I Know Your Secret - Ruth Heald Page 0,50

I feel a fresh wave of nausea. It doesn’t help that work has been really busy. I’m struggling to keep up with the pace. I feel like I have constant flu, but I dread telling work about the baby. I’ve seen how women who have had children have been forced out of the office, on spurious grounds of redundancy, when it’s really because they can no longer work late every night. I’m sure that as soon as I tell the partners at the law firm, I’ll start to be sidelined. I’m already worried about all the time I’ll miss for antenatal appointments.

I reach for Peter’s hand as we sit in the hospital waiting room. I really hope he’ll stand by me. I’m praying this baby is his. It has to be. I was so careful with the other man.

I watch the pregnant women being called in for their scans one by one. Some of them clutch their backs as they walk to the consulting room, struggling under the weight of their bumps. I can’t imagine my body expanding so much. I touch my stomach, which is still showing no signs of a bump. It’s hard to believe there’s really a baby growing inside me. The constant nausea is the only thing that reminds me I’m pregnant. But just months from now I will be as big as those women.

I’m called through and Peter and I walk into the small consulting room. The sonographer smiles as I climb up onto the bed. When she rubs cold gel on my belly, Peter reaches for my hand and squeezes it. It feels good to have him beside me. The probe touches my stomach and the sonographer presses harder than I expect.

There’s a rushing sound on the screen, but no picture, only darkness. The sonographer keeps moving the probe, pressing harder. I feel a stab of fear. What if the baby’s not there? Eventually she finds something. The flicker of a white line. And then more. Our baby.

‘There it is,’ she says, smiling.

‘Wow,’ Peter says, staring at the screen. And I can see that he’s forgotten his doubts entirely.

‘Can you tell when it was conceived?’ I ask quickly.

‘Let me just run some checks and take some measurements, and then I’ll have a better idea.’

Peter and I watch in silence as the sonographer works, staring intently at the screen. I feel Peter squeeze my hand tightly. I can hardly believe this is real. My baby. On the screen. Growing inside me.

‘OK,’ the sonographer says. ‘This looks like a healthy baby. Congratulations. Now I can’t give you an exact date of conception. But from the measurements, I’d say this foetus is about nine weeks old. You have to take two weeks away to get the date of conception, so you would have conceived seven weeks ago.’

I smile at Peter. I can see he’s thinking what I’m thinking, because he can’t help beaming back at me. The baby was conceived just after we got back together.

Thirty-One

Beth

I sit on the sofa with my laptop, browsing through houses on Rightmove. Charlie is staying at his father’s tonight. When Richard came round to collect him, I nearly asked him about Danielle, but something stopped me. I remembered what Grace said about me just looking for someone to blame. Can that be true? Is this all in my head? I glance over at the photo of Nick on the sideboard. I wish he was here to talk to. He always saw things so clearly, always gave me the best advice.

I go back to looking at houses. I think of how hard I’ve worked over the last month, trying to find new clients, advertising and building up my website. But it’s not enough. I haven’t managed to acquire any more clients, and Richard’s made it very clear that he’s going to sell the house. I’ve been looking up more information about beneficial interest and I intend to ensure I get my fair share of the proceeds from the house, but in the meantime I still need to find somewhere to live. Richard said he wants the equity from our home to buy a place of his own. A bigger place, where he has enough space.

Enough space for what? A baby? Danielle’s baby?

No, that can’t be right. I’m just being paranoid, jumping to conclusions, like Grace said. There must be other people who compare their partners to Kate Winslet, other men who talk down to women. But the brooch…

Taking the steps two at