by Izzy Bayliss
“Clara!” I said, plastering a smile on my face. “Hi, Jacob, hi, Joshua.”
“Hi, Auntie Lily,” they chorused.
“You look nice!” Jacob said.
“Do I? Thanks, Jacob, I can always rely on you for a compliment,” I said, bending down to him. “Come here and give me a hug.” There weren’t many things that I liked about Clara, but she had made two fabulous little people.
He pulled back and studied me again. He had a look of confusion on his face, like his little brain was busy trying to work something out.
“Are you okay, Jacob?” I said.
“But you look good –”
“You don’t need to look so surprised,” I said, laughing.
“But Mummy said you’re messy –”
“Your Mummy said what?”
“She said you’re messy,” he repeated. “She said Lily is such a mess.”
“Oh, did she now!” I said, putting my hands on my hips and swinging around to face Clara.
“Oh, he must have heard me wrong,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I think what I said was ‘Lily said yes,’ isn’t that right, sweetheart?”
He shook his head vigorously. “No, you said to Daddy that ‘Lily is such a mess.’”
“That is quite enough now, Jacob,” she hissed. “It’s time for your piano lessons anyway . . . Look, the reason I’m here is that I just wanted to drop these off –” She let a stack of books fall onto the counter with a thud. “They’re guides to nutrition during pregnancy. You’re laying down the foundations for your child’s future health now, so it’s important to get it right.”
I plastered a smile on my face. “Well, considering I spend a good part of the day throwing up and then when I finally can eat, it’s usually cake, I think my child is screwed.”
She looked at me in horror. “Don’t be flippant, Lily.” She pulled the boys’ heads into her tummy and covered their ears. “So, did you tell Sam yet?”
“I haven’t got around to it . . .”
“Oh, you’re just soooo busy here, aren’t you?” She looked around the café, which for the first time all day only had two customers. “You’re far too busy to take care of a little detail like letting your child’s father know that he is actually going to be a father!” She shook her head despairingly at me. “Oh, Lily,” she sighed. “Will you ever get it together?”
I decided to fight fire with fire and turn the questions back on her. “So, how’s your detective work going? Have you uncovered anything more?”
“Boys, run into the kitchen there and give Granddad a hand,” Clara said before turning back to me when they had left. “Well, yes actually, I have!” she pronounced proudly.
“Really?” I asked wide-eyed.
“Tom was in London for work last week and I found a receipt for cocktails. He told me he went to bed straight after dinner. And he came home with a leather jacket – if that’s not a sign, then I don’t know what is!”
Clara had a point; I couldn’t imagine Tom in a leather jacket. He was too much of a fuddy-duddy; he would look ridiculous.
“Why don’t you just ask him what’s going on, Clara?” I knew she was hurting, but she was causing all this unnecessary drama in her life.
I saw a wobble in her composure. “I can’t –” she said quickly.
“Of course, you can, you’ve done enough digging – it’s time to confront him now.”
“But what if he admits to it?” There was a flicker of fear behind her eyes.
“Clara, it doesn’t have to be the end, if you confront him and he admits to it, you can still work it out if you both want to –” I placed my hand over hers.
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But what if he doesn’t want to? I don’t want the boys to come from a broken home.”
It was then that I realised her bravado and scheming was all a front. Her investigation into Tom’s affairs was her way of taking control of the situation. We were more alike than she thought; we were both afraid to face up to our problems out of fear of being hurt.
CHAPTER 37
“I think I’m going to head to bed,” I said to Frankie that evening as she poured herself a large glass of wine.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Lily?” I knew she was worried about me.
I nodded. “I’m exhausted.”
“You’re growing toenails this week apparently.”
“Were you reading the book again?”
She nodded. “I can’t help it; I’m fascinated by the whole thing. It’s amazing; you’re amazing.” She paused before continuing. “Look, all this stress isn’t good for you or the baby. You need to call Sam!”
“But he probably won’t even answer anyway!”
“There are other ways – you could email him or text him, you know?”
“I don’t want to do it like that –”
“Well, you can’t put it off forever, you’ll be out of the first trimester soon. Suppose Sam comes home and sees that you are pregnant? Or what if Marita sees you somewhere and tells him? He might never forgive you!”
“I will tell him, I just don’t know when . . .” I hugged my knees against my chest.
“What are you afraid of?”
“That he will reject me – reject our baby,” I said in a small voice. “I don’t think I could cope with that on top of everything else right now.”
“He might not react like you think he will,” she said.
“But what if he does?” I said in a small voice.
I went to bed that night and fell into a coma-like sleep, but it felt like just seconds later my alarm was blaring, calling me to get up and go to work. As I pulled myself out of bed, I was tired right down into my bones; my body felt like it was wading through a vat of treacle. I had to stop and get sick twice as I tried to get myself ready. My morning sickness was showing no signs of abating. I still felt horrific, but usually by eleven I started to feel more like myself again. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the day especially when things were so hectic in Baked with Love. It was brilliant to be busy at last, but it was non-stop.
I kept thinking about my conversation with Frankie the evening before. I knew she was right, but it was so hard to work up the courage to tell him. If he rejected me, that was it, I was going to be doing this solo, and I was scared. It was almost easier to be in the mental limbo where I now was and believe there was a chance, even if it was just a small chance that Sam would want to give our relationship another go for the sake of our baby. I had tried rehearsing in my head how I was going to break it to him. Sam, I know this will come as a shock but I’m pregnant or would I be better off just getting directly to the point, Sam, we’re going to have a baby?
What way was he going to react? I really hoped he wouldn’t get angry. I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with that on top of my own feelings.
While Dad cleared down tables, I stood in the kitchen after the lunchtime rush had died down. I had my phone in my hand. Maybe Frankie was right, Sam was a good person. So he might not want to be with me, but wouldn’t he want to be involved in his child’s life? I needed to let him know, and then it was up to him to decide what he wanted to do.
I picked up my phone and took a deep breath. I dialled his number and listened to the foreign dial tone as I waited for the phone to be picked up. My throat felt dry and scratchy, and my chest started to tighten. My hands grew clammy around the phone. The phone continued to ring, and my heart was hammering. Eventually I heard the sound of his deep voice. “Hi, this is Sam, please leave a message.”
“Sam, it’s me – I em . . . I –”
Nothing was coming. The words were stuck in my throat. This wasn’t the way I wanted it to be, to have him learn that he was going to be a dad by listening to a stuttering and stammering voicemail. I quickly ended the call.
CHAPTER 38
That night I dreamt I was lying on the grass with my mum. We were sitting on a picnic rug, making daisy chains together in the garden. The sun was high in
the sky, and the air was filled with sound of birds chirping and insects humming as they flitted from flower to flower. Mum made a chain for me, and then she handed me a tiny one and said, “That’s for the baby.”
I woke with a start; my heart was racing. I peeled my eyes open and looked around me. My mood sank when I realised that I wasn’t in the garden and instead I was in Frankie’s spare room. It had seemed so real. I expected to still be lying there under the warm sunlight with her beside me. Because I had no memories of her, I loved dreaming about her, but then reliving the fact that she was no longer with me when I woke up again always stung. I lay there on the pillow and tried to recall the dream before it vanished entirely from my memory. She knew about the baby, it was as if she was giving me her blessing to say that I could do it – that I would be okay.
I could hear the sound of bells and suddenly I realised they were coming from my phone, which was ringing on the table beside the bed. It vibrated off the locker and onto the floor. I reached out of the bed and felt around on the carpet for it before picking it up and answering it without bothering to check who it was.
“Hello?” I said sleepily. I looked at the red display on my alarm and saw it was just after eight a.m.
“Lily, it’s me, Clara –”
My first thought was that Clara ringing me first thing on a Saturday morning was never going to be good news.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I said quickly. I wondered if she had finally confronted Tom.
“Are you not up yet?”
“Well, clearly I am now.”
“Have you seen the papers?”
“No, why?”
“You are all over them kissing Marc.”
“What?” I said in total disbelief. “I couldn’t be –”
“Well, you are, and you should consider wearing high-rise jeans or else spanx in the future.”
I was totally lost. “I don’t understand . . . what you are talking about?”
“The Irish World paper – you’re in their glossy magazine gallivanting with Marc.”
“I am not!” I said indignantly.
“I bloody well know what my own sister looks like! I don’t know why you would be so stupid as to go back to Marc. I wouldn’t usually buy such a rag of a paper, but Tom arrived home with it – probably so he’d have something to talk about with his hussy,” she hissed into the phone. “I suggest you go and get yourself a copy.”
I hung up and quickly climbed out of bed. I got into the shower and let the water wake me up. I threw on jeans and a sweatshirt and pushed my feet into my trainers. I peeped in on Frankie but she was comatose, so I crept softly out of the apartment and hurried to the nearest shop.
Once there, I ran inside and headed straight for the magazine stand. Neon fonts assailed me and then suddenly a bright pink headline caught my eye.
‘MARC EMBRACES MYSTERY WOMAN. IS THIS THE LATEST WOMAN HE IS CHEATING ON NADIA WITH?’
It was a different magazine than the one Clara was talking about. I quickly lifted it down from the stand and was horrified to see that somebody had taken a picture of Marc leaning in to kiss me the day he had called into Baked with Love; however, from the angle that it was taken from, it made it look as though we were actually kissing. My top had risen up and you could see my love handles peeking out under the sides. I wanted to die on the spot. With trembling hands, I flicked through the magazine until I got to the story.
Serial womaniser Marc is finding comfort in the arms of a new woman while Nadia is left holding the baby. A clearly strained Nadia, whose on-off relationship has been a source of turmoil for the leading actress, was pictured recently fleeing from the Dublin home they jointly shared together.
There was a photo of a stressed-looking Nadia cradling baby Marley to shield him from the photographer while she hurried down the steps of their home. It was clearly taken a while ago because Marley was much younger in it, but they had stitched the article together to make it look like something it wasn’t. I was shaking. I checked the date and saw that it had been published a few days ago. I felt mortified that the copies had been sitting there for the world to see and I didn’t even know a thing about it. I checked in a few other gossip magazines and sure enough they had all featured the story. Who would have taken that photo and how did it end up on the front cover of a magazine? Then I thought about Sam and felt panic rise within me. What would he think if he saw it? I knew there was a slim chance he would see it in New York, but what if his family or friends saw it and told him about it? How was I ever going to get him to believe me? And I still had to face telling him that I was pregnant too. This painted a very bad picture, but it was all spin. I realised how it must look to a reader, let alone Nadia, Sam, and everyone else in my life. And what was the most worrying thing of all was that I couldn’t stop people from seeing it. I could buy all the copies off this newsstand, but I couldn’t scour every shop in Ireland.
I bought the magazine and hurried back to the apartment. Frankie was sitting at the table in her dressing gown, her auburn hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and her eyes were tired. Her skin looked pale and blotchy. I had noticed two empty bottles of wine sitting beside the recycling bin on my way out the door. She must have polished off both of them after I went to bed.
I placed the magazine in front of her. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Look at it,” I said.
She read the cover and her hands flew up towards her mouth. “Oh my God, Lily! When did this happen?”
“It didn’t! Oh God, if you even think it’s true, then I really have no chance of convincing people that it’s all a set-up. I was just giving him a hug!”
“I’m not going to lie, it looks really bad . . .”
“What am I going to do?” I wailed. “What if Sam sees it? He already has hang-ups about Marc and me! He’ll never believe that it wasn’t like that –” I had been dreading telling him that I was pregnant. This would make everything so much worse. He wouldn’t want to have anything more to do with me ever again, and I couldn’t say I blamed him.
Dad rang me next. “Clara told me what happened. They’re an awful shower, those, what do you call them? Pepper-atsy? Have they no regard for the lives of ordinary people? When you think of what they put poor Princess Diana through . . .”
I was hardly in the same league as Princess Diana, but I knew the point he was trying to make. “It looks so bad, Dad, but it wasn’t like that –”
“Sure, I was there with you. I saw with my own two eyes that it wasn’t like that!”
“You’re the only one who knows the truth.” No one was going to believe that it was entirely innocent. It looked so much worse than it was. My heart sank.
I lifted the magazine again and stared at the picture for the millionth time trying to figure out where the photo was taken.
“It looks like it was taken on someone’s phone,” Frankie said, studying it over my shoulder.
“But who would have taken it? Surely none of the customers who had been in Baked with Love that day would have been remotely interested in snapping a picture of me hugging Marc? They would have seen it was an innocent hug, so how did they manage to catch that exact moment?”
“Well, unless Marc did it –”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe Marc set the whole thing up?”
“But why would he do that?” Frankie’s theory didn’t make any sense to me.
“Oh, I don’t know – to get a bit of publicity?”
“You think?”
“He’s desperate for money plus he’s so hungry for fame that he doesn’t care how he gets it. Good or bad publicity – it’s all the same to him.”
Suddenly, it was starting to make sense. Marc was hardly famous enough that he would have the paparazzi following him around; however, if he sold them a staged photo and handed them a salacious story on a plate in exchange for a few quid, then surely it was a no brainer for them to run it and help shift a few copies
.
“So you think he tipped off the magazines?” I said, Frankie’s theory finally clicking into the place.
“Well, yeah, or else he got someone to take the photo for him and sold it onto them for a bit of cash.”
“But what about Nadia?”
“They’ve broken up, haven’t they?”
“Yeah, but –”
“Well, wouldn’t this be the ultimate revenge?”
“Would he really be that stupid?” I asked in disbelief.
She looked at me with narrowed eyebrows, and we both laughed.
“It’s the only explanation, Lily,” she continued.
Suddenly, I knew she was right. My stomach flipped and started to knot. I felt a wave of nausea grow inside me. It was one thing if somebody took a photo unbeknownst to either of us, but if Marc had been the one to stage the photo, using me to get a bit of publicity and risk damaging my relationship with Sam, then it was sickening. Did our history mean nothing to him that he could use me so carelessly as a pawn in his games? Hadn’t he caused enough trouble for me?
CHAPTER 39
I was grateful to be flat out all the next day; it meant I had less time to spend worrying over how I was going to tell Sam. I would be busy clearing tables when I would see Dad falling behind with the queue, so I would have to run and give him a hand. I was glad to see the huge piles of cakes I had stocked that morning were rapidly dwindling, although it would mean I would have less left over to give to Father Joe, I thought guiltily. I had just wiped down a table and was bringing the plates into the kitchen when I found my path blocked by a girl taking a selfie. She was just like all the others; long hair extensions cascaded down her back, her make-up emphasised pouty lips, and she wore scarily high heels.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to move around her.
She glared at me for daring to interrupt her, then walked over and sat down, tossing her voluminous mane of hair over her shoulder.
I hurried past her and into the kitchen, my arms laden with the weight of crockery. I couldn’t understand why we had got so busy all of a sudden. Why were my customers all the same type of girl? And what was the obsession with taking selfies? They never ordered the sweet stuff; it was always just coffee. Although our coffee was good, I didn’t think it was that much of a draw. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t complaining, I just wanted to understand what was bringing them in the door so I could use it to get more customers.