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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, his 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 official 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.
There was room for only one thought, one thread of coherence in my mind, and each time it lapped around my brain, so began a new wave of uncontrollable sobs, muffled only by James’s M&S jumper. The jewel-like embellishments on the toes of Anna’s shoes shone and danced like a kaleidoscope refracted through my rather impressive deluge of tears, and then James leant back in to my hair and said the words. Said them out loud so that we could hear the truth in them.
‘We’re going to be parents.’
CHAPTER 2
‘WELL, YOU KNOW what they say.’ Phil grinned, chocolate eyes peeping from under her blunt designer fringe. All around us, the city’s populace of on-trend urbanites basked in the funky basement atmosphere of Rufus’s Cocktail Lounge. It had always been our favourite place.
‘Go on, Phil, what do they say?’ I asked, indulging her.
‘If your sex-life is crap and you argue all the time, you might as well have kids.’ Phil finished her words of encouragement with a blood-red smile and a playful shrug of her shoulders.
‘I think you mean get married, Phil. If your sex-life is crap and you argue all the time, you might as well get married, isn’t it?’
Phil hooked a long glossy fingernail around a hair that had affixed itself to her newly reapplied lippy and swept it back in with the others. ‘Whatever. They’re both bad ideas.’ She winked.
‘Well, I know which one I’m interested in,’ I said, over the mellow beats of Rufus’s in-house DJ. ‘And it doesn’t involve a big white dress.’ I smoothed out the creases of my silk pewter vest while Phil let her eyes follow a group of men towards the bar. In the dimness of the club’s ambience, her dark brown bob looked closer to black, giving her an air reminiscent of a Japanese doll. Whatever had caught her attention at the bar wasn’t enough to hold it there.
‘We’ll see,’ she cooed. ‘Once junior arrives, you’ll be all loved up and Viv will be banging on about nuclear families, and you’ll buckle. I’ll put money on it. You’ll be Mrs Coffrey before the end of next year.’
Phil knew my family too well. Mum had already tried every angle she could to talk me into the virtues of marriage, despite my father having put an abrupt end to theirs after falling for mine and my brother’s babysitter. It wasn’t that I was against marriage exactly, and in fairness to my father after eighteen years it seemed to be working for him and Petra, but as far as commitment went, I just couldn’t see that there was anything more binding than raising a child together.
‘Mum just wants the whole wedding faff, Phil. She missed out when my brother married Lauren because Lauren’s mum did it all. That’s why she’s going nuts with this bloody party she’s talked us into having. Did I tell you that she’s made me order a massive cake for it?’
Phil broke into a husky giggle. ‘If she’s content with throwing you a mock-wedding reception, Ame, cake and all, take the deal and run.’
‘It’s not a mock-wedding reception.’ I shuddered. At least not outside my mum’s head it wasn’t. ‘It’s just a small gathering to celebrate our new status as …’ What were we now, exactly? ‘… parents-in-waiting.’
‘It’s your last chance at a big mash-up before you go all boring on me is what it is. I suppose we’ve had a good run, though.’ Phil sighed. ‘You’ve been pretty good fun, for someone who’s already been stuck with the same ball and chain, for-ever.’
James wasn’t the ball and chain. Ball and chains didn’t keep a mental itinerary of all the things we wouldn’t be able to do over the next few years. Like skiing holidays, and city-breaks. If anyone was shackling anyone else, Phil probably had it back to front. ‘Eight years is hardly forever, Phil.’ I smiled.
‘Sex with the same man for eight years and you’re not even thirty yet. It’s heartbreaking,’ she said absently.
I shook my head, spearing a slice of lemon with my straw. ‘You never know, Philippa. You might settle down yourself, one day.’
Phil grimaced at the horror of such a thought. ‘And wake up to the same guy for the rest of my days? No. There isn’t a man who could swing that deal. I mean, how utterly depressing. No wonder women turn to chips and chocolate once they settle down. You’d better buy yourself some loose joggers now, Hon, you’ve done well to last this long. In fact, I’d been wondering what gift I should bring you guys to your “kissing-our-lives-goodbye” party. I’ll get you his and hers jogging bottoms … with pockets, for your chocolate wrappers.’
Phil smiled while a couple of our remaining cohorts, still lucid enough to follow the conversation, joined in.
‘I can’t imagine Amy in jogging bottoms,’ chirped Hannah, Cyan Architecture & Design’s newest office junior. Hannah’s wispy blonde hair had become steadily more wispy as we’d worked our way through the cocktails list. ‘You’re always so … polished,’ she continued.
Sat beside Hannah, Sadie Espley – niece of Adrian Espley, Cyan’s founding architect – looked as though she might actually contribute something for the first time all night. Then her phone flashed again, reeling her face back down behind a curtain of honey-blonde tresses.