it here.’ She heard his sigh through the thick wood. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. She didn’t care—
‘Gisele’s pregnant.’
Lee’s hands dropped down from her ears, her eyes wide. She felt the floor tilt beneath her feet as the words settled like rocks in her stomach. Gisele was pregnant. She was surprised – and she wasn’t. This day had been bound to come. They had been married three years now; she was young. It made sense she’d want to start a family, to have his child.
Did he really think she cared? Was that what had prompted him to come and stand on her doorstep in these temperatures? Did he think it somehow made him a better human being, now that he was going to be a father? Wasn’t it rather too late for that? She felt herself harden, wet clay to concrete, anger to action. She turned away and walked back up the hall, up the stairs, his voice receding at her back, her heart hammering in her chest.
‘Please, Fitch, just let me come in. Five minutes, that’s all I’m asking . . .’
She walked into the vast open-plan kitchen and living area, drenched in light and sound. She turned down the dimmers slightly. Jasper was on his hands and knees on the floor, playing with the remote-control car his godfather Noah had given him, ‘just because’, a few weeks earlier. Star Wars was playing on the TV in the background, thankfully throwing out enough galactic noise to drown out Cunningham’s mournful pleas.
‘Hungry?’ she asked, walking to the cupboard and hoping a dinner she’d forgotten to buy ingredients for would miraculously emerge before her. She was what she called a cupboard cook, using whatever happened to be on the shelf – nothing was ever planned, rarely was it successful, but somehow she and Jasper got by on her strange concoctions. Jasper’s favourite was her sausage noodle bake, which never tasted the same, no matter how often she cooked it.
‘Starving!’ Jasper proclaimed dramatically.
‘Okay, well . . .’ she said, staring into the fridge like it was a maths equation. There had to be an answer in there somewhere. It might be only just after five thirty, but it was supper time, and their lives ran according to the clock of Jasper’s stomach. ‘Spaghetti arrabbiata?’
‘We had pasta at lunch.’
‘Oh well, that’s a first-world problem, my darling,’ she shrugged, reaching for the diced pancetta. ‘There are worse things than having pasta twice in one day.’
She put on a pan of water, rummaging in the cupboards for a ready-made tomato sauce and hoping she wouldn’t have to water down some ketchup like last time. Whilst the pasta cooked, she lit a fire in the baroque marble fireplace, and when dinner was ready, they went straight into a spaghetti-sucking contest. Afterwards, they shared a bath and then flopped on the sofa for some telly-watching before bed and a story. It was their usual Thursday night routine, and identical to the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday routines too. Nothing ever changed in their lives because there was no need for it to. That in itself was a luxury, she knew. There were no potential ambushes to outfox on the way home; no bombs tearing through the sky as they cycled to the shops. Life here was quiet, repetitive and predictable. It was safe. It was everything she had promised to give him.
‘I love you, Jazz.’
‘I love you, mama,’ he said, the duvet tucked all the way up under his chin.
She stroked his cheek, feeling its padded velvety softness against her own skin, which felt so rough by comparison; she had spent too many years scrabbling through rubble to ever have the soft hands of TV advert mothers. ‘Give me a kiss.’ He puckered up his rosy lips and she planted a kiss on them. Her hands clasped his face for a moment as she marvelled at the miracle of him. He was the image of his father. ‘Sleep tight, little man.’
‘You too, mama,’ he said, his eyes burning intensely, anxiously.
‘I will, darling. Don’t worry.’ She tapped the end of his nose with her index finger and winked.
She navigated her way expertly over the scattered Lego – her newly domestic equivalent of crossing a minefield – and closed the door softly behind her. She stood there for a few moments, hearing him shift position onto his side and say something quietly to Ducky, his beloved cloth toy, before walking down the