LITMIR.BIZ

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of home, listening to the sounds of my brother’s restless sleep from the fold-out bed next to me. I remember being not quite brave enough to risk disturbing so much as the air around me to call out for my mother.

      She was here now, but still this felt a lot like that time. The air heavy with a palpable sense of change. The loss of something achingly irreplaceable.

      I opened my eyes with another steadying breath. The pinch in my throat cut the action short. Mum shifted beside me.

      It was too quiet.

      Intuitively, a cool, soft hand tried gently to reassure with soothing motions over the back of my knuckles. The stirring anxiety in my chest blossomed in response. A warm wave of nausea rushed past the scratchiness in my throat then, lacing my mouth with a pitiful flurry of saliva. It hurt when I retched. Across the bleak grey room, the sound was enough to pull the attention of the figure standing quietly there.

      I felt my mother’s hand close around my own.

      ‘Sweetheart? Try not to move too suddenly.’ In the dimness of the nightlight, I couldn’t see that she had been crying, but I could hear it, there in the fragile reserve of her voice. Another retch and Mum took back her hand, adeptly lunging forth with a cardboard bowl. The sickness heralded an immediate thumping in one side of my head, forcing closed my eyes again as she wiped the bitter residue from my lips. They hurt too. And my teeth, clenching behind them – sore from the assault of medical intervention. I swallowed to remind myself of it. The pain lessened the further down it travelled. Beyond the neatly folded edges of crisp white hospital bed sheets, pain seemed to disappear altogether.

      I couldn’t bring myself to look down there.

      A faint squeak of shoes on linoleum stirred across the other side of the room. The sounds grew as their owner began making his way tentatively over. James’s hand, heavier than my mother’s, ran gently over my head. For a moment, it soothed the angry thump of ache there.

      ‘It’s okay, baby,’ he whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

      There was something fragile in James’s voice too, something that didn’t belong. He leant in and kissed the straggled brown mess of my hair. His whiskers were long, scratchy, with none of his usual cologne to cocoon me as he closed the distance between us. He smelled the way he sometimes did after his run – of strain and exhaustion. Something in the way he kissed me now paved the way for inevitable memories of the previous morning to filter back home.

      The day had begun like any other. The same dull ache I knew would subside from my hips once I was up and showered; enough mischievous nudges to wake me long before my alarm had chance to. And then, the unexpected as I’d pulled back the duvet, revealing that this day would punctuate all others in the last thirty-one weeks.

      There hadn’t been that much blood at first. During the frantic time that followed, I’d stayed calm – we both had – listening to plans being made as the professionals poked and prodded, recorded and conferred. James had focused on their reassurances, while I’d stacked all my chips on the nudges. That was the practical thing to do. No panicking unless the nudges stopped. All the while I’d kept calm, thinking such practical thoughts, as if thought alone could keep us safely centred in the eye of the storm building around us. Now there was only quiet.

      James moved his head beside mine, his breathing shallow against my ear. I listened to it. But there was no relief in him. I knew then. This was the aftermath of that storm. The stillness after the chaos. The changed landscape waiting to be considered. Here in this too-quiet room, the devastation would be met.

      Mum took my free hand again, the other engaged in tubing and tape. She was squeezing it tightly now, holding onto it as if one of us might be blown to oblivion otherwise. I lay quite still, suddenly afraid again of disturbing the air around me.

      ‘Amy? Do you know where you are?’ James asked quietly, straining to hold the evenness of his voice. He was still holding himself awkwardly beside me, his face hidden from mine. I nodded against him, willing him to stem the rest of his words. He was trembling. ‘Amy … We lost him, baby.’

      My mother’s grip loosened as she broke beneath a subdued shudder of anguish. James’s voice cracked against me. ‘We’ll be okay, baby,’ he promised. ‘We’re gonna be okay.’

       CHAPTER 1

       Five years later

      AS FAR AS uncomfortable experiences went I was pretty good in the saddle, I thought. Calm. Controlled. Cool under fire. And these traits had come in handy over several tumultuous years working within a fast-paced architectural practice. But this? This gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘pressure’. This whole set-up was geared towards breaking a person. A relentless tap-tap-tapping at the walls of our resolve, thinly veiled attempts to expose our weaknesses so that they could finally tell us what I’d prepared myself to hear all along – that we weren’t worthy, that we’d make awful parents, and that this had all been a horrific waste of everybody’s time.

      A heavy wooden door clattered shut somewhere off the corridor where we sat, fidgeting like apprehended schoolchildren. We both listened to the patter of daintily heeled shoes as they echoed away from us to some other inhospitable depth of the building. I knew it wasn’t Anna, she’d been wearing flats when she’d briefed us this morning. I’d watched her tapping them nervously on our behalf before the panel had called us in, then I’d focused my eyes on the bejewelled toes of those same shoes while James answered the questions each panel member had put to him.

      I let out a long silent breath, surprised that I couldn’t see a grey plume as it hit the chilly air in this fusty old building. James’s knee resumed its impatient bobbing. That James, the epitome of unflappability, was this jumpy only jangled my own nerves.

      Every other meeting, interview and session had been conducted in a purpose-built room. A conference suite, an office, our home, even – where there were carpets and coffee and heating. But the Town Hall, this last checkpoint on the home straight, was about as inviting as a Dickensian institution.

      I checked my watch. It had been nearly fifteen minutes since the panel had dismissed us to await our fate out here. You could cram an impressive amount of mental self-flagellation into that timeframe, I’d found. I knew James didn’t want to hear it, but I needed to blurt out something, and words seemed preferable to anxious blubbing.

      ‘I shouldn’t have said we’ve been looking at bigger houses,’ I groaned quietly.

      Exasperatedly, James pushed a flop of dark blond hair back from his face and gave his left knee a reprieve from all the jiggling. I’d made him grow his hair out a little after one of the other women on the prep course had said we looked corporate. She’d made it sound like a swear word. James couldn’t understand why I was taking any sort of advice from a woman who was actually choosing single-parenthood. When she’d told us that she was hoping to adopt more than one child by herself, James had whispered that even if she made it to the medical stage, they’d probably find she was certifiably nuts.

      I hadn’t noticed until just now, but longer hair didn’t really suit James.

      He turned to face me. ‘They didn’t ask us anything that they hadn’t already read in our report, okay? And there’s no rule that says we can’t move house one day.’ James’s right knee took over the bobbing.

      I tucked precision-straightened hair neatly behind my ears and began to fiddle with one of the small diamond studs he’d bought me for my twenty-ninth last month. One of the few nights we’d actually gone out together and not fallen out.

      ‘Stability, James. That’s what they want to hear, not that we’re planning to up sticks and disrupt our home—’

      James held a hand aloft to cut me off. ‘Amy, forget it. We’re not doing this again. We’ve jumped through every sodding hoop imaginable over the last year just to get to this point. We’ve just met ten people in there we don’t know

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