Chapter 2: The Unexpected Visitor
Three days since the move. Three days of unpacking boxes in a studio that smelled of old paint and someone else's life. Three days of sleeping on a mattress I'd bought from a stranger on Gumtree, of waking at four in the morning with my hand pressed flat to my stomach, of staring at the ceiling and counting the water stains.
The shift started at seven. I was there by six-forty, because the alternative was sitting in that cramped little room with the striped curtains listening to the neighbours argue through the walls. The PICU hummed around me, monitors beeping their steady rhythms, ventilators sighing. The same sounds I'd heard a thousand times. The same sounds that usually settled something in my chest.
Today they just made my head ache.
I was hanging a new bag of fluids for a little girl with meningitis when Kate appeared in the doorway of the side room. She stood there with her arms crossed, dark eyes sharp.
"You're back."
"Kate." I capped the line and checked the drip rate. "Shouldn't you be on the other wing?"
"I swapped a shift." She looked away from the girl's bed. "Heard you were coming back today. Wanted to see for myself."
"See what?"
"How you're doing."
I smiled. It felt like a muscle I'd forgotten how to use. "I'm fine."
Kate made a sound low in her throat, something between a laugh and a snort.She jerked her head toward the door.
"Break room. Now."
"I have patients."
"You have ten minutes. Don't make me drag you."
She didn't have to drag me. I followed her anyway, because I knew that look in her eye. Kate had been there the first time I'd cried over a patient, the first time I'd questioned whether I could do this job at all. She didn't take no for an answer, and she didn't miss a thing.
The break room was empty. A kettle sat on the counter, brown with limescale. Someone had left a half-eaten biscuit on the table. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead in a way that made my teeth ache.
Kate closed the door and leaned against it.
"Now then." She folded her arms. "You look like shit, and I don't mean the usual four-shifts-in-a-row shit. I mean the kind of shit that makes me want to find whoever did it and hurt them."
"I've just been tired."
"Three days off. You were supposed to be resting."
"I was moving."
"Moving?" Kate's eyebrows climbed. "Moving where?"
I hadn't told her. I hadn't told anyone. The studio in Camden was my secret, the same way the pregnancy test wrapped in tissue paper in the shoebox was my secret. I'd spent three days carefully not answering my phone, carefully not responding to her texts, carefully building a wall between my real life and the one I'd walked away from.
"New place," I said. "Camden. It's smaller, but it's fine."
Kate's face went very still.
"Smaller than Pall Mall?"
"Yes."
"Jill." She took a step toward me. "The flat on Pall Mall was half a palace. Why would you move to Camden?"
The lie sat on my tongue, ready to go. I could taste it. Just a simple thing. It was time for a change. I wanted to be closer to work. I needed my own space.
Then Kate said, "I saw Mycroft."
My chest went tight.
"Tuesday night," she went on. "At the Dorchester. Some private club thing, all the politicians and their hangers-on." She paused. "He was with a woman. Blonde. Very polished. Looked like she'd stepped out of a magazine."
The name hit me before she said it. Emmeline. I'd seen her once, months ago, at some gallery opening Mycroft had dragged me to. She'd looked at me like I was a smudge on her shoe.
"She's been around him before," I said. "It's work."
"It didn't look like work."
"Kate."
"Jill." She mirrored my tone, sharp and unyielding. "Tell me what's going on. Right now."
The words rose up in my throat. I'm pregnant. I'm carrying his child. He left me anyway. I'm alone and I'm scared and I don't know what I'm going to do.
I opened my mouth.
And somewhere in the back of my head, I saw her face. Blonde, polished, perfect. Standing where I used to stand, her hand on his arm, her smile bright and brittle.
I laughed.
"Good for him."
The words came out steady, almost light. I was proud of them, the way you're proud of a stitch you've placed cleanly in a wound that's still bleeding.
My hand drifted to my stomach. I didn't notice it until Kate's eyes dropped, sharp and curious.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"Your hand."
I pulled it away, too fast. "Nothing. I'm tired."
Kate tilted her head, studying me like I was a patient with confusing symptoms. I'd seen that look before, on her face and on my own. The look of a nurse who knew something was wrong and was trying to decide whether to push.
"If I find out," she said slowly, "that you're hiding something from me, I will be very angry."
"I'm not hiding anything."
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
"You are." She stepped closer, and her voice dropped. "I've known you for six years, Jill. I know what you look like when you're lying. You get this little crease between your eyebrows, right here." She touched her own forehead. "It's there now."
I didn't answer.
The door swung open. A porter appeared, his face red and harried. "Tallentire? Crash call in room four. The Anderson boy."
I was moving before he finished the sentence, my grief shoved into a box and slammed shut, my hand no longer on my stomach but reaching for a crash trolley. Kate's question followed me down the corridor, a splinter I couldn't pull out.
When I got to my knees beside the boy's bed, pressing my palms against his chest in rhythm with the metronome of the defibrillator, I let the work swallow me whole. Let it burn through everything else.
But at three in the morning, when the boy was stable and the shift was over and I was alone in the Camden flat with the water stains on the ceiling, my hand found my stomach again.
And Kate's voice echoed in my head, sharp and unyielding.
I'm pregnant. The words were right there. I'd almost said them. And the only thing that had stopped me was the image of Emmeline's smile.
Which was worse, I wondered, to keep a secret from the one person who loved me? Or to tell her, and watch her pity me for the child I was carrying alone?
I lay in the dark with my hand on my stomach and Kate's voice in my head. Which was worse, I wondered, to keep a secret from the one person who loved me? Or to tell her, and watch her pity me for the child I was carrying alone?
The boy in room four had smiled at me when he woke up. Small, groggy, his lips cracked from the tube. He'd said, "You're still here," and I'd said, "Of course I am," and for ten minutes I had felt like a person again.
Now the ceiling stared back at me. The water stain above the bed looked like a map of somewhere I'd never been.
I reached for my phone. His name was still in my contacts, right where it had always been. Mycroft. I opened a new message. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard.
I'm pregnant.
The words sat there, bright and terrible. I could send it. He would know. He would have to know. And then what? He would call, or he wouldn't. He would offer money, or he wouldn't. He would say he was sorry, and I would hear his voice, and I would fall apart all over again.
He was with Emmeline. He had ended us with his hands still smelling of me. He had given me a week to move out and called it practicality.
I deleted the message.
The screen went dark. I put the phone face down on the floor beside the mattress. Then I sat up, fumbled for the light switch, and opened the shoebox with the tissue paper and the blue onesie.
The fabric was soft. Impossible, how soft it was. I held it against my cheek and breathed in the clean, neutral smell of new cotton. No lavender. No old books. No him.
This was mine.
This small, impossible thing, this life I had not planned and could not undo, was mine. And I would not let him take it, and I would not let him turn it into a transaction or an inconvenience or a problem to be solved with a bank transfer.
I said it out loud, just to hear it.
"He doesn't know."
The words hung in the air of the little flat, swallowed by the peeling wallpaper and the water stains.
"He never will."
I folded the onesie carefully, wrapped it back in tissue paper, and closed the shoebox. Then I put it on the shelf above the mattress, next to the pregnancy test, out of sight. Not hidden. Just mine. A secret I had chosen to keep, not a shame I had been forced to carry.
It was a small distinction. But it was the only thing keeping me upright.
I lay back down and stared at the ceiling until the sky turned grey. In the morning I showered, dressed in my scrubs, and walked the twenty minutes to the hospital through the drizzle. The city smelled of diesel and wet pavement. Normal things. Things that didn't care about my heart.
Kate found me at the locker bank at six-fifty.
"Morning," she said, too lightly. She was watching me in the mirror of her locker door.
"Morning." I pulled on my compression socks. "I'm not hiding anything."
"I didn't say you were."
"You were thinking it."
She shut her locker. "You're up early for someone who works nights."
"I swapped. Covering days this week."
"Right." She picked up her bag. "I'll see you at lunch, then. We're going to that sandwich place you like."
"Kate."
"What?"
I wanted to tell her. The urge was physical, a pressure behind my ribs. She would hold my hand. She would tell me I could do this. She would not pity me; she would rail at him, and then she would be kind, and I would not be alone in it anymore.
But the secret was mine now. Mine and his, and I had decided.
"I'll see you at lunch," I said.
She studied me one more second. Then she nodded and walked out. The door swung shut behind her, and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach in the empty locker room, and I did not cry.
I had made my choice.
The day went on. The Anderson boy improved. A new admission came in at noon, a little girl with sepsis, and I held her hand while the registrar ran the line. Kate eyed me over the chart board but said nothing.
And in the evening, walking home through Camden with my keys already in my hand, I stopped outside a shop window and looked at my reflection. Frazzled hair. Pale face. A slight swell in my belly, still small enough to hide, still soft enough to deny.
I could not tell Mycroft. That was finished, closed, done. But the child would know one day. The child would ask where it came from, and I would tell it the truth.
Not today. But someday.
I turned away from the window and walked up the stairs to my flat. The shoebox sat on the shelf above the mattress, waiting. I touched it with one finger.
"Just us," I said. "That's all we need."
And I believed it, almost, as I lay down in the dark and let the water stains watch over me.