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clock on the shelf inside the inglenook.

      Holly wore a determined smile when Bill’s truck backed into the drive. She had her box and her rucksack on the step beside her in a clear face-saving statement that she was eager to get going but there was still no sign of Vito. She climbed into the truck with a sense of regret but gradually reached the conclusion that possibly it was preferable to have parted from Vito without any awkward or embarrassing final conversation. This way, nobody had to pretend or say anything they didn’t mean.

      * * *

      Vito strode into the cottage and grimaced at the silence. He strode up the stairs, calling Holly’s name while wondering if she had gone for a bath. He studied the empty bathroom with a frown, noting that she had removed her possessions. Only when he went downstairs again did he notice that the Christmas decorations had disappeared along with her. The table was clear, the kitchen immaculate.

      Vito was incredulous. Holly had done a runner and he had no idea how. He walked out onto the doorstep and belatedly registered that the old car no longer lay at the foot of the lane in the ditch. So much for his observation powers! He had been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed that the car had gone. Holly had walked out on him. Well, that hadn’t happened to him before, he acknowledged grimly, his ego stung by her sudden departure. All his life women had chased after Vito, attaching strings at the smallest excuse.

      But would he have wanted her to cling? Vito winced, driven to reluctantly admit that perhaps in the circumstances her unannounced disappearance was for the best. After all, what would he have said to her in parting? Holly had distracted him from more important issues and disrupted his self-control. Now he had his own space back and the chance to get his head clear. And that was exactly what he should want...

      * * *

      ‘When you’re finished throwing up you can do the test,’ Pixie said drily from the bathroom doorway.

      ‘I’m not doing the test,’ Holly argued. ‘I’m on the pill. I can’t be pregnant—’

      ‘You missed a couple of pills and you had a course of antibiotics when you had tonsillitis,’ her friend and flatmate reminded her. ‘You know that antibiotics can interfere with contraception—’

      ‘Well, actually I didn’t know.’ Holly groaned as she freshened up at the sink, frowning at her pale face and dark-circled eyes. She looked absolutely awful and she felt awful both inside and out.

      ‘Even the pill has a failure rating. I don’t know... I leave you alone for a few weeks and you go completely off the rails,’ the tiny blonde lamented, studying Holly with deeply concerned eyes.

      ‘I can’t be pregnant,’ Holly said again as she lifted the pregnancy testing kit and extracted the instructions.

      ‘Well, you’ve missed two periods, you’re throwing up like there’s no tomorrow and you have sore boobs,’ Pixie recounted ruefully. ‘Maybe it’s chickenpox or something.’

      ‘All right, I’ll do it!’ Holly exclaimed in frustration. ‘But there is no way, just no way on earth that I could be pregnant!’

      Some minutes later she slumped down on the side of the bath. Pixie was right and she was wrong. The test showed a positive. The door opened slowly and she looked wordlessly up at her friend and burst into floods of tears.

      ‘Remember how we used to say that the babies we had would be precious gifts?’ Pixie breathed as she hugged her sobbing friend. ‘Well, this baby is a gift and we will manage. We don’t need a man to survive.’

      ‘I can’t even knit!’ Holly wailed, unable to concentrate, unable to think beyond the sheer immensity of the challenges she was about to face.

      ‘That’s OK. You won’t have time to knit,’ her friend told her, deadpan.

      Holly was remembering when she and Pixie had talked innocently about their ideal of motherhood. Both of them had been born unwanted and had suffered at the hands of neglectful mothers. They had sworn that they would love and protect their own babies no matter what.

      And the vague circumstances suggested by ‘no matter what’ had actually happened now, Holly reflected heavily, her sense of regret at that truth all-encompassing. Her baby would not be entering the perfect world as she had dreamt. Her baby was unplanned, however, but not unwanted. She would love her child, fight to keep him or her safe and if she had to do it alone, and it looked as though she would, she would manage.

      ‘If only Vito had phoned...’ The lament escaped Holly’s lips before she could bite it back and she flushed in embarrassment.

      ‘He’s long gone. In fact, the more I think about him,’ Pixie mused tight-mouthed, ‘the more suspicious I get about the father of your child. For all you know he could be a married man.’

      ‘No!’ Holly broke in, aghast at that suggestion.

      ‘Well, what was Vito doing spending Christmas alone out in the middle of nowhere?’ Pixie demanded. ‘Maybe the wife or girlfriend threw him out and he had nowhere better to go?’

      ‘Don’t make me feel worse than I already do,’ Holly pleaded. ‘You’re such a pessimist, Pixie. Just because he didn’t want to see me again doesn’t make him a bad person.’

      ‘He got you drunk and somehow persuaded you into bed. Don’t expect me to think nice things about him. He was a user.’

      ‘I wasn’t drunk.’

      ‘Let’s not rehash it again.’ Her flatmate sighed, her piquant face thoughtful. ‘Let’s see if we can trace him online.’

      And while Pixie did internet searches on several potential spellings of Vito’s surname and came up with precisely nothing, Holly sat on the sofa hugging her still-flat stomach and fretting about the future. She had already secretly carried out all those searches weeks earlier on Vito and was too proud to admit to the fact, even to her friend.

      ‘I can’t find even a trace of a man in the right age group. The name could be a fake,’ her friend opined.

      ‘Why would he give me a fake name? That doesn’t make sense.’

      ‘Maybe he didn’t want to be identified. I don’t know...you tell me,’ Pixie said very drily. ‘Do you think that’s a possibility?’

      Holly reddened. Of course it was a possibility that Vito had not wanted to be identified. As to why, how could she know? The only thing she knew with certainty was that Vito had decided he didn’t want to see her again. Had he felt otherwise, he would have used the phone number she had left him and called her. In the weeks of silence that had followed her departure from the cottage, she had often felt low. But that was foolish, wasn’t it? Vito had clearly made the decision that he had no desire to see her again.

      And why should she feel hurt by that? Yes, he had said that night with her was amazing but wasn’t that par for the course? The sort of thing a man thought a woman expected him to say after sex? How could she have been naive enough to actually believe that Vito had truly believed they were something special together? And now that little bit of excitement was over. What was done was done and what was gone, like her innocence, was gone. Much as her tidy, organised life had gone along with it, she conceded unhappily, because, although she would embrace motherhood wholeheartedly, she knew it would be incredibly tough to raise a baby alone without falling into the poverty trap.

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