here.
‘Realised what?’ I say, looking up at her mother.
‘That Zoe was pregnant.’
54
Angela tells me the whole story. A moonless night in September, just over a year ago, Zoe finishing an evening shift of outreach work with vulnerable women on the streets of north London. Walking home alone when she was grabbed, beaten, knocked unconscious, her balaclava-wearing attacker intent on strangling her until he was disturbed in the act, chased away by a group of students returning from a night out. One of the students was a first-year medic who gave Zoe mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrived.
‘Her heart stopped twice on the way to the hospital,’ Angela says. She is sitting in a chair by the bed, holding Zoe’s hand, her thumb tracing the line of a pale blue vein on the back of her daughter’s hand. ‘But they managed to bring her back both times. Those first twenty-four hours were unbearable, the worst. Thinking every minute that we were going to lose her; then trying to keep her alive in the first few days, bouncing between that and the hope that she might actually regain consciousness. But her brain had been starved of oxygen for too long – there was too much damage.’
I put a hand to my mouth, the weight of tears heavy behind my eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Angela.’ The words feel hopelessly inadequate. ‘For both of you. I can’t imagine . . .’
‘The media had a version of the story by then,’ Angela continues, ‘saying it was this serial attacker the police couldn’t catch, this ‘Ghost’ who was still on the loose, filling in the gaps in the story they didn’t know by suggesting that Zoe was a sex worker like the other victims. That subtext of just another prostitute, as if that meant they all deserved it in some way. Every headline as if she was being attacked all over again. And we couldn’t help her, no matter what we tried.’ She pauses, takes a deep breath. ‘You feel so helpless, as if you can’t do what a mother is supposed to do. But after a couple of months, after this room had been kitted out, we brought her back from the hospital so she could be with us, at home. We thought it might help her recovery.’
I look at her daughter’s pale skin, long lashes beneath closed eyes, the slow pulse of a vein at her neck, wondering whether there might be any kind of recovery for her. Whether she might ever hold her own daughter in her arms, feed her, smile at her, wonder at the miracle of life that she had made. If there was anything that could bring her back from this existence, suspended somewhere between life and death, or whether the Ghost had taken it all away from her forever.
Angela says, ‘She always looked for the good in people, always believed the best in them.’
‘How far along was she,’ I say quietly, ‘when you realised she was pregnant?’
‘About twelve weeks.’
‘And it wasn’t . . . from when she was attacked?’
Angela shakes her head. ‘The police did their tests, didn’t find anything.’ Without looking at me, she adds, ‘And no, we never thought about abortion. We never even discussed it. When you see life hanging by a thread, you want to cling to it, nurture it. Gerald was convinced she would miscarry anyway, but Mia had other ideas.’
She describes the move to a private wing of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington at thirty-seven weeks for a planned caesarean section, a healthy baby delivered and both mother and daughter returning to the big house in Prestwood Ash a month later. A guest room converted into a nursery, grandparents taking on the role of parents.
‘I didn’t even know she’d been seeing anyone after her and Dominic split up; she was quite secretive about things like that. Kathryn knew something was going on but the only thing she could get out of Zoe was that it was early days, and she couldn’t talk about him yet. That it was . . . complicated.’ She brushes a strand of hair off her daughter’s forehead. ‘And then all of a sudden, the relationship was over. He was history. She was so upset, but she still wouldn’t talk about it apart from to say he wasn’t a good person and she wished she’d never met him. I told her she should come over and spend the weekend at home with us. But that night she was attacked.’
‘And the