There would be endless discussions. It was more than likely that Kate could home in on fears for the future that Georgia didn’t want to think about yet. Things like where she was going to live and how she would be able to cope financially. She would probably only be being a responsible friend if she pointed out that Georgia still had options at this very early stage of her pregnancy.
Even as she was still reeling at the news that Kathryn had delivered, Georgia knew that the idea of not going ahead with this pregnancy was completely unthinkable but she did need time to get used to this...this rather overwhelmingly unexpected miracle.
And it was a miracle.
In the end, she hadn’t planned for this to happen. She hadn’t set out to seduce a potentially acceptable sperm donor on the off-chance of hitting the jackpot. She had been hugely relieved that an accidental pregnancy had been avoided.
Because she’d known how complicated it could become if Kate knew the truth.
For the first time since the shocking moment when she’d seen that tiny heart beating on the ultrasound screen, Georgia felt a flash of fear.
Kate couldn’t know the truth. Not about who had fathered these babies anyway. The truth about the pregnancy would have to come out, of course. But not yet. Hopefully not until she’d had time to get all her ducks in a row and would have a convincing argument to counter any objections that Kate could come up with.
* * *
It was the eggs that did it.
Ruined any plans that Georgia was still formulating about the quiet conversation she was planning to have with Kate when she was ready.
Something about the sight of that congealed egg yolk on the white plates stacked in the sink ready to be washed, combined with the weariness of having just completed a busy night shift, and the vague nausea Georgia had been aware of for some time suddenly tipped into something far more violent. She ran towards the bathroom in the hope that she would make it as far as the toilet before her stomach turned itself inside out.
She didn’t even notice that Kate had followed her until she felt the welcome touch of a damp facecloth as she finally let go of the cold, ceramic bowl of the toilet and sat back on her heels.
‘I’ll never eat eggs again in my life,’ she groaned.
‘You didn’t eat any in the first place. You just looked at the plates.’
‘I know...’ Georgia leaned back against the wall, the facecloth pressed against her eyes. Had she really reassured Sean that she wasn’t sick a couple of weeks ago? She had never felt this unwell in her life.
‘Are you sick? Running a temperature?’ Kate went into doctor mode, taking hold of her wrist to feel for her pulse.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Did you eat something dodgy on night shift? Like a kebab?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, my God...’ After a short silence in which the sound of pennies dropping was almost audible, Kate sounded horrified. ‘Are you pregnant. Georgie?’
So much for picking her own moment to share this news.
Kate’s heavy sigh as she shifted to lean against the wall beside Georgia was exactly how she was feeling herself.
‘When were you going to tell me?’
‘When it was too late to have an argument about whether or not it was a good idea to go through with it.’
Kate’s breath came out in a shocked huff. ‘Did you think I’d try and persuade you to have a termination?’
Georgia took the facecloth away from her eyes. If the truth was coming out, it may as well be the whole truth. Well...not quite the whole truth, of course...
‘Why not? You’ve never approved of my plan for single parenthood. You told me the whole idea was hare-brained.’
‘That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t support you in whatever you chose to do.’ There was a wobble in Kate’s voice that broke Georgia’s heart. It had felt so wrong keeping this a secret from her best friend and this was her punishment.
She had hurt Kate.
‘I can’t believe you’ve kept this to yourself. How pregnant are you?’
‘About ten weeks.’
The silence was short. And shocked.
‘So you did hook up with someone at the rally. I knew there was something you weren’t telling me. Who was it?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters. It’s your child’s father. You need to know about family genetics. You’ll need financial support.’
Georgia shook her head sharply enough to make her stomach try to roll again but she wasn’t about to be sick. The rush of adrenaline that fear produced was enough to buy her some time.
‘That’s precisely the reason I did it this way. I don’t want to know about the father’s family. I don’t want financial support. I don’t want anyone interfering in any way. This is my baby. And it’s going to stay that way.’
It had to stay that way.
From a dark, buried space in the back of her mind, Georgia could hear a small voice.
The small voice of a terrified child.
‘Don’t let them take me, Mummy. I don’t want to go...’
‘You’re coming with us. You’re my daughter. You’re going to get brought up in a decent, Godly household, not dragged up by your slut of a mother. Get in the car now and stay there...’
There was pain mixed in with the terror as the car door slammed shut on the arm still reaching out in a desperate plea to the woman this man was shoving back with his other arm. She could see her mother fall to the footpath, could see the blood on the strange shape of her arm as she tumbled and then curled up on the back seat of the vehicle that was taking her away from everything she knew and loved.
Georgia squeezed her eyes shut against the agonising memory. Kate didn’t know about her childhood. Nobody did. If people asked her about that scar on her arm, she told them she’d fallen off her pony one day, when she’d been out jumping every log she could find on the hills behind her country village. She’d covered the horrible reality with a fantasy of a perfect childhood so often she almost believed it herself. The only other person who’d known the real truth and could understand the fear that had poisoned so many years of her life had been her mother and she’d lost that rock in her life a long time ago.
She couldn’t begin to try and explain any of this, even to her best friend. Because it was too big and she’d walled those memories off and tried to bury them for a very good reason—she didn’t want to remember any of it.
It was inevitable that knowing she was bringing her own children into the world had prompted a backward glance at what was behind those mental walls but that was only as far as Georgia was prepared to go.
So she couldn’t tell Kate why but she could make her understand that Georgia wasn’t going to change her mind. She knew she was pushing her closest friend away with her vehement tone but this was self-protection.
No. It was even more important than that. She was protecting her babies.
It was a blessing that she’d stopped herself telling Kate how she felt about Matteo due to the link she had to him via Luke. Somehow, instinct had protected her babies even before she had known they existed.
It was infinitely more important that Kate never know this part of the truth because Matteo would never let his children be brought up by someone he despised.
Maybe he wouldn’t be as violent as her father had been but he would be just as persistent, even if he didn’t believe that he had a vengeful God on his side.
Okay, she knew that Matteo would never condone violence. That he would probably be as reasonable as any co-parent could be and he would allow her access to her babies—perhaps even shared living arrangements. But that wouldn’t be enough. Life would be an endless emotional roller-coaster where the dips would consist of anxiety and loneliness and probably something as nasty as jealousy.
What if...what if Matteo found a woman he could adore instead of despise? If she became a part-time mother to her babies?
No. She couldn’t handle that.
And she still had the power to make sure she never had to face that kind of painful disruption to her life.
‘Don’t ask again, Kate.’ Her voice came out in a kind of hiss. ‘Because I’m never going to tell you. I’m never going to tell anyone, especially the father. And I couldn’t anyway because I don’t have his address. I barely remember his name. And...oh, God... I’m going to be sick again...’
* * *
The morning sickness gave life an edge of misery that made the following weeks seem very long but then it began to wear off and life suddenly seemed much brighter.
On the work front, Georgia’s fears of being demoted to a paper-pusher proved unfounded. Her ‘light duties’ were actually going to be an opportunity she’d quietly dreamed of being offered. There would be no more lifting patients or putting herself into dangerous rescue situations but she would still be able to use every skill she possessed as a paramedic. She would be challenged, in fact, because she was going to be working alone at times. Given a fully equipped SUV that had everything an ambulance had apart from any stretchers, she could be sent first to a scene to assess and start treatment. Or she could be dispatched as backup to provide the kind of interventions and drugs a less qualified crew could offer.
She was going to get all the excitement and satisfaction her job was capable of delivering, without any of the drudgery. No hard physical challenges and no long transport journeys taking perfectly stable patients to a hospital while radio traffic announced the dispatch of available crews to far more exciting-sounding calls.
Her new duties would have been more than enough to restore her zest for life as the misery of constant nausea receded but there was another bright spot that was getting steadily larger. Even before the morning sickness had kicked in, Kate and Luke had finally managed to connect and their relationship had deepened steadily. Now it seemed believable that her best friend had found exactly what she had been searching for. The One. Which was just as well because Kate had, shockingly, broken her own rules, had had unprotected sex with Luke and—astonishingly—become pregnant as easily as Georgia had herself.
Was it really only a few months ago that they were both passionate career women in their mid-thirties who’d been facing the prospect of futures that might not deliver the extra dimension of having a real family?
Okay, things weren’t perfect...
Single parenthood was not really anybody’s dream. For most people, it was something that you coped with when you had to. When the fairy-tale concept of family hadn’t worked out for whatever reason.
But Georgia didn’t see it that way.
The best times in her childhood and adolescence had been when she’d felt safe with her mother. When they’d found a new place to live and knew it could be months before her father tracked them down and made another attempt to separate them. When, at best, the police or social services would come knocking at their door and there would be court appearances or the like to deal with.
At worst, it had been when Georgia had had to start looking over her shoulder all the time in case she was being followed. Or walk home from school with the fear that she might not find her mother still alive when she got there.
Georgia knew she could do more than cope with single parenthood. Without the threat of interference, she could ensure that the lives of her children were full of joy. And love. And that they would always feel safe.
She also believed that everything would work out for Kate. That she and Luke had the foundations for a perfect life together.
Georgia was quite convinced about this. Until that grey, wet day when she received the dreadful news that Kate had had an accident. That she’d been hit by a car as she’d run across a busy road.
That, while she’d been lucky enough not to receive any injuries more than a concussion, she’d lost her baby.
It was one of the hardest things Georgia had ever had to do, walking into that hospital room to bring fresh clothes and take Kate home. It felt like a giant spotlight was aimed at her belly to advertise her continuing pregnancy and rub salt into what had to be the rawest wound ever.
‘I’m so, so sorry, Katy.’
But Kate brushed off her sympathy.
‘It’s not that big a deal, you know? I’d barely had time to get used to the idea anyway.’
And that was apparently all that Kate wanted to say about the subject. At home for the next couple of days, all she wanted to do was sleep. Georgia took time off work to watch her friend and make sure there were no signs of a more severe head injury that had been missed. That first night, she actually lay on Kate’s bed beside her, waking her every so often just to check her level of responsiveness and listening to the pattern of her breathing as she slept again.
It hurt that she was being shut out. She knew how she’d felt even in the midst of the initial shock of learning that she was pregnant. That it was a miracle. Little beings were forming inside her belly. Her babies. She’d barely had time to get used to the idea either, but she already loved them enough to fight to the death to protect them.
But Kate had apparently been practising hiding her real feelings about Luke for a while now. Did she think that if she gave in to the grief she had to be experiencing now, it might not stop there? That she would confess she’d broken the rules of that stupid ‘pact’ they’d made at medical school to marry each other if they were both still single when they were thirty-five? That she had fallen in love and that Luke would call the whole thing off? She was pushing Luke away right now as well and that felt so, so wrong. They had found something very special between them and they should be fighting to protect it. This crushing blow should be bringing them closer together, not pushing them apart.
Georgia desperately wanted to help but she couldn’t interfere, could she?
There was a barrier here that she had created herself because she hadn’t wanted Kate to interfere with her own life by trying to influence her decisions. Because she hadn’t ever shared the trauma of her own childhood. She hadn’t told Kate that Matteo was the father of her babies. She hadn’t even told her yet that she was carrying twins.
She certainly couldn’t tell her that now, in the wake of her own loss that had to be devastating, even if Kate didn’t want to admit it.
That barrier had just become a whole lot more solid.
The mess had just got a whole lot messier.
Something her mother had once quoted came back to her in the quiet hours of that night.
What a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive...
Georgia couldn’t even offer advice to her best friend to hang onto the connection she had found with Luke because they both knew how rare it was to find something like that. It would be a case of ‘do what I say, not what I do’, because she had found a connection herself that was just as rare and precious. With Matteo. And she was prepared to sacrifice that.
Not because she wanted to.
Because she had to.
She had to let her head win any battles with her heart because the lessons she had learned in life were so deeply engraved.
You couldn’t trust love to last.
And some fathers could destroy your life.
There was a crazy moment, in those long hours where the silence was only broken by the sound of Kate’s breathing, when it seemed that her heart could win the battle. Georgia seriously considered getting hold of Matteo’s contact details and admitting the truth. The whole truth. Her heart whispered encouragement. Maybe it was worth taking the risk. Maybe Matteo also knew how rare this kind of connection was and would be prepared to move heaven and earth to make it work.
But her head had plenty of ammunition left.
Are you c
razy? You’re expecting that kind of commitment on the strength of a couple of days and ‘one’ night together?
Maybe you imagined that the connection was mutual.
And do you really want to open that can of worms right now—when your very best friend is utterly miserable? Would you want to make her feel like she has to support you to chase the improbable dream of a happy-ever-after family when she’s grieving for the loss of her own?
Kate’s breath came out in a sigh that became a whimper of distress that was timed perfectly to underline just how wrong it would be to make this any worse than it had to be. Georgia smoothed a lock of blonde hair back from Kate’s face and whispered reassuringly.
‘It’s okay... Everything’s going to be okay.’
It had to be, that was all there was to it.
And, with that determination, another convincing victory got handed to her head. Georgia had chosen the path she needed to follow. Now she just needed to stick to it.
* * *
‘Hey, man...’ Matteo started speaking even before Luke’s image came onto the screen of his laptop. The tone of the Skype call had interrupted the movie he was watching but it was a very welcome surprise. ‘Where the hell have you been for the last few weeks?’
‘It’s been crazy.’
‘You talking about your work or your love life?’
‘Bit of both. Hey, before I get distracted, what are you doing on Friday?’
‘Tomorrow or next week?’ Matteo blinked. ‘Not that it matters. I’m working on both Fridays. Why?’
‘Do you reckon you could swap a shift? For next Friday? That gives you a whole week to sort it out.’
‘I don’t know.’ Matteo peered at the screen but Luke didn’t look as if he was in the midst of some personal crisis. He looked...very happy. ‘It’s never easy but I could try, I guess, if it was important enough. What’s going on?’
‘You remember what you said?’
‘I say a lot of things.’ Matteo grinned. ‘What particular words of wisdom are you referring to?’
Twin Surprise for the Italian Doc Page 7