by Jay Howard
Tomorrow is Another Life
“I know a very good clinic,” he said, “very discreet. I’ll make the appointment for this week.”
Daphne lay there, stunned, doubting for a moment that she’d heard him correctly.
“Tell your manager we’re going away for a long weekend.”
“A... a long weekend?”
“You can get rid of it and go back to work on Monday with no one the wiser.”
And then he just rolled over; turned his back to her and was asleep in minutes.
She sat up and pulled her pillow from behind her, held it tight to her chest and rocked herself as the wail of despair built up inside. She bit down hard on her lip, pulled her knees up to her chin and buried her head in the pillow’s downy softness. The despair ebbed as she rocked and rocked, arms tight round her legs. It wasn’t a passive dissipation; it was swamped under the primal force of a tsunami.
‘It’! My baby’s not an inconvenient thing to be disposed of. He intends to kill my child. He expects me to lie there and passively accept their scraping, murderous invasion of my womb.
Rage blossomed into a bloom of fire and passion, crimson and black behind her eyelids.
Her face was an impassive mask when she looked at her husband. Her legs slid slowly back down the bed and she clenched the sides of her pillow, twisted sideways to hold it above his head. A minute, she thought, just one short minute, to make him pay for his treachery. But her hands halted with the pillow a few inches from his face; even pushed to the limit of her control she couldn’t do it, held back by the last vestige of reason that fought its way to the surface.
No, there has to be another way, a wiser way. Make him suffer; yes, he should pay for his sins. And I must keep my child safe.
She had no doubt he was serious. So far she’d allowed him to dictate the rules governing their lives. All I ever wanted in exchange was children. He knows that. And now the self-centred bastard thinks he has the right to deny me even that.
Daphne was accustomed to hiding her innermost feelings from the world; her father had thought her beautiful, said she deserved better than the husband she chose. Choice of husband – bah! What choice? She’d never attracted male attention. Her hair was admired, or rather envied, by women; it had always been thick and lustrous, with a natural wave and the colour of burnished conkers. Her body, though her father called it ‘willowy’; the girls at school, no doubt the boys too, described her as short and skinny, amongst other derogatory comments. Attracting the attention of a young man as handsome as Ron had overwhelmed her normal good sense, but she’d accepted her less than ideal situation once she was married. No one else would be likely to want her as a wife and she yearned for children.
She lay back down, used her much-practised breathing exercises to slow her heart rate and clear her mind. The night’s seconds ticked away while she stared at the ceiling. She was a woman who considered all the options before making major decisions, and now she must act in her child’s best interests. For several years she had acted covertly to protect herself, ‘just in case’ insurance. Now he had proved she had been right not to trust him it was time to play her trump card.
And so the plan was born.