The Accidental Family

by Rowan Coleman

  The concierge took her coat and led her to a table in a corner booth where Jake was waiting for her, wearing his weekend uniform of light blue button-down shirt topping a pair of chinos.

  “You look radiant,” he said, half rising to kiss her on the cheek as she slid into the booth next to him. Sophie had to admit that she did look good. She looked like her old self, only a bit hippier and with a new and improved cleavage. After her mother had aired her preposterous theory, which probably had a lot more to do with Iris’s longing for a grandchild and her HRT, Sophie had made a special effort to dress like a woman who was certainly not pregnant. She had slipped on her loyal and steadfast black Dolce & Gabbana heels, which she teamed with a black knit dress that set off her pale complexion and blond hair, her cake-enhanced curves filling out the dress much more satisfyingly now. She’d never have the cleavage of Miss Stephanie Corollo, but she was more than pleased with how she filled out the dress. The absolute truth was that she had tried on another skirt she’d brought with her, only she hadn’t quite been able to zip it up, and even if she had, it would have made her newly round tummy look even bigger than it was. But even so, here she was, a modern, stylish woman. A woman who was most definitely free of any sort of reproductive type of condition of any kind.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Jake said. “I’ve ordered champagne and I thought we’d start with some Colchester oysters; a dozen are on their way, is that okay?”

  “Um.” Sophie wanted to say, “Yes, fine, oysters, I love them,” but a little nagging part of her wouldn’t allow it. “The only thing is, I’ve become allergic to shellfish.”

  “No! Not now that you live right by the sea where you can practically scoop up crustaceans with your bare hands?” Jake commiserated. “You should have mentioned it when I suggested we come here!”

  “I know, but I’m still getting used to the idea,” Sophie told him. “It’s come as a bit of a shock.”

  “No problem, I shouldn’t have been so presumptuous.” He called over a waiter. “I’ll change the order—how about their deep-fried white bait, it’s to die for. And you can enjoy the champagne.”

  When Sophie thought about champagne, all she could think about was the taste of sweaty socks. Bile rose in her throat.

  “Except that I’m on antibiotics,” Sophie said. “I can’t drink. I mean I literally can’t drink. I keep trying, but nothing seems to go down.” Jake laughed and Sophie wondered what chemical outlets were available to potentially gestating people and decided that probably there were none. Except that she wasn’t a potentially gestating person. She was sure of it. Almost.

  “So you’re back in London visiting your mother?” Jake said.

  “Yes, duty calls.” Sophie smiled. They were almost sitting side by side in the booth, his thigh barely six inches from hers. J Sheekey’s was a busy, exclusive place, this had to be a table Jake had specifically requested and he would have had to have some considerable clout with the management to get it on such short notice. Which meant that not only did he want to impress her, he wanted to sit as close to her as possible, a fact Sophie found intriguing.

  “No trouble in paradise then?” Jake asked, with just the merest hint of hope in his voice. He picked up her left hand and looked at her ring finger. “Wow, you’re engaged too—congratulations. You should have said the other night.”

  “Oh well,” Sophie said, dropping her lashes coyly. “I didn’t want to steal your thunder. Congratulations to you—Stephanie is lovely.”

  “Yes, she is, isn’t she?” Jake smiled fondly. “She’s pretty stunning in every respect.”

  “Why doesn’t she stay with you at your apartment while she’s in London?” Sophie asked.

  “Appearances. She’s from a very old New York Italian family. She’s got a great-grandmother, who’s about a hundred or something and who sets a lot of store in appearances, that’s filtered down to Stephanie. She’s an old-fashioned girl at heart. We spend pretty much every night together, but we need to do it at two separate addresses.”

  “I think that’s sweet,” Sophie said. “I’ve started to think that no sex before marriage is probably an excellent idea.”

  “Really? You surprise me, you don’t look like a woman who’s not …” Jake stopped himself, blushing. “You look very happy.”

  “So will you buy a house when you’re married?” Sophie asked, mildly disconcerted by the way he was looking at her while talking about his fiancée.

  “Stephanie’s got this amazing penthouse overlooking Central Park. We’ll live there.”

  “What, you mean you’ll go back to the States at weekends or something?” Sophie was surprised.

  “No, I mean I’ll go back to New York for good. Stephanie didn’t want to live in the UK. She’d miss her family too much, and I couldn’t think of anything to stay here for, much as I love this town and its people …especially some of them.” He paused to smile at her and Sophie found herself smiling back at him. Despite gorgeous, successful, and independently wealthy Stephanie, despite the ring on Stephanie’s finger and her own, Jake still found her attractive and she found that, in this instance, what with the late-period debacle and Louis’s overly complicated personal life, she liked it. She liked it very much.

  “She seems like a woman worth moving to another continent for,” Sophie said softly as Jake slid a few millimeters closer to her.

  “She is,” he told her, leaning toward her a little, as if he were breathing her in. “She’s the perfect match for me …which makes me wonder why …”

  “Why what?” Sophie asked him in what she thought would widely be considered a seductive tone. She felt inordinately proud of herself. Until very recently a seductive anything would have been well out of her reach.

  “Why I’ve never quite been able to get you out of my head,” Jake said. “You never really wanted me, we barely did more than kiss a couple of times, yet here you are sitting in front of me and all I can think about is how much I’d like to kiss you.”

  “Well, I’ve got to say I’m not surprised,” Sophie said, making Jake sputter out a mouthful of champagne.

  “No?” he asked her.

  “Well, you know, there’s this place, this table—oysters, champagne. This is not a lunch that one friend throws for another. It’s a seduction lunch, Jake, whether you realized it or not. You planned to get me here for one last little spin before you marry Stephanie. Next you’ll be telling me you booked a hotel room so that we can have coffee in private.”

  Jake stared at her openmouthed for a second, as if he were about to protest, and then he laughed.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I think that in the back of my mind I was hoping for something …but I promise you, I didn’t plan it— there is no hotel room. It’s just that you look stunning, Sophie. Being in love really agrees with you, and when I saw you it reminded me of how much I liked you. How different things would have been if you’d liked me back, and that got me wondering, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Sophie told him, reassured that he still found her attractive despite herself because it meant there was no way on earth she could have any kind of bun in her oven. Pregnant women couldn’t be beguiling and seductive. Mother Nature wouldn’t allow ladies to go round flirting when they had an actual baby inside them, that would just be wrong. Sophie was certain that being knocked up meant sexiness went out the window. And she was definitely sexy, she was on fire with desirability. If only her so-called fiancé found her as hard to resist as Jake did.

  “I think it’s because you’ve changed.” Jake’s voice was low. “It’s as if something or someone has switched you on, you look alight with life. You look incredible.”

  “Thank you,” Sophie said. “It’s the same for me, seeing you, you know. I think that if things had been different, if we’d met at another time, then maybe we would have rubbed along pretty well together. But I don’t think we would ever have really been in love. Not like you are with Stephanie …not
like I am with Louis.”

  “Stephanie is amazing,” Jake said. “And I do love her. It’s just …I really like kissing you, Sophie.”

  “You know, it could be useful,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “To kiss someone other than our fiancés just to be able to compare and contrast. You know, to make sure that the feelings we think we are feeling for our significant others are real.”

  Sophie raised her eyebrows, surprised by what she had half suggested.

  “Are you suggesting we kiss each other purely for scientific research?” Jake asked her.

  “Am I suggesting that?” Sophie hedged.

  “I think you are.” Without warning Jake grabbed her hand and all but dragged her out of the booth and through the restaurant, turning heads as he went.

  “We have to make a call,” he told the waiter, who looked astounded as Jake rushed past. “Back in a minute.”

  Sophie followed Jake, not absolutely certain of what was going on until they emerged into the alleyway that ran behind Tottenham Court Road.

  Without pausing to take a breath, Jake put his hands on her shoulders and backed her against a graffiti-covered wall. For a second he looked at her, breathing hard, and then he kissed her. And Sophie kissed him back in a way she never would have before, her body hungry for intimacy, responding to Jake long before her mind could process what was happening. For several seconds everything about the kiss felt wonderful, incredible. And then Sophie realized—the lips that sought out her neck were not Louis’s, the hands that had traveled down from her shoulders and across her breasts weren’t the ones her body longed to be touched by, and, most of all, she was standing in an alleyway kissing a man who wasn’t the father of her baby. Not that she was pregnant, but if she were, then that would have been bad.

  Sophie pushed Jake away.

  “Wow,” Jake said. “Not exactly sure the results of that experiment went the way they were supposed to.”

  “Aren’t you?” Sophie asked him.

  “Not if I was supposed to discover that I don’t like kissing you, because I do. A lot.”

  “No you don’t,” Sophie told him, despite the evidence to the contrary that was quite clearly visible in his chinos. “And neither do I. You love Stephanie, I could see it all over your face when you talked about her, and I love Louis. I really do, and I don’t know what I’m doing kissing you in a back alley, because kissing you only made me miss him more.”

  “Ouch.” Jake sighed, picking up her hand and kissing it. “You know, it kills me to say it, but I don’t think I would ever have been the right man for you, even if Louis hadn’t come along.”

  “Maybe not—but judging from that kiss, Stephanie’s a very lucky lady,” Sophie said, smiling tentatively.

  “So can we still have lunch?” Jake asked hopefully, holding her hand. “We can swap wedding plans.”

  “I’d love to have lunch with you. But I don’t actually have any wedding plans yet,” Sophie told him as she followed him back into the restaurant.

  “Really? You’re not like any bride I know. Listen, if it’s not too awkward you should talk it through with Stephanie. That woman is a wedding-planning machine.”

  “Is she …?” Sophie suddenly had visions of a transatlantic wedding-planning empire as they settled back into the booth. “Jake?”

  “Yep?” Jake asked her, considerably more relaxed than he had been when they’d left.

  “Thank you. It’s so good to have you as a friend.”

  His smile was perhaps a little sad as he kissed her on the cheek and then said, “Sophie, I was always going to be your friend.”

  Sixteen

  Sophie stood in the pharmacy on the corner of Highbury Grove for a long time, looking at its meager selection of nail polish. She thought of Stephanie Corollo’s long, glossy red nails and then examined her own broken plain ones, still a little Cornish sand collected in their corners, and she picked up a bottle of Scarlet Woman from a little basket of bargain items located next to the copper arthritis bracelets.

  The woman behind the counter watched Sophie closely, her facial expression set in mistrust and disapproval. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t used to lengthy browsing in the tiny pharmacy where people probably usually knew exactly what they wanted when they dashed in on their way home from work or while rushing the kids off to school. Perhaps, in her designer black knit dress and Dolce & Gabbana shoes, Sophie looked the type to try and run off with a bottle of nail polish worth fifty-nine pence. Most likely though, Sophie concluded, it was because the woman knew that Sophie had not come in to buy nail polish, or an emery board, or indeed any of the other miscellaneous items she was clutching in her hands, but the pregnancy-testing kit she kept looking at, sitting on the shelf, which she hadn’t yet had the courage to pick up.

  It was foolish, Sophie knew, for a woman her age and in her circumstances to feel embarrassed about buying the item she needed. She was not some irresponsible teen or some good-time girl who’d end up on a morning chat show waiting for the results of a paternity test. She was a woman in her thirties, and an engaged woman to boot, with a ring to prove it, even if she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d left things with her fiancé. By almost anyone’s standard in the modern world, she was probably perfectly entitled to be buying a pregnancy test without anyone judging her.

  The trouble was that Sophie judged herself. If her mother was right about her condition, she hadn’t noticed any difference in herself for over two months. She was on the brink of motherhood and had taken about as much care in approaching that responsibility as a lemming careering over a cliff—and what kind of mother would that make her? Once, when the girls had first come into her life, she had moaned to Iris about her lack of any kind of maternal feeling, not to mention a total absence of the women’s intuition that people, mostly other women, harped on incessantly, hinting that the female of the human species was ever so slightly psychic when it came to her offspring. Iris had told her that she had just as much maternal instinct as the next woman and that all she had to do was listen. Yet for possibly two months she had been potentially pregnant, and she hadn’t experienced the merest flicker in her subconscious to alert her to what would be the most pivotal, life-changing moment in her existence on planet earth.

  At that second her phone burst into life in her pocket, causing her to drop the merchandise she was holding onto the floor. The woman behind the counter sighed and folded her arms under her breasts.

  “Sorry,” Sophie said to the woman as she fished the phone out of her bag and saw Louis’s name on the display. The sight of his name set her heart racing, but she was prepared for it to be anyone on the phone but him, including Bella and Wendy.

  “Hello?” she answered.

  “It’s me,” Louis said. Sophie tensed; his voice sounded flat, distant even as it nestled in her ear.

  “I know,” Sophie told him, picking up the items she’d dropped.

  “It is okay for me to call you, isn’t it?” Louis asked her edgily. “You said you’d call and you haven’t.”

  “I have called,” Sophie said, surprised by the chill in her voice. “Wendy answered, and I left a message for you to call me back but you didn’t.”

  Louis was silent for a long moment. “You didn’t try again though,” he said, not leaving Sophie any wiser as to whether or not Wendy had passed on the message.

  “Neither did you,” Sophie said. She wanted to talk to him about her call from Bella, but she knew that would be the worst possible thing she could bring up now. He had called her at last and she didn’t want to overwhelm this fragile contact with a rush of information.

  “I’m really glad to hear the sound of your voice,” she said softly, desperate to draw them a little closer together, even over so many miles. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Have you?” Louis sounded uncertain, defensive, but perhaps just a fraction warmer. “It’s just that I wasn’t sure if you’d walked out on me and the girls or not.”

  “I would n
ever do that,” Sophie promised him.

  “So you’ve just walked out on marrying me?” Louis asked her tightly.

  “Look, Louis—”

  “Yes, I know—you need space. You don’t need to explain anything to me, that’s not why I’m ringing you. We’ve been looking for Seth all week, but he’s nowhere. One of his flatmates says he met this girl in Tottenham at a gig the other day, and apparently he really liked her. She lives in London. Wendy’s really worried about him. He hasn’t answered his phone all week or tried to contact her—she says he can be a bit rash if he’s upset about something. She’s really worried, so we’ve got the girl’s address and we’re coming up to see if he’s there. We’ll be leaving in an hour or so. The roads should be pretty clear, so we’ll make good time. I thought I’d let you know in case we bumped into you.”

  “Right,” Sophie said, fighting both the irritation that rose in her chest at the very mention of Wendy’s name and the urge to point out that the chances of Louis “bumping into” her anywhere in the capital city of several million were slim to nil. But she didn’t want to sound facetious and unreasonable.

  “What about the girls?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Alexander’s said she’ll mind them; hopefully we’ll get back by Sunday, otherwise I’m not sure about school on Monday …” Louis trailed off.

  “Look, Mum’s house is sort of on the way to Tottenham,” Sophie said. “Bring them to me. Mum would love to see them, I’d love to see them, they’d love to see the dogs. They can stay the night while you go and see Seth and then perhaps tomorrow I could take them to see their grandma.” Sophie was referring to Carrie’s mother, who lived in an assisted-living home a short drive from her mother’s house. “And if they miss one day of school it won’t be the end of the world. If you and Wendy need to stay in London longer, I’ll take them back home.”