Yes, it would.
Pregnancy had been the way Melissa had trapped Andrew. Blackmailed him into marriage. It was the absolute last thing Alice would want to have happen.
Especially now, when everything seemed to be going in the direction she’d dreamed of. When it seemed more than likely that Andrew would propose to her.
When he was ready. He had to know, as definitively as Alice did, that he wanted them to be together for the rest of their lives. She was quite prepared to wait for as long as that might take.
She didn’t have any intention of going anywhere else.
Jo bounced back from the sushi incident far more quickly than Alice.
‘Great way to lose a couple of kilos,’ she said a week later.
‘Are you kidding? I’d rather hit the gym every day for a month than go through that.’
‘You don’t look like you’re in any state to go near a gym. Are you okay?’
‘I’ve felt better. It’s taking a while to feel like eating properly again, that’s all.’
The first alarm bells rang the following week when Alice still felt unwell every time she looked at food.
When she realised she was now several days late for her period.
It was easy enough to find a pregnancy test kit in the emergency department and take it into the locker room toilets when she had a quiet moment.
Far harder to try and deal with the shocking result.
She was pregnant.
So much for the extra insurance. They’d made love the night before she’d become ill and that had been in the middle of her cycle. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Just a few days either side and it wouldn’t have mattered that her chemical protection had been disrupted.
Alice sat on the closed lid of the toilet and buried her face in her hands.
She had to face the fact that it had happened.
And that she was now going to have to try and find a way to tell Andrew. To tell him that history was repeating itself. To give him reason to think that she might be no better than Melissa and trying to force him into marriage. She had taken responsibility for contraception. He had trusted her and she had broken that trust.
It didn’t matter how tightly pressed her hands were against her eyes. The tears still seeped through.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DENIAL was a wonderful thing.
Alice knew perfectly well it was only a temporary refuge but it was impossible to resist. Her reasoning was along the kind of lines that had stopped her pushing Andrew to talk about his time with Melissa and what his marriage had been like.
She didn’t want to know because, deep down, she was afraid it might tarnish the glow of what they had found in this new life together. And what she had to tell him now would inevitably do the same thing and that meant she would never again get as close as she was at this moment to living her dream. Who could blame her if she wanted to delay the falling of the axe for just a few days?
Enough time to soak in memories to treasure.
The way Andrew smiled at her. That careless touch as he passed sometimes. Just a brush of her hand or touch on her arm or even simply a meaningful glance if they were at work. If she was busy in the kitchen at home, and Emmy wasn’t close by, he might lift her hair to drop a kiss on her neck or put his arms around her waist and draw her back so that her rump was nestled in his groin for a second or two.
Even more intimately, there was that look in his eyes just before he kissed her properly. When they lay with their heads on the pillows of Andrew’s bed, their faces so close it was hard to focus. That was what Alice was going to miss the most. The feel, more than the look, of being trusted.
Being loved.
For a few days it worked wonderfully well. Increasingly, however, Alice could feel the claws of guilt digging in. She had wanted to win Andrew’s trust so much and here she was keeping a secret he had every right to know.
Work was a blessing because it was so much easier to push anything personal so far into the background it could be virtually forgotten. Until she had to deal with a case that hit a little too close to home.
Laura Green was a thirty-two-year-old woman who had presented with sudden onset vaginal bleeding and she was terrified that she was miscarrying. Her husband, John, was with her and, while he was doing a great job of support and reassurance, Alice could see the same fear in his eyes.
‘It’s okay, babe. Don’t cry.’
But Laura was sobbing as she climbed onto the bed and Alice helped her out of her clothes and into a gown. She could empathise with this woman’s fear.
Losing her own baby was already unthinkable. It was a part of her. A part of the man she loved. Inside her belly and growing stronger every day.
While the consequences of revealing her secret were terrifying, there were moments when Alice couldn’t help being thrilled. No matter how things worked out between herself and Andrew, she wanted this baby very, very much. She would love it and protect it and care for it.
As a solo mother?
It was unfortunate that the doctor assigned to Laura’s case chose that precise moment to enter the cubicle. Even more so that it happened to be Andrew. Thankfully, Alice was busy shoving her patient’s personal property into a large paper bag. The rustle of the paper covered her sharp intake of breath and she had a moment, as she bent to push the bag into the basket under the bed, when she could blink really hard and ensure that the threat of tears was banished.
This was one of those chin-raising moments.
If she had to be a solo mother then she would cope. It was a long way from how she would want things to be, but she’d been dealing with that kind of disappointment her whole life, hadn’t she? Chasing dreams and then making the best of what was left when the dream evaporated.
And she’d had the feeling all along that what she’d found with Andrew and Emmy was too good to last for ever. She was prepared. Or she would be, very soon.
‘How many weeks pregnant are you, Laura?’ Andrew was asking.
‘Almost ten.’
‘And you’ve had a scan to confirm the pregnancy?’
‘Last week.’ Laura’s voice broke. ‘We…we saw the heart beating and…and they said that everything looked…fine.’
‘Is this your first pregnancy?’
Laura couldn’t answer. She had pressed her face against her husband’s chest and he was holding her as her shoulders heaved with silent sobs.
‘We’ve been trying for ages,’ John said. ‘And…yes, this is the first pregnancy.’
‘Any abdominal pain?’
‘No.’ Laura raised a tear-streaked face. ‘Am I going to lose my baby?’
‘We’ll have an answer to that soon,’ Andrew told her gently. ‘I’m going to examine you to see whether your cervix is open or closed and, depending on what I find, we’ll look at doing an ultrasound test as well. Alice, could you get a blood pressure for me, please?’
‘Sure.’ It was good to have something to do instead of standing there with her thoughts spinning in ever decreasing circles.
She really hoped that Laura wasn’t losing this baby, but the first twelve weeks was when the majority of miscarriages occurred.
How long had Melissa waited to break the news of her pregnancy to Andrew? Had she told him very early before she entered this higher risk period for miscarriage so she could be sure of securing the marriage proposal she desired? Or had she waited out the first trimester to get past a time that many people might consider a termination to be acceptable?
Maybe Alice would be damned either way—too soon or too late.
She wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Laura’s upper arm. This was important because, if a miscarriage was underway, Laura’s blood pressure could be dropping to dangerously low levels. She picked up the bulb of the sphygmomanometer and started squeezing it.
‘This will get tight on your arm for a bit,’ she warned.
The pressure inside Alice’s head seemed to increase as she w
atched the mercury level rise. With the stethoscope in her ears, she could hear the rapid pounding of her own heart.
She wasn’t anything like Melissa but would Andrew see that?
He still never mentioned his dead wife. Alice had been only too happy to sidestep the issue. To go along with the pretence that Melissa had never existed and therefore didn’t matter.
How wrong had she been? Their marriage and the reason for it couldn’t matter more now. History repeating itself. It was…huge and dark and very scary.
‘Blood pressure’s 130 over 85,’ she reported.
‘Is that good?’ John asked anxiously.
‘Probably up a little,’ Andrew responded calmly. ‘Only to be expected given the stress level.’ He was pulling on some gloves. ‘Tell me about this bleeding.’
‘It was so sudden,’ Laura said in a horrified kind of whisper. ‘I was just standing there and all of a sudden I felt this trickle down my legs and I looked down and saw it was blood and—’ Her words trailed into silence.
‘She screamed,’ John added in a hollow voice. ‘I knew something awful had happened. I just picked her up and ran to the car. I didn’t even think to call an ambulance or anything.’
‘Did the bleeding continue at that rate?’
‘No. I had a towel to sit on in the car but there wasn’t much on it by the time we got here. Is…is that good?’ Laura sounded more than hopeful now. She sounded desperate.
‘Let’s have a look.’ Andrew made sure the curtains around the cubicle were closed and then drew the sheet back. ‘Bend your legs up for me, Laura.’
The examination took only a minute. Andrew’s gloves were bloodstained as he pulled them off but his words were as good as could be hoped for.
‘Your cervix is still tightly closed,’ he told Laura.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not a definitive answer yet but if it was open we’d have to say that yes, you were having a miscarriage.’
‘What happens now?’ John asked.
‘We’ll do an ultrasound to check for a foetal heartbeat. If we find one, it will be good news and all we’ll need to do is keep Laura under observation for an hour or two to make sure that the bleeding has settled. We’ll run some blood tests, too and monitor temperature and things just to rule out any kind of infection being the cause for this.’
Nobody asked about what would happen if they didn’t find that heartbeat. The ramifications of that were only too obvious.
It was Andrew who did the ultrasound examination a short time later. John and Laura were holding hands tightly and Alice stood on the other side of the bed. Andrew had a hip on the bed with one hand holding the transducer to position it on Laura’s still flat belly. With his other hand, he was pointing to part of the image on the screen which he had angled to allow the young couple to watch.
‘That’s the bladder,’ he said, indicating a darker blob. ‘And this is…’ he changed the angle of the transducer ‘…the uterus.’
It felt as if everybody in this space was holding their breath. There were dozens of other patients in this department at the moment and a hive of activity beyond the flimsy fabric of the curtains, but Alice knew she wasn’t the only one totally oblivious to anything other than that screen. She watched Andrew press the transducer down a little more firmly. She saw the tiny furrow between his brows.
And then, there it was. A rhythmic movement on the screen. A pulse of life.
Laura gasped and then twisted her face to look up at her husband. The relief and then the hope radiating from both their faces was blinding. Alice had to look away and she found her gaze caught by Andrew.
The look she was receiving was so soft. So warm. He wanted to share the joy of these young parents.
It was too much. The threat of tears so overwhelming that Alice had to look away instantly.
‘Excuse me,’ she whispered. ‘I have to—’
To escape.
She turned and all but ran from the cubicle.
Alice had just bustled past Andrew without looking in his direction.
She was obviously busy, with a sealed bag of blood samples in her hands, but this was the second, or was it the third time, she’d missed the opportunity for eye contact on this shift.
And that was weird.
Almost as if she was avoiding him.
Andrew’s frown deepened as he turned back to the X-ray image on the computer in front of him.
‘That bad?’ Peter stopped to peer over Andrew’s shoulder.
‘Not at all. Straightforward undisplaced radial fracture. Nothing a short stint in a cast won’t make as good as new.’
Peter nodded. ‘You must have been thinking about something else, then, to make you look so worried.’
‘Was I looking worried?’ Andrew tried to sound nonchalant.
‘Yep.’ The head of department raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re sure there’s nothing I can help with?’
‘I’m good,’ Andrew said firmly. He smiled to prove it.
‘No hassles getting properly settled, then? You’re happy you made such a big move?’
‘Oh, yes.’ From the corner of his eye he could see Alice on her return journey from wherever she’d been taking the blood samples. ‘Couldn’t be happier.’ Andrew felt his smile broadening and couldn’t help glancing away from his colleague.
Peter followed his line of sight. ‘Ahh…’ The murmur was both understanding and approving.
‘Hey!’ Andrew’s call was soft but Alice looked up.
She smiled brightly. Too brightly?
‘Everything all right?’
‘Of course.’ The answer was quick. Alice was looking startled, as if it had been an odd thing for him to ask.
‘How’s Laura doing?’
‘Fine. Bleeding’s still minimal so she’ll be able to go home very soon.’
Alice had noticed Peter standing behind Andrew now. She looked at the departmental head and then her gaze shifted back to Andrew before sliding away. She was avoiding eye contact. Why? Because Peter was there? Surely she realised that everybody knew about their relationship by now so why did she seem…what…nervous?
‘I’d better get on with…’ The rest of Alice’s words were lost, partly because she was muttering but more because she was already moving swiftly away from the two men.
Andrew flicked a glance up at Peter but he was staring after Alice with a rather thoughtful expression. As though he’d noticed something a bit different about her as well.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ was all he said to Andrew. ‘I’ve got some paperwork I should catch up on while things are quiet. Don’t forget that senior staff meeting at shift changeover. The more that can make it the better.’
Andrew’s hand curled over the computer mouse, clicking through images to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
He felt as if he was missing something but he knew it had nothing to do with the patient who’d fractured his arm. It had something to do with Alice. With why she’d been distant ever since…
Since they’d worked together earlier to assess Laura with her threatened miscarriage. Since that moment of relief when he’d located the heartbeat on ultrasound and could pretty much guarantee that the young couple weren’t going to lose their baby.
Amidst the pleasure of a good outcome for their patient, Andrew had been acutely aware of a much more personal reaction to the scene. An odd flash of longing. He’d spared just a moment to wish that it was Alice on a bed having undergone an ultrasound examination and that he was holding her hand and they were both celebrating the proof that they were expecting a new addition to their family.
Had he somehow communicated something of that longing?
Good grief! If the idea of having a baby of their own was enough to scare Alice off he’d better rethink the whole idea of proposing marriage. Maybe she wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment.
Maybe all she’d wanted all along was the guarantee of continuing to liv
e in the place she loved.
No. Andrew actually physically shook his head as he pushed his chair back and stood up, ready to go back to his patient and arrange transfer to the plaster room.
Alice wasn’t like that. She’d never use someone to get what she wanted. Deceive them emotionally.
She wasn’t anything like Melissa had been.
He couldn’t possibly be that wrong about the woman he was in love with. Any doubts he might have had regarding the strength of his feelings towards Alice had been well and truly dispelled during that food poisoning episode. Apart from Emmy, there was no one he cared about this much. Or ever would.
He’d been waiting for Alice to recover completely so that they could enjoy a real celebration. Waiting for the right moment to tell her how he felt and what he was dreaming of for their future.
Clearly, the right moment was not going to be anytime very soon.
Later that afternoon that moment seemed to recede even further.
A skeleton staff had been left in the department for the few minutes when senior doctors and nurses gathered in the staff room. Andrew came in last, having given Laura the all-clear to go home and stop worrying. He scanned the crowded staff room from where he had to stand close to the door, looking for Alice, unsure of whether she was here or not.
He wanted to catch her before she left to collect Emmy from school because he wanted to suggest that he bring takeaway food home for dinner tonight and make things easier for Alice. She still looked a bit peaky even though she should be well over the knock of being so ill for a couple of days.
‘I didn’t want to send out a general memo,’ Peter told the group, ‘and I’d appreciate it if what’s being said stays in this room, but you’re all here because you have keys to the drugs cabinet and I need you all to know there’s been some anomalies noted recently in drug tallies.’
There she was—at the back of the room, sitting beside Jo.
It took Andrew a moment to register and then comprehend the strange look Alice was giving him. Her chin was up and she looked defensive. Cold, even.
Oh…Lord! Did she think he’d been seeking her out because of the mention of an issue regarding restricted drugs?
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