Chapter 3: The Truth Unravels
The last monitor on my rows had settled into a steady rhythm by handover, and my legs felt like they belonged to someone else. Eight hours of keeping a four-year-old's heart beating, and now my badge was already in my pocket, my coat half on. I wanted my studio flat and its narrow bed and the dark.
Kate was waiting by the break room door. Not coming out of it, waiting outside it, arms folded, a cup of cold coffee abandoned on the windowsill beside her.
"Don't," I said.
"You haven't even heard what I was going to say."
"You've got that look. The one you get before you say something I don't want to hear."
She stepped sideways as I moved for the door. Not aggressive, just there, solid, dark eyes fixed on me. She smelled of cigarette smoke and hand gel, the smell I'd known since my first year on the ward.
"Five minutes," she said. "Then you can go home and I'll leave you alone. Properly alone, if that's what you actually want."
"I've had a twelve-hour shift, Kate."
"Then you've got nothing left to lie with. Sit down."
I sat. The plastic chair was cold through my scrubs. Somewhere down the corridor a monitor chimed, and a colleague's trainers squeaked past the door. I realised, too late, that my hand had drifted to my stomach again, the flat place under my uniform where nothing showed yet, and Kate was watching it.
She had been watching it all week. I'd caught her looking on Tuesday, when I'd turned down coffee. On Wednesday, when I'd eaten dry crackers at four in the morning like they were medicine. She'd said nothing. That was worse than anything she could have said.
"I'm going to tell you what I know," she said, "and you're not going to walk out, because I'm standing in front of the door. You moved out of your flat last Friday. You won't say where. He's gone, and you won't say why. And your hand goes there," she nodded at my stomach, "about forty times a shift. I counted yesterday. I know you're pregnant, Jill. I saw the test in your locker."
The words went through me like a defibrillator shock, a jolt that left everything reordered. The test. I'd shoved the positive test into my locker in a moment of madness three weeks ago, meaning to throw it out, meaning to never think of it, and I'd forgotten. I'd actually forgotten.
"How long have you known?" My voice came out strange, small.
"A week. I wasn't sure until this morning." She crouched in front of me, close enough that I could see the concern she'd been trying to hold behind the bluntness. "Why didn't you tell me?"
And that was where the wall went. All of it, four weeks of it, the goodbye in the grey morning light, the week he'd given me to move out, the phone call about costs like I was a bill he was settling. The onesie in my bag in Camden. The text I'd typed to him and deleted, letter by letter, in the dark.
"Because if I said it out loud it became real," I heard myself say. "And because he doesn't know."
Kate went very still. "He doesn't know. You're pregnant and he doesn't know."
"He ended it the same morning I was going to tell him." I laughed, and it came out wrong, brittle. "Four years, Kate. I was waiting for a ring. I'd been waiting for months. I thought he was going to ask me that night. Instead he told me it was goodbye, and gave me a week to clear my things, and offered to cover my moving costs."
"He what."
"Like a settlement. Like a contract." My hands were shaking now, so I pressed them flat against my knees. "And I couldn't tell him. Because he'd already decided I was finished, and I thought, if I told him, I'd always wonder whether he'd have stayed for the baby and not for me."
Kate sat back on her heels. For a moment she didn't say anything, and the fluorescent light hummed above us both, and the grey sky through the window promised rain.
"Does anyone know?" she asked finally.
"No one. Just me. And now you."
"Right." She stood up, pulled her keys from her pocket, and locked the break room door from the inside. "Then you're going to tell me the rest. All of it. And then you're coming round to mine, and you're eating something that isn't a cracker."
I looked up at her, and to my horror my eyes were already wet.
"What if he finds out from someone else?" I asked.
"Then he finds out." Kate pulled the other chair round, sat down facing me, and waited. "But it won't be from your locker."
The lock clicked like a verdict. The fluorescent light chose that moment to flicker, and the grey sky beyond the window pressed in like a held breath. Kate's eyes stayed on me, patient and merciless at once.
"Start with the night," she said. "The night he ended it."
I thought of that last night. I'd come home from a twelve-hour shift where a child had died in my arms, and Mycroft had been waiting. He'd poured me wine, run me a bath, and then he'd taken me to bed as if the world had stopped existing. That was what I'd thought. That was what I'd let myself believe.
"I thought it was the best night we'd ever had," I said. "I thought he was going to propose. He'd been acting strange for weeks, distant, but I told myself it was work. That night he was all over me. Told me I was beautiful. Held me like I was the only thing in the world."
I stopped. The memory of his hands on my body, his mouth on my throat, and then the cold grey morning that followed. I hadn't slept. I'd lain awake listening to his breathing, imagining the shape of the ring I thought was coming.
"And then?" Kate's voice was careful.
"And then I woke up and he was dressed. Already dressed, like he'd been awake for hours. He was standing at the window and he didn't turn around when I spoke. He said, 'This has been good, but it's over.'"
The words came out flat. I'd rehearsed them in my head so many times over the last four weeks that they'd lost their edges. He had looked at me in the morning light and I'd seen it in his eyes before he said it. I'd seen that he was already gone.
"He said it was goodbye," I said. "Not 'we need to talk.' Not 'I've met someone.' Just goodbye. He gave me a week to move out. He offered to cover the costs of the move, the deposit on a new place, anything I needed. He was so reasonable about it, Kate. So calm. Like we'd been nothing more than flatmates."
"Did you tell him? About the baby?"
"I couldn't." My eyes stung. "I had the test in my bag. I'd been carrying it around for three weeks, waiting for the right moment. I thought the right moment was going to be after he proposed. I'd say yes, and then I'd tell him, and it would be the happiest day of our lives."
Kate reached out and took my hand. Her fingers were cold and solid.
"And when he said it was goodbye, I couldn't give him that. Because if I told him, he might have stayed out of duty. He might have done the right thing, married me, played the part, and I'd have spent the rest of my life wondering if he'd ever really wanted me or just the baby."
"So you let him think there was nothing to stay for."
"I let him think I was fine with it." My voice cracked. "I packed my bags on Friday. I found a studio in Camden. I filled in a change of address form at the post office. I bought six cheap plates and a kettle. And I took his baby's onesie with me, the one I'd bought the week before, and I didn't tell him."
Kate was quiet a long moment. The only sound was the hum of the light and the distant beep of a monitor somewhere down the corridor.
"Have you thought about what happens when he finds out?" she asked finally.
"Every day," I said. "Every single day. I've typed the text message maybe twenty times. Every time I get to the word 'pregnant' and I can't send it."
"Why not?"
"Because he'll use it." The words came out before I could stop them. "He'll want to take care of me. He'll arrange things. He'll pay for everything and make it all immaculate and clinical, and I won't know if it's love or obligation. And I can't live with that uncertainty. I can't raise our child wondering whether their father chose them or was duty-bound to them."
My hand had drifted back to my stomach. Kate saw it, and something in her face changed.
"What will you tell the child?" she asked softly. "When they're old enough to ask?"
I looked down at my hands in my lap. I'd been avoiding that question for weeks. I'd been so busy surviving that I hadn't let myself look forward any further than the next shift, the next meal, the next night alone in my narrow bed.
"The truth," I said. "That their father left before I could tell him. And that I chose them anyway."
Kate squeezed my hand. Then she stood, pulled me to my feet, and wrapped her arms around me. Her scrub top smelled of hand gel and sweat and something faintly floral. I let myself lean into her, just for a moment, just until my breathing steadied.
"Right," she said into my hair. "You're coming round to mine. You're going to eat something with actual food in it. And you're going to stop hiding the test in your locker, because I'm taking it."
I pulled back. "Kate—"
"Don't argue. You need to stop carrying that thing around like it's a bomb you might detonate. It's not a secret anymore. It's a fact. And facts are easier to carry when someone else knows them too."
She unlocked the door and held it open. The corridor beyond was busy with the evening shift change, voices low and urgent.
"Coming?" she said.
I looked past her, down the corridor, through the windows to the darkening London street beyond. Somewhere out there Mycroft was doing whatever it was Mycroft did, unaware that in four months' time he was going to be a father.
"I'm coming," I said. And I walked out of the break room behind her, and I didn't look back.