A quick glance in either direction as he passed the open doors told him that she wasn’t in the lounge or the spacious study they shared, or in the formal dining room they only used when they were entertaining.
‘Sweetheart?’ He pushed the kitchen door wide and shuddered when he took in the almost clinical neatness of the whole room. Every surface gleamed and there wasn’t even a teaspoon on the work surface where she always made her last cup of instant coffee before she left the house each day. There certainly wasn’t any evidence of hot buttered toast.
Panic roared through him and in an instant he was racing back down the hall and taking the stairs two and even three at a time in his desperate need to get to their bedroom and the en suite bathroom.
‘She wouldn’t,’ he told himself fiercely, fighting with a sudden nightmare vision of his wife’s lifeless body sprawled across their bed or on the bathroom floor.
It was a heart-stopping body blow to realise that he might have drifted that far away from her. He honestly didn’t know if she’d become so depressed that she might attempt suicide, but he prayed that her deep reverence for life would have prevented her taking that awful step.
‘Oh, thank you, God,’ he whispered as he clung to the door-frame, tears of relief already starting to flow when he realised that she wasn’t there…wasn’t anywhere in the house, in fact.
It took him several minutes to compose himself and a cold facecloth to remove the evidence of his loss of control before he dragged his heavy feet across to slump on the side of the bed.
‘So, where are you, sweetheart? Where have you gone?’ he asked the silent room, with a sudden memory of the laughter that had filled it when they’d been decorating it together, getting more paint on each other than the walls and then having to spend ages under the shower washing each other off…just to be certain there were no spots of paint remaining, of course.
His eyes drifted across to the photograph in the silver frame that graced the dressing-table, searching out the bright, laughing face he loved so much…and found it covered by the envelope propped against it with his own name written across it in her familiar script.
Dread wrapped around his heart as he reached for it, his hand visibly trembling as he pulled the single sheet of paper out and fumbled to unfold it.
There was no heading to the letter. No ‘Dear Con’, ‘Darling’ or ‘My Love’, the way she always began the most mundane of notes. Before he could even focus on what she’d written his heart was breaking to see the marks on the paper where her tears had fallen.
‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to admit that I’ll never be able to give you what you want,’ she said in the frighteningly brief missive. ‘It’s best if I go away so you can start the divorce proceedings. Let Martin know what you want to do. I won’t fight it. Be happy.’
‘No!’ he roared in disbelief. ‘Callie, no!’ And he felt his heart shatter in agony.
Callie turned her face to the window as the woman beside her got out of her seat and set off to leave the coach, the bulging photo album detailing every moment of her grandchildren’s lives back safely in her handbag.
She rested her head against the glass, hoping that her next companion on this never-ending journey would take the hint and leave her alone with her thoughts.
She didn’t want to know about anyone else’s problems. She only wanted to know how she was going to cope with her own…how she was going to find the will to draw her next breath when she’d just walked away from everything she’d ever loved.
Not that it had been an easy decision, far from it. In fact, she was ashamed to realise how selfish she’d been for so long, wasting years and an almost obscene amount of money trying to force her body to do something it would never be able to manage—give them the child they’d both wanted.
She tried to stop the image forming inside her head but it was already there, indelibly, for the rest of her life.
The tears began again as she remembered how grey and still her baby had been when he’d finally been born.
He’d been perfect. Absolutely perfect in every way, with ten tiny fingers and toes each with the most minute nail already there and growing. She would never know whether he’d inherited Con’s deep blue eyes or her own grey ones or whether he would have the mischievous dimples that punctuated her husband’s cheeks whenever he smiled.
Not that he’d been smiling much in the last four months and twenty-three days. It seemed as if they’d both forgotten how to do that when they’d seen that precious little image on the screen and realised that the heart had no longer been beating.
The memory was still so painful that she could barely draw breath, her own heart feeling as though some alien force was crushing it inside her chest. What right did it have to beat when her baby’s didn’t? Why was it that even the youngest teenage girl could manage to get pregnant, seemingly with even the most meaningless of sexual encounters, while she…she couldn’t carry a child for the man she’d loved from the first moment their eyes had met, the only man she’d ever loved.
No more crying, she told herself, suddenly remembering that she mustn’t do anything to draw too much attention to herself. Concentrate on something else—except there wasn’t much else to look at in the barren wasteland of a bus and coach depot other than the people in the queue waiting to get on.
She hastily dragged her eyes away from the young woman struggling to fold up her baby’s pushchair single-handed with the child cradled in the other arm. She wouldn’t allow herself so much as a glimpse of the perfect little face so she would have no idea if it was a girl or a boy, if it was about the same age that her…
No! Concentrate on the two girls chattering brightly together. Were they friends setting off for a day’s shopping in the next big town or was this just the most convenient way for them to get to and from work each day?
The two older women in front of them were talking equally animatedly. Were they friends taking the trip together or were each of them like her previous garrulous companion, lucky to have found someone equally inclined to chat?
And the cadaverous young man with the tattoo sprawling up one side of his grubby neck? It was all too easy after spending time as an A and E doctor to spot the fact that he was a drug addict, but whether he was using illegal Class A drugs or had gone onto a methadone programme was more difficult to tell at first glance. The ravages of what he’d been doing to his body weren’t.
Then, in front of him, there was the white-faced young woman obviously trying hard not to cry as the stern-faced man spoke to her through a mouth thinned by a mixture of anger and exasperation. It must be hard for him to keep his voice down so the rest of the queue couldn’t hear what he was saying. He looked like the sort of man used to having his orders obeyed without question.
Apparently unaware that the passengers already on the bus had a bird’s-eye view of those waiting to join them, the man took out his wallet and grabbed several high-denomination bills, folding them twice, neatly, before he tried to press them into the girl’s hand.
Initially, she refused to take them, shaking her head fiercely, and the revulsion on her face was a far clearer indication of what was happening than any words she was saying. But, of course, the older man had made up his mind and with a few terse words denied her objections and thrust the money into her hand before he abruptly turned on his heel and strode away.
And
