clipped consonants and snappy vowels gave away the effort that near-civility was costing him. ‘I know you need this. I know you want everything decided, booked, settled. But it’s not just you now. Can’t you see that?’ He could see it, and he didn’t know how to get away from it. ‘If we decide something, we have to do it together. I will not let you plan and schedule and itemise my life just because I happened to get you pregnant. That doesn’t give you the right to come in here and tell me how it’s going to be.’
‘I’ve given you choices...options.’ Finally she couldn’t keep the anger from her own voice. With the venom contained in his, it didn’t seem optional—it was a necessity. A way to fend off his biting accusations.
‘You don’t get to give me anything. That’s not how together works.’
‘What’s made you so scared?’ she asked. ‘Tell me why my having a plan freaks you out. Because as far as I can see, with us barely knowing each other, and living hours apart, and having an actual baby together, some idea of how we’re going to cope seems like a good idea. So why is it you blanch, pretty much start shaking and bite my head off?’
He scraped his chair backwards, leaving a good couple of feet between him and the table, the space acting like a force field around him. ‘I can’t do it like this, Rachel. I won’t. I can’t sit here, backed into a corner with no way out of what you’ve decided for us. I won’t be trapped.’
And with that he headed straight out of the door, leaving her sitting at the kitchen table wondering what the hell had just happened. Her heart was hammering in her chest, tears pricked at her eyes, and her fingers shook slightly when she reached for a cloth to mop up the spilled coffee.
How had they got here? They’d gone from almost kissing when she’d arrived to the point where they couldn’t be in the same room together.
And now she was scared—because nothing he had said or done made her believe that he was in any way glad about the fact they were having a baby. In the days since she’d found out she was expecting, she’d started to look forward to being a parent. Feel joy at the prospect of meeting the new life they had created. Of course there was an enormous dose of full-body-paralysis fear, not least when she tried to think about how she could possibly spend the next eighteen—or eighty—years trying to maintain some sort of contact with Leo.
The thought of having to live with the disorder and randomness that Leo so clearly needed threated to bring on another panic attack. But when he had headed for the door just now, her stomach had dropped and her heart had felt as if it had stopped. She had been filled with an overwhelming dread that he might not come back. That he was leaving her to have this baby alone. She knew that she could do it if she had to. But in the second that she thought that Leo might be walking away, she wanted him by her side. Chaos and all. They had made this new life together, and she wanted to find a way for them to be a family.
She cleared away a few pieces from the table—for no reason other than that she didn’t want to be just sitting waiting for him when he got back. So when she heard his footsteps at the door, she had her back to him, running something under the tap and holding her breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually, in a shaky voice redolent of raw emotion.
She stared into the sink a little longer, gathering her thoughts, and fighting down the swell of tears that seemed to be climbing her throat. She couldn’t account for them, couldn’t reason why the croak of his voice made hers swell with sympathy.
‘I’m sorry, too.’ She turned off the tap and slumped back against the sink, relief washing through her. ‘I shouldn’t have made those plans without you.’
‘And I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. I’m genuinely sorry. But there are some things we need to talk about if we’re going to make this work. I know you like to have everything all worked out, but I can’t do that.’
‘So what am I meant to do? Just wait and see if you turn up at my office again?’ She tried to laugh, to pretend she could live like that, but it sounded hollow even to her.
‘Would that be so bad? I’d make sure I was there when you—when the baby—needed me. Does everything need to be planned months in advance?’
Her spine straightened again; Leo’s presence was seemingly anathema to serenity. ‘And is that what I should tell my doctor? Oh, I’ll definitely come along at some point. An appointment? No. I’ll just arrive when I’m ready.’
‘And what about the baby—is he allowed to arrive when he’s ready, or are you going to hold him to whatever due date the doctors pull out of the air? I hope for his sake he isn’t late.’
She was about to snap back, when her train of thought faltered and her voice failed. ‘Wait, he?’ she asked, with the beginnings of a smile tweaking her lips. ‘Who says it’s a boy?’
His face softened, and for the first time she saw the hard expression around his eyes ease, and his usual humorous glint return. She found she was relieved to see it, had been worried for a few moments that she and the baby had caused its disappearance to become permanent. It had been his determination to make her laugh that had drawn them together that first night, and she was worried that without that humour between them the very foundations they were working on were unsteady.
‘I don’t know. In my head, when I think about how things will be, I just always see a boy.’
‘You’ve thought about it?’
His eyes bugged.
‘Have I thought about it? What else am I meant to think about? Have you thought about anything else?’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘So what do you?’
He raised an eyebrow by way of a question. ‘What do I...?’
‘What do you think, when you think about it?’
He crossed to the table and dropped into a seat, reaching for his abandoned cup of coffee. A smile was creeping across her face at the sight of the hint of a grin on his. He thought about their baby. The knowledge glowed inside her. ‘I don’t know. Just flashes of things, I suppose.’
‘Good things?’
‘Mostly.’ They shared a long look, mutual happiness turning both their mouths up like a mirror. But they couldn’t leave it there. If they wanted this to work, they had to dig deeper than that. Learn to trust one another.
‘And the bad?’ she asked.
‘This.’ He motioned towards her colour-coded papers. ‘This is pretty much every bad thing I’ve imagined since Wednesday afternoon. I want you to know, Rachel, that I’m here for you and for the baby. But I will not do this entirely on your terms. We’re both going to have to compromise.’
‘And the first thing that’s got to go is any attempt at a plan?’ She couldn’t help her defensiveness—he was threatening the only thing that was keeping her in any way connected to sanity.
‘This plan? Yes. We didn’t discuss a single thing before you made it. Of course it has to go.’
She felt a wave of nausea as she realised what he was saying. Every plan she had made in the past few days. All the words and the numbers and the tidy tick-boxes that had soothed her mind—were
