go, or if you have to, come back whole, like she was heading to war.
Maybe she was. But it had occurred to her, as she ghosted through this warm and wonderful Christmas, that no one could make her go back to the war zone.
“Will,” she whispered, and looked up, but his head was still bent down, and their lips were too close. They should never be this close. Yet she must have moved closer because they—
Touched.
Abbie sucked in a breath, slammed herself back against the cushions, as far from that forbidden mouth as she could get. An electrical charge crackled through her veins, fizzed beneath the fine skin of her wrists, but didn’t burn.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Will straightened slowly as if in a dream and stared down at her as he brought one ever-so-slightly shaking hand to his lips. As if she’d hit him and he couldn’t quite believe it. “Abbie—” He sounded like a dying man.
And she felt—she felt—
“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “That was an accident. Sorry.” She stood and squeezed past the huge statue he’d become, and went upstairs to lie, stunned, in bed beside her snoring mother.
Abigail Farrell filed for divorce on New Year’s Eve.
* * *
Abbie woke up with a snake of panic curled low in her belly.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
She lay on her back, staring wide-eyed at the darkness, jumping every time a cat meowed or hissed or knocked something over somewhere in the house.
Which was really fucking often.
After roughly three hours of trying to sleep while maintaining a ruthless grip on her own memories, Abbie gave it up as a bad job and grabbed her phone. It lit up the room, revealing a pair of round, glowing eyes watching her from the windowsill.
“Christ,” she gasped, then squinted into the shadows. “Dumpling?”
The chubby black cat took his name as an invitation and leapt halfway across the room to land on her bed.
“For fuck’s sake,” Abbie muttered, even as she stroked that special spot between his ears. “Fine. Whatever. As long as you stay away from Will’s room.” Dumpling loved Will. Almost all of the cats loved Will, actually—probably because he respected their many strengths and protected their vulnerabilities and tolerated their sharp claws and rough tongues. Probably because he didn’t mind prickly affection, not when he knew it was the best they could give.
Dear God, she really had to stop thinking about this stuff.
Tapping in the passcode to unlock her phone—since it never recognised her face without eyeliner, which was incredibly fucking rude—Abbie found a text from Chitra that had apparently been sent ten minutes ago. At 12:43 a.m.
Chitra: Do you ever think about the fact that foetuses are kind of like parasites draining your resources to promote their own survival?
Abbie released a deep, deep sigh before responding.
Abbie: No, and neither should you. Why are you awake? Everything okay?
Chitra: Kid won’t stop kicking. Am proud of her violent tendencies but concerned by her lack of loyalty in deploying them.
Abbie released a huff of laughter and sank deeper into the softness of her pillow. Then another text arrived, one that had her wide awake and edgy again.
Chitra: Why are YOU awake?
Abbie’s subconscious provided an answer before she could craft a nice, sanitary excuse for herself. I’m awake because every single thing I said to Will today was safe but wrong.
Shit. She’d noticed some hideous thought creeping at the edges of her mind for several hours, but she really hadn’t wanted to face it head-on. Now she had faced it, and in the space of a few seconds, it grew bigger and bigger. So big, in fact, that it uprooted the entire landscape of her mind and blew all her careful compartmentalising to shit.
Suddenly, all she could think about was Will.
Slowly, she typed out a message.
Coming to terms with the fact that I said goodbye to that therapist too soon, and it’s probably time to say hello again. Also, trying to decide on the line between being smart and sensible and being too scared to risk anything ever. So far, making zero progress.
She stared at those words for a few long moments before deciding they were not an appropriate thing to send an exhausted, heavily pregnant lady in the middle of the night. So she deleted them and sent something else.
Abbie: Too much mocha before bed. BTW I really love you.
Chitra: DO you? Enough to reconsider my three-way co-parenting idea?
Abbie: … Well, no. Not that much. You and Charlie are