‘It’s okay,’ I say now, carefully. ‘You don’t need to answer that. I remember.’ She stares at her lap, and I exhale heavily and run a hand through my hair.
‘I had been skipping my pill sometimes, for a long time,’ she whispers. ‘I went a little crazy, to be honest with you. River was a new baby, and then Penny fell pregnant, and it felt like everyone around us was having babies and it was all that I could think about. And at first you seemed keen on the idea, but then you weren’t… and I just… It was selfish and stupid.’
‘Yeah. It was,’ I say quietly. I am angry, but not as angry as I might have been had I learned this information before I adjusted to the idea of the baby. I consider this and realise that the mitigating factor is that I do already love this child.
It was completely and utterly wrong of Molly to make the decision on my behalf, a betrayal of my trust, a manipulative and selfish move. It was the action of a spoilt child, far too used to getting her own way. But it doesn’t matter how many phrases I apply to what she did, I can’t make myself be as furious as I know I should be. Maybe it will come later, once this sinks in, or maybe I’ve just exhausted my reserves of energy for the day and I’ll wake up furious tomorrow.
All I know is that I am not all that surprised by this realisation – maybe because as conscious as I am of Molly’s strengths, I also understand her weaknesses. I wonder if on some level, I have known this all along.
‘So I guess…’ she murmurs. ‘I guess that’s done, then.’
‘Done?’ I repeat, and I glance at her sideways.
‘This was the thing, Leo. This was what brought our issues to a head – what I did.’
‘I think I can get past this,’ I frown. ‘This wasn’t what caused us to separate.’
‘Oh, it was definitely a factor.’
‘So… you found out you were pregnant, and then we called it quits? That’s crazy!’
She looks down at the bump of her belly and runs her palms up and down it a few times.
‘You’d asked me to think about whether or not I still wanted to be with you and we’d barely spoken in the weeks since that conversation, but you were coming home with Brad when he returned for the birth. Then you called at the last minute and said you weren’t coming home, so I got pretty upset. I went to Istanbul to spend a few days with you to try to reconnect.’
As she speaks, I remember a few things. I remember standing in my hotel room. I’d just put on my gym gear – I was in a foul mood, and hoping a vigorous workout would snap me out of it. I held a bottle of water in one hand, and I had the door key between my teeth. I swung the door open and Molly was standing there with a suitcase beside her. The sight of her was so unexpected that it startled me out of the trance-like processing I had been doing until I opened the door. What the hell are you doing here? I remember being as shocked by the rudeness of my own tone as I was by the sight of her, and I remember the way that her face fell. I have been travelling for a full day to see you, and that’s how you’re going to greet me?
‘You weren’t happy to see me,’ she whispers, and then she clears her throat. ‘I shouldn’t have gone. It made things worse, not better.’
‘God!’ I say suddenly. I look at her in shock as I remember my next words to her. ‘I told you to go home.’
‘Yeah. We went into your room in that shitty hotel room you were staying in – it smelt like rotten socks and the bed had a popped spring in it and – it was just awful.’
‘I just took the first room I found – I didn’t want you to stay with me, not there.’
‘I said I’d find something else so we could have a few days together. You told me not to bother,’ she whispers.
Those memories are shocking, but jumbled pieces of the puzzle float around in my mind and I can’t figure out how to make sense of it. I was furious with her for coming – I was miserable – I was stressed and panicked. Worst of all, I felt utter despair at the sight of her, which felt like an out-of-place emotion even then.
When I opened that door, I couldn’t figure out what she was even doing there, standing in my hallway, looking at me with that desperate pleading in her eyes. I’d been ashamed to see her and to know that every new line on her face was my fault.
‘You’d never come into the field before,’ I say now, and she shakes her head.
‘It’s not like I walked through a firefight to meet up with you in Homs,’ she sighs. ‘You were in Istanbul, so it was safe enough. But I hadn’t arrived unannounced before, no. We met up in Europe a few times during the first year, but you’d grown less keen on that as time went on.’
I’m frantically searching my memory, trying to figure out how that encounter ended. I can’t think past sitting on the bed with her in the dodgy hotel room and being embarrassed at how bad the place was. She had looked so uncomfortable, and so utterly sad, and so out of place.