A Part of Me

by Anouska Knight

  A Part of Me

  Anouska Knight

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  Also by Anouska Knight

  SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE

  Stay in touch with Anouska Knight at:

  www.facebook.com/AnouskaKnightAuthor

  www.twitter.com/AnouskaKnight

  For my sisters, who I love more than Marmite

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First and foremost, I have to thank Anna Scott, ITV producer extraordinaire, blonde bombshell and all-round good egg. No, you didn’t have a hand in this book; however, in my typical buffoonery I neglected to thank you in the last and, after all the laughs and fabulousness you brought with you, a thank you was the very least I owed you. Thank you!

  As always, gargantuan thanks galore to my rip-roaring ever-enthusiastic, ever-encouraging editor Donna–The Don–Hillyer. I couldn’t possibly bust through the pain barrier without you. Well, you and an endless supply of chocolate-dipped confections and caffeine. The power of three, right there, folks.

  Huge thanks also to the powerhouse of office ninjas at Mills & Boon/Harlequin UK for your massive support throughout the last twelve wonderful months. I must’ve caused at least one of you an epic headache so, to that person in particular, a very hefty thank you. And soz! I’m going to roll the lovely lot at Cherish PR into that too. Thanks gang! Aspirins are in the post.

  To my agent Madeleine Milburn, thank you for coming aboard. It feels good already, Agent Milburn! (You might want to get some aspirins in too.)

  Jim, thank you for always deserving a thank you, and thanks too for shrugging it off when you didn’t hear one as often as you should have.

  To my other brilliant boys, Bodhi and Wolf, for letting me slip away quietly into my room and regress into grimy student-esque habits without raising too many complaints about missed bedtime stories and school projects, thanks, fellas–you’re more awesome than I know how to write.

  Mena, thanks, kid, for lending me your ears and telling me which ideas are really too naff to write about. Taz, thanks for lending me your home so I have somewhere else I can shuffle my grimy student-esque habits around. I’ll replace the chocolate-dipped stuff … and the coffee. Mum, thanks for telling me that I can do it. And then telling me again.

  Last but definitely not least, an enormous thanks to Clare and Podge. Clare, for helping me to understand a journey that has to be heard, not researched, and Podge for the memory of school-trip oysters, a trauma burned into my psyche. You both rock.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Extract

  Endpages

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  THERE WAS SOMETHING innately foreboding about waking up at an unknown hour in an unfamiliar room. A childlike fear, fortified by pressing shadows and the mysteries they concealed. Revelations better left in the dark.

  Against an unexplained sharpness nestled deeply within my throat, I inhaled the softness of my mother’s perfume from where she sat motionless beside me. Her presence was little reassurance amidst the thick heavy quiet.

  As children, she’d once driven us, weeping, through the night to spend the remaining dark hours in the box room of my grandmother’s bungalow. I was reminded now of that long night in the darkness, lying in a bed that did not smell of home, listening to the sounds of my brother’s restless sleep from the fold-out bed next to me. I remember being not quite brave enough to risk disturbing so much as the air around me to call out for my mother.

  She was here now, but still this felt a lot like that time. The air heavy with a palpable sense of change. The loss of something achingly irreplaceable.

  I opened my eyes with another steadying breath. The pinch in my throat cut the action short. Mum shifted beside me.

  It was too quiet.

  Intuitively, a cool, soft hand tried gently to reassure with soothing motions over the back of my knuckles. The stirring anxiety in my chest blossomed in response. A warm wave of nausea rushed past the scratchiness in my throat then, lacing my mouth with a pitiful flurry of saliva. It hurt when I retched. Across the bleak grey room, the sound was enough to pull the attention of the figure standing quietly there.

  I felt my mother’s hand close around my own.

  ‘Sweetheart? Try not to move too suddenly.’ In the dimness of the nightlight, I couldn’t see that she had been crying, but I could hear it, there in the fragile reserve of her voice. Another retch and Mum took back her hand, adeptly lunging forth with a cardboard bowl. The sickness heralded an immediate thumping in one side of my head, forcing closed my eyes again as she wiped the bitter residue from my lips. They hurt too. And my teeth, clenching behind them – sore from the assault of medical intervention. I swallowed to remind myself of it. The pain lessened the further down it travelled. Beyond the neatly folded edges of crisp white hospital bed sheets, pain seemed to disappear altogether.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look down there.

  A faint squeak of shoes on linoleum stirred across the other side of the room. The sounds grew as their owner began making his way tentatively over. James’s hand, heavier than my mother’s, ran gently over my head. For a moment, it soothed the angry thump of ache there.

  ‘It’s okay, baby,’ he whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

  There was something fragile in James’s voice too, something that didn’t belong. He leant in and kissed the straggled brown mess of my hair. His whiskers were long, scratchy, with none of his usual cologne to cocoon me as he closed the distance between us. He smelled the way he sometimes did after his run – of strain and exhaustion. Something in the way he kissed me now paved the way for inevitable memories of the previous morning to filter back home.

  The day had begun like any other. The same dull ache I knew would subside from my hips once I was up and showered; enough mischievous nudges to wake me long before my alarm had chance to. And then, the unexpected as I’d pulled back the duvet, revealing that this day would punctuate all others in the last thirty-one weeks.

  There hadn’t been that much blood at first. During the frantic time that followed, I’d stayed calm – we both had – listening to plans being made as the professionals poked and prodded, recorded and conferred. James had focused on their reassurances, while I’d stacked all my chips on the nudges. That was the practical thing to do. No panicking unless the nudges stopped. All the while I’d kept calm, thinking such practical thoughts, as if thought alone could keep us safely centred in the eye of the storm building around us. Now there was only quiet.

  James moved his head beside mine, h
is breathing shallow against my ear. I listened to it. But there was no relief in him. I knew then. This was the aftermath of that storm. The stillness after the chaos. The changed landscape waiting to be considered. Here in this too-quiet room, the devastation would be met.

  Mum took my free hand again, the other engaged in tubing and tape. She was squeezing it tightly now, holding onto it as if one of us might be blown to oblivion otherwise. I lay quite still, suddenly afraid again of disturbing the air around me.

  ‘Amy? Do you know where you are?’ James asked quietly, straining to hold the evenness of his voice. He was still holding himself awkwardly beside me, his face hidden from mine. I nodded against him, willing him to stem the rest of his words. He was trembling. ‘Amy … We lost him, baby.’

  My mother’s grip loosened as she broke beneath a subdued shudder of anguish. James’s voice cracked against me. ‘We’ll be okay, baby,’ he promised. ‘We’re gonna be okay.’

  CHAPTER 1

  Five years later

  AS FAR AS uncomfortable experiences went I was pretty good in the saddle, I thought. Calm. Controlled. Cool under fire. And these traits had come in handy over several tumultuous years working within a fast-paced architectural practice. But this? This gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘pressure’. This whole set-up was geared towards breaking a person. A relentless tap-tap-tapping at the walls of our resolve, thinly veiled attempts to expose our weaknesses so that they could finally tell us what I’d prepared myself to hear all along – that we weren’t worthy, that we’d make awful parents, and that this had all been a horrific waste of everybody’s time.

  A heavy wooden door clattered shut somewhere off the corridor where we sat, fidgeting like apprehended schoolchildren. We both listened to the patter of daintily heeled shoes as they echoed away from us to some other inhospitable depth of the building. I knew it wasn’t Anna, she’d been wearing flats when she’d briefed us this morning. I’d watched her tapping them nervously on our behalf before the panel had called us in, then I’d focused my eyes on the bejewelled toes of those same shoes while James answered the questions each panel member had put to him.

  I let out a long silent breath, surprised that I couldn’t see a grey plume as it hit the chilly air in this fusty old building. James’s knee resumed its impatient bobbing. That James, the epitome of unflappability, was this jumpy only jangled my own nerves.

  Every other meeting, interview and session had been conducted in a purpose-built room. A conference suite, an office, our home, even – where there were carpets and coffee and heating. But the Town Hall, this last checkpoint on the home straight, was about as inviting as a Dickensian institution.

  I checked my watch. It had been nearly fifteen minutes since the panel had dismissed us to await our fate out here. You could cram an impressive amount of mental self-flagellation into that timeframe, I’d found. I knew James didn’t want to hear it, but I needed to blurt out something, and words seemed preferable to anxious blubbing.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said we’ve been looking at bigger houses,’ I groaned quietly.

  Exasperatedly, James pushed a flop of dark blond hair back from his face and gave his left knee a reprieve from all the jiggling. I’d made him grow his hair out a little after one of the other women on the prep course had said we looked corporate. She’d made it sound like a swear word. James couldn’t understand why I was taking any sort of advice from a woman who was actually choosing single-parenthood. When she’d told us that she was hoping to adopt more than one child by herself, James had whispered that even if she made it to the medical stage, they’d probably find she was certifiably nuts.

  I hadn’t noticed until just now, but longer hair didn’t really suit James.

  He turned to face me. ‘They didn’t ask us anything that they hadn’t already read in our report, okay? And there’s no rule that says we can’t move house one day.’ James’s right knee took over the bobbing.

  I tucked precision-straightened hair neatly behind my ears and began to fiddle with one of the small diamond studs he’d bought me for my twenty-ninth last month. One of the few nights we’d actually gone out together and not fallen out.

  ‘Stability, James. That’s what they want to hear, not that we’re planning to up sticks and disrupt our home—’

  James held a hand aloft to cut me off. ‘Amy, forget it. We’re not doing this again. We’ve jumped through every sodding hoop imaginable over the last year just to get to this point. We’ve just met ten people in there we don’t know from Adam, yet they know every last sodding thing there is to know about us.’ He was already pointing an accusing finger down the corridor towards the room where the panel were still discussing and dissecting our lives. ‘They’ve been through our income, our childhoods … our sodding body mass indexes, for Christ’s sake! If it’s all going to come tumbling down now because you said you’d like a bigger garden one day then they can shove it up their pedantic arses.’

  ‘Shh! Someone might hear you!’ I sputtered, nervously eyeing both ends of the corridor. James stood. I watched as he moved away from me over to the tired lead window opposite. This journey hadn’t been an easy one, but on some level I knew that James had found it harder than I had, and ultimately would find it easier to walk away from, if it was about to come to that.

  We’re nearly there, I wanted to say to him, but everything about him looked so uneasy. He’d never wear that jumper again. I’d bought it from M&S because walking in wearing his favoured Ralph Lauren might’ve been read as ‘part-time yacht-enthusiast’, when what we were aiming for was ‘full-time crayon-enthusiast’. I blew out a cheekful of air. Subliminal messages through the medium of casual knitwear – how was that for cruising close to certifiable nuttiness?

  James shook his head as he looked out onto the dismal March morning. We’d asked for the earliest slot available, I knew I’d be a wreck otherwise. James began jostling the keys in his trouser pocket before turning cool blue eyes on me.

  ‘Anna wouldn’t have put us forward to panel if she didn’t think we were ready, you know that. Just … try to relax, okay?’ I nodded, reluctantly leaving my earring alone before I pinged it onto the floor again. I decided to chew at my lower lip instead. There was less chance of that ending up on the floor and, unlike diamonds, skin was self-regenerating. Beyond the corner of the corridor, softly striding footsteps were making their way towards us. James’s chest rose with a deep intake of breath as he turned back to the window.

  The Chair of the panel, a forty-something chap with thinning hair and a name I’d been too flustered to catch, rounded the corner towards us. Awkwardly, I got to my feet and straightened my clothes. I’d gone for a pale blue blouse and pretty cardigan in lavender. Depending on how the next few minutes went, I probably wouldn’t wear them again either.

  ‘Miss Alwood, Mr Coffrey. Would you like to come back in?’

  I gave a small, unassuming smile and convinced myself he had smiled back. I looked to James for affirmation, but he was steely eyed.

  I watched Mr Chair’s elbow patches all the way back into the musty room where Anna sat at one of three chairs set in front of the panel. We’d got lucky when Anna was assigned to us. Not everyone liked their social worker but, thankfully, we did. I waited for her to look at us, but only the back of her short blonde ponytail faced our way. My stomach churned. Beyond Anna, the panel of four men and six women looked as though they were sitting at the top table of a wedding reception, with a very small congregation of three with which to share their joy.

  I crossed my fingers at my side. Please, let them be about to share joy.

  ‘Hey, take a seat,’ Anna whispered, gesturing at the chairs we’d sweated out our interrogation on just half an hour ago. I was sure I saw one of the panel members, the adoptee, smile too, but it was so much warmer in here the temperature change was making me feel fuzzy at the edges.

  The Chair settled himself into his seat again and fumbled at his papers the way officials with o
fficial business like to do. ‘Mr Coffrey, Miss Alwood.’ A new thudding was taking up residence in my chest. ‘We know this can be a rather fraught experience, so we don’t wish to subject you to any further unnecessary tension.’ James reached over and took my hand assertively in his. We’ll be okay. Whatever happens, we’ll work through it.

  ‘Therefore, we would like to offer you both our congratulations. It is this panel’s recommendation that you be approved as joint adoptive parents to a child under the age of four years.’

  Thud, thud, thud …

  The pulsing inside my chest was the only thing telling me I hadn’t keeled over and died on the spot, but even that was beginning to wane. The trembling inside me was being swallowed up by something else, something shocky and numb – a sensation sweeping through my insides chased by a warmer, welcome feeling …

  Joy.

  Could this really be happening? Finally, were we nearly there? I glanced vacantly through each of the warm expressions of the panel members. Had I correctly understood what had just been said?

  I looked at Anna. Her face was rosy with controlled delight, which made something loosen in me, some invisible hawser rope that had kept me steady all these past months, suddenly letting me go enough that I might keel over yet. James nuzzled a kiss against my cheek, his thumb chasing the first wet track as it coursed down my face. He said something to Anna as a broken message began organising itself in my mind.

  We’re going to have a child. Somewhere out there, our little boy or girl is waiting for us to bring them home.

  Skirting along the periphery of my thoughts, I was aware that Anna was saying something in reply to James. She patted my back reassuringly, just a small gesture of comfort but enough to trigger the domino effect. I hadn’t meant to dissolve so whole-heartedly in the middle of that room, to be so completely disabled by my own happiness and rendered such a useless blubbering mess, but after twenty-one months of being cool under fire I couldn’t keep it inside another second.