Chapter 1
Maddie opened her eyes. It was dark; she struggled to orient herself as her vision adjusted to the gloom. She was in the nursery: she could just make out the silhouette of Noah’s cot. She had no idea how she’d got here. When she groped for the memory, it’d been wiped clean.
Her throat felt raw and hoarse, as if she’d been screaming. She moistened her lips, and tasted blood. Shocked, she touched her mouth, then looked down to see a dark smear on her fingertips. Had she fallen? She and Lucas had been arguing, she remembered that, though she couldn’t remember what the row was about. Had she stormed out of the room? Walked into a door?
She closed her eyes again and thought back to the last thing she could remember. She and Lucas had been upstairs, in their bedroom; her husband had just come out of the shower, spraying her with water as he towelled his thick, dark hair. Her heart had skipped a beat, as it always did when she saw him naked, even after six years of marriage, the intensity of her craving for him almost frightening her as she’d pulled him hungrily onto the bed.
She suddenly remembered: with perfect timing, the baby monitor on the bedside table had flared into life, an arc of furious red lights illuminating the bedroom. Not that the alarm had been necessary; Noah’s screams had echoed from the adjoining nursery, loud enough to wake everyone in the house, and probably everyone on the street, too.
Lucas had told her to let the baby cry. That’s why they had been arguing. Lucas had told her to leave Noah. It was just colic, he’d grow out of it – Come on, Maddie, just leave him …
And then her memory simply snapped in half, like a spool of tape at the end of the reel.
She exhaled in frustration. She had no way of knowing if she and Lucas had argued five minutes or five hours ago. The doctor said her memory lapses were normal, the product of exhaustion and the pills she was on. Nothing to worry about, he said. Nothing to do with what had happened before. She had three children, two of them under three: of course she was tired! Of course she forgot things! It’d all sort itself out if she was patient.
But it was happening more and more often: whole blocks of time, lost for good. It’d started around the time she’d found out she was expecting Noah, and had got worse in the nine weeks since his birth. No one watching her would notice there was anything wrong. She didn’t collapse or black out. But suddenly, in the middle of doing something, she would find she couldn’t remember what had just happened. A few seconds, or a few minutes of her life, gone forever. Her memory stuttered and skipped like a home movie, with blank spaces where pivotal scenes should be.
All she could remember tonight was the baby screaming, Lucas rolling away from her in frustration …
Noah wasn’t screaming now.
Galvanised by fear, she sat up and switched on the nightlight. She’d been holding him in her arms, but they were empty now. He wasn’t in his cot, he wasn’t on the floor. She couldn’t see him. She leaped up from the chair in panic, and then she saw him, crushed against the back of the seat. Somehow, he’d slipped out of her arms and become wedged between her hip and the side of the rocking chair, his vulnerable head pressed against the wooden spindles. Terror flooded her as she crouched on the floor and pulled his limp body onto her lap. His eyes were closed, his face still and pale, except for the vivid red imprint of the chair on his cheek.
She put her ear to his chest, praying for a heartbeat, pleading with a God she didn’t believe in. Please let him be OK. Please let him be OK.
Abruptly, Noah squirmed in her arms and let out an indignant but healthy cry. Maddie gave a strangled half-sob, half-laugh and snatched him up against her shoulder, her throat clogged with grateful tears.
‘Mummy?’
She practically jumped out of her skin. Nine-year-old Emily stood silhouetted in the doorway to the hall, her long nightdress giving her the air of a Victorian ghost.
‘Emily! Did Noah wake you?’
Her daughter nodded sleepily. ‘Can’t you make him stop, Mummy? I’m so tired.’
Maddie felt thick-tongued and groggy, as if she’d awoken from a drugged sleep. ‘Me, too, darling.’
Emily leaned against the rocking chair, her long, fair hair brushing against her brother’s furious scarlet face. The screaming baby grabbed a fistful in his tiny hand. ‘Can’t you give him some medicine or something?’
‘It doesn’t really help.’ Maddie gently freed her daughter’s hair from Noah’s grasp. ‘Go back to bed, Em. You’ve got school in the morning.’
‘I feel hot.’
She felt her daughter’s forehead. A little warm, but not enough to worry about. ‘Get some sleep, and you’ll be fine.’
‘I can’t sleep. He’s too noisy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Maddie sighed, standing up and switching Noah to the other shoulder. ‘There’s not much I can do. Why don’t you try putting a pillow over your ears?’
‘Nothing blocks that out.’
Maddie closed the door as Emily stomped back down the corridor to her own room, praying the noise didn’t wake two-year-old Jacob too. She paced the small nursery, shushing and rocking the baby, so bone-tired she was almost asleep on her feet. She felt ninety-two, not thirty-two. Her back ached, and her eyes were raw and gritty. Her breasts throbbed with the need to nurse, but when she sat down to try, Noah stubbornly refused to feed.
She got up again and pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the nursery window, looking down into the inky garden as she jiggled Noah up and down in an attempt to soothe him. There was nothing lonelier than being awake when everyone else was asleep.
Unplanned isn’t the same as unwanted, Lucas had said. But he was wrong. Noah hadn’t been a happy accident, not for her.
Oh, she loved him beyond words now he was here, there was no question of that. She’d walk over hot coals for him, of course she would. She was his mother; there was nothing she wouldn’t do for any one of her children. But it’d taken everything she’d had to put herself back together after Jacob, and she hadn’t been sure she’d had it in her to do it again.
Emily had been an easy infant; even though Maddie had, quite literally, been left holding the baby when her daughter’s father had been killed five months into the pregnancy, she’d coped better with single motherhood than she’d expected. It’d helped that Emily had apparently read the textbook on how to be the perfect newborn. She fed every four hours. She smiled on cue at six weeks. She put on exactly the right amount of weight and hit all the correct percentiles for her age. Maddie had taken Emily to the animal sanctuary where she worked, and her daughter had cooed beatifically in her pram in the sunshine for hours while Maddie groomed horses and mucked out stables. She’d listened to other mothers at her postnatal classes complaining about mastitis and sleepless nights and wondered what their problem was.
Her mistake, she’d realised when Jacob was born, had been having her easy baby first. She’d confidently assumed motherhood would be just as straightforward second time around, especially
