standard. You’ll be out of pocket.’
‘Do you think I’d charge?’ His voice was suddenly strained but he had his back to her, putting on the kettle at the little sink behind Rhonda’s desk. ‘You’re family.’
Family. She stared blankly at his broad back, at the tanned and muscled arms emerging from his crisp, white short-sleeved shirt, at the stethoscope dangling casually from his back pocket.
He oozed competence. He oozed caring.
He was a family doctor. This was what he did. There was no reason for her to want to well up and demand a hug and turn his shoulder into a sodden mess just because he’d said the word ‘family’.
She wouldn’t.
But she needed him and the very thought had her terrified.
So she sat on, silent, trying to keep her thoughts in check.
Tom spent time making tea, checking how she had it, measuring sugar, stirring for maybe longer than it needed, as if he sensed she needed time to get herself together. By the time he set the mug into her cupped hands and tugged a chair up before her so he could sit down and face her, she had the stupid tears at bay again. She was under control—or as under control as she could be after the appalling news of two days ago.
‘Now.’ Tom was smiling at her, his very best patient-reassuring smile, a smile she recognised as one she’d practised as a new doctor. Family or not, she was clearly in the category of new client who may or may not have something diabolical going on.
There was a box of tissues on the side bench. He swiped it surreptitiously forward—or not so surreptitiously as she noticed and she even managed a smile.
‘I won’t cry on you.’
‘You’re very welcome to cry if you want. I wouldn’t have minded it you’d cried on me four years ago. That one meeting and then you were gone...’
‘To England,’ she told him. ‘I couldn’t stay here. Paul’s mother blamed—’
‘Paul’s mother is a vituperative cow,’ he said solidly, and Tasha thought of Deidre and thought she couldn’t have put it better herself.
‘She thought I should have stopped Paul trying to climb.’
‘No one could ever stop Paul doing what he wanted to do.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Not much. My mum was happy for me to meet Paul but Paul’s mother...not. When Dad moved on from Deidre as well, it made things even more complicated. Dad was a serial womaniser. My mum coped okay—she got on with her life—but Deidre stayed bitter. She fought Dad’s access to Paul every inch of the way. Dad cared about both Paul and me, but with Paul he ended up sidelined. As we got older Paul and I used to meet a bit. We’d have a drink with Dad occasionally, but after Dad’s death we lost touch. Tasha, you need to drink.’
‘What...?’
He took her cupped hands in his and propelled the mug to her lips. ‘Tea. Drink.’
She drank and was vaguely surprised by how good it tasted. When had she last had tea?
Come to think if it, when had she last eaten?
Great. Collapsing would help no one.
Neither would coming here. She should face this herself.
She couldn’t. She needed... Tom.
‘So tell me why you’re here?’ he asked.
She’d come this far but she didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to tell anyone.
Telling people made it real. It couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare.
‘Tasha, spill,’ Tom said, in that gentle voice that did something to her insides. It made things settle. It made the battering ram in her heart cease for a moment.
Though of course it started up again. Some things were inescapable.
‘My baby...’ she started, and Tom sat back a little and eyed her bulge.
‘Close to term?’
‘I’m due to deliver next week.’
He nodded, as if it was entirely sensible that a close-to-term pregnant woman had decided to drive to Cray Point just to see him.
She should keep talking.
She couldn’t.
‘Do you have a partner?’ he asked tentatively when she couldn’t figure what to say next. ‘Is the baby’s dad around?’
And finally she found the strength to make her voice work. ‘The baby’s father is Paul.’
‘Paul...’
‘He left sperm,’ she managed. She’d started. She had to find the strength to continue. ‘That last climb...I was so angry with him for going. There’d been two landslides on Everest, major ones. The Sherpas were pulling out for the season, as were most of the climbers, but he still insisted on going. Then he came home that last night before he left, laughing. “I’ve got it sorted, babe,” he told me. “I’ve been to the IVF place and left sperm. It’s all paid for, stored for years. If worst comes to worst you can have a little me to take my place.”’
She paused, searching for the words to go on. ‘I think it was a joke,’ she said. ‘Maybe he thought it’d make me laugh. Or maybe he was serious—I have no way of telling. But I knew...I waved goodbye to him and somehow I knew that I’d never see him again.’
She tilted her chin, meeting his look head on. ‘I was almost too angry to go to his funeral,’ she told him. ‘It was such a stupid, stupid waste. And then Deidre was in my face, blaming me, making nasty phone calls, even turning up at work to yell at me. So I left for England. You know I’m a doctor, too? I took a job in the emergency department in a good London hospital and I decided I’d put Paul behind me. Only then...then I sort of fell in a heap.’
Tasha shrugged. How to explain the wall of despair that had hit her? The knowledge that her marriage to Paul had been a farce. That her judgement was so far off...
She remembered waking one morning and thinking she was never going to trust again, and the thought had been followed by emptiness. If she couldn’t trust again, that excluded her from having a family. A baby. The thought had been almost overwhelming.
‘So you decided to use the sperm,’ Tom said, as if he was following her thoughts, and she felt a surge of anger that was pretty much directed at her naïve self.
‘Why not?’ she flashed. ‘Paul left it to me in his will. I could bring our baby up knowing the good things about Paul, feeling like it knew its dad. It seemed better—safer—than using an unknown donor, so I decided I’d be brave enough to try.’
And then she hugged her swollen belly, and the tears at last welled over.
‘I wanted this baby,’ she whispered.
