head become so full of other stuff that she’d managed to stop watching the calendar more closely than a death row inmate? She grabbed her trying-to-conceive diary from the kitchen shelf and fumbled through the pages with shaky fingers. April 2nd, day one of cycle. April 16th, ovulation due. And there, with a bold red ring around it, was April 30th. The day her regular-as-clockwork period was due. Two days ago. She sank down onto the nearest chair. Elation soared through her heart like a songbird, followed by a great crashing tsunami of fear. Three minutes later, a trip to the bathroom delivered the life-changing news she’d previously longed for. A precociously bright line popped up with indecent haste in the window that up to now had remained so stubbornly empty month on month.

She was pregnant.