‘I can’t remember why you stayed,’ I frown. ‘Did you insist? Were you only there to…? I mean, did you know that if we…’
‘No,’ she says, and she gasps at me, as if I’ve insulted her.
I wince and point to her belly. ‘Well… Molly, I mean… you did stop taking the pill. It’s not such a stretch that you might have lined up a meeting for the right time to seal the deal.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says, frowning at me. ‘I got lazy with it, I didn’t stop taking it.’
‘Is there any difference?’
She sighs and sinks back into her seat, then shakes her head. ‘I know, it’s still wrong. But I promise you, I didn’t realise I’d missed enough for it to stop working.’
‘So how did you end up staying with me, love?’
‘You were angry, but then you realised what an arse you were being and you apologised, and we decided I’d stay,’ she tells me. ‘I found us a better hotel room and we moved across town, but you really only spent the evenings with me that week – you were busy all day.’
I have a vague idea that I might have made a point of staying out because I resented her decision to arrive unannounced and I hate the picture that paints of my mindset. I ponder this for a moment and another piece of the puzzle falls into place.
Trapped, I felt trapped. I felt exactly as though I was caught in a situation from which there was no safe exit – no way forward that didn’t involve pain. I try to understand that, but I’m getting impatient and stressed now, and my mind refuses to offer more context. I sigh and glance back at Molly: she’s the answer to the puzzle of my mind.
‘So if you weren’t there to get yourself a baby, what did you want out of that trip?’
She smiles at me sadly, and rests her hand over mine on her belly and squeezes my fingers.
‘I just wanted to reconnect with you.’
‘And we obviously did at least once,’ I say, and I nod towards her belly.
‘Not really,’ she says sadly. ‘I mean we were intimate again, yes obviously… but we didn’t connect on the level we needed to. When we did talk, you only wanted to talk about the embed, and I really didn’t want you to do it, so we kept arguing about it – which just proved the extent of the problem to us both, I think. I went there thinking that all we needed was time alone together, but by the end of that week…’ she clears her throat. ‘I couldn’t wait to get home.’
‘So did we decide to separate then?’
‘Actually, no. You came home a few weeks later, and we had another big fight about the baby, and it just got so ugly… I think we both knew it was over then.’
‘It wasn’t over,’ I frown at her. ‘It will never be over.’
‘I don’t think we know that yet, Leo,’ she whispers after a minute. Her eyes drop to my legs, and then return to my face. ‘Unless you’ve suddenly realised you want to retrain as an accountant?’
We spent the rest of the car trip in silence. I can remember patches of that week in Istanbul now, and I can remember making love to her once or twice while we were there.
I remember missing her, even when she was with me – and I can completely understand what she meant when she said she couldn’t wait to get home. I used to count down the days until I saw her, but that week, I counted down the days until she left.
I can hardly believe we let it get to that point – but I do remember the way that she had looked at me in Istanbul. There had been a confused blend of desperation and disdain in her eyes and every time I’d tried to share with her my enthusiasm for the assignment I was working on, I’d see even those emotions die altogether, until her beautiful blue eyes seemed dull.
I remember thinking that no one in the world had the power to hurt me like Molly did. She could cut me deeply with just a dismissive comment about not talking about my assignment, or a simple roll of her eyes when I tried to bring it up again. I knew that she didn’t mean to, I knew that I’d hurt her too and she was acting from a place of pain, but that awful week was one long series of awkward conversations and each of us trying to reignite something that was too far gone to be reanimated. When she finally left, I was relieved.
That desperate, desolate relationship I am starting to remember is worlds away from the one I know now. These weeks with Molly have been alive with love and intimacy again – despite all the challenges we have faced in that time. How can things between us be so wonderful now, and yet in the ordinary comings and goings of our days the first time around, we let it fade away to nothing?
Even as I’m thinking about all of this, my mind drifts back to the moment earlier that morning when I stood on my own for exactly ten seconds, and I heard Tracy say those wonderful, magical words.
‘Tomorrow, we take your first step.’
39
Molly – May 2015