Matilda Next Door - Kelly Hunter Page 0,22

would keep her awake, or open one of Henry’s fancy bottles of wine and put her feet up and the music on low and relax for a few minutes before she started checking the phone for calls.

And, oh boy were there calls. Sixteen of them—all but one of them from Henry.

The other one was from her mother, and she started with it, only to shake her at the sound of her mother’s voice telling her to give Henry a call when she had a spare moment. And she would. She absolutely would. Just as soon as she poured the fancy wine into a crystal glass etched with frolicking stags and took a sip.

Could she even finish the glass she’d poured? What with responsibility for a baby resting firmly on her shoulders?

Damn.

She set the glass on the wide arm of the chair, looked at her phone and thought, five minutes more before I tackle all those Henry calls.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember some of the meditation breathing techniques Holly had tried to teach them at the last Smart Ladies’ Supper Club meeting. Holly was a midwife so, seriously, the woman should know her breathing techniques, right?

Breathe in, palm to her torso just below her breasts and make that palm rise. Hold for the count of one, two, three. And breathe out to the count of five.

Breathe in …

As her body grew heavier and she reached for her pretty blue scarf and draped it over her body like a blanket.

And out …

*

Henry was having a bad morning. By the time he’d printed out and muttered his way through the information Tilly had sent him, the only thing he was sure of was that someone, somewhere, had bribed, cajoled, pleaded or otherwise forged his signature on a whole lot of paperwork. How else could there be a legal birth certificate for one Rowan Aurelia Church, born on August the third in the maternity wing of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to one Amanda Ava Murphy and one Henry Robert Church?

There was a will. Amanda hadn’t died destitute—a brilliant mind and various patents had seen to that—and the child had inherited the lot. But the estate was to be managed by Henry until the child’s majority, and until Henry took control it was being administered by the solicitors who’d prepared the will.

There was the Dear Henry letter, brief and to the point, and it had been enough to make his legs buckle and his hands shake. He hadn’t found a brain compartment for it yet, but he would. He’d label it terror and lock it down hard, never to see the light of day again.

Dear Henry,

I know this is not what you want from me.

Death wasn’t exactly part of my plan either. Not now. Not yet.

If I had my way, I’d be there for all my daughter’s tears and joys. I’d be crying on her first day of school, but I’d never let her see me do it. I’d be puffed with pride years later when she accomplished her shiniest goals. I would love her so thoroughly throughout the years that she would never, ever feel unworthy or unwanted.

Remember when we talked about mothers that day, and I said I wouldn’t know how to be a good one because I’d never had one? Wouldn’t even know where to begin. And you said—I remember it so clearly, Henry—you looked me up and down and said ‘Who better to know how to be an excellent mother than someone who’d only ever known the absence of one? All those times you wept for want of one, or reached for a blanket to wrap around your loneliness and pretended it was your mother’s arms … Who better to know exactly what is needed from a mother, and when, than a girl who never had one?’

I like to think I’d have made a great parent and justified your belief in me, but I’m dying and I’m so afraid that if I don’t reach out to you, my daughter will become a ward of the state. I’ve been there and done that and it is no place for a child.

Rowan’s yours.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t think I could get pregnant. The odds were so long.

And although you never considered our night together the start of a proper relationship, for me it was a tender, intense and loving experience. You did not disappoint. That’s how I choose to remember it. A magical night with a man I