‘Oh, thank God. I thought your silence meant you disapproved. I said we’re going to have a baby.’
Anna felt sick for a second. A baby? Nia? And this guy Anna had never met who might or might not look like Peter Andre?
‘Wow,’ she managed to say. ‘That’s amazing, Nia. How do you feel?’
Nia let out a sound that might have been a groan. ‘So sick. I’ve been dying to tell you. I’m only a few weeks pregnant, so no one at work knows yet and I have to keep running off to the toilet to retch.’
Anna felt like the worst kind of friend. This was the biggest news Nia could have come to her with, and Nia had been waiting to tell her, and Anna didn’t know how to respond properly. She wondered whether it was because she wasn’t there, because she couldn’t grab hold of Nia and hug her and tell her she loved her and she couldn’t wait to meet her baby, but she wasn’t sure. A part of her, a bigger part than she wanted to admit, felt a bit cheated. She’d said no to having a baby with Edward, but maybe it would have been different if she’d known that Nia would get pregnant so soon afterwards? Maybe they could have done this together. But then she shook herself, reminded herself that her marriage to Edward hadn’t been right, and you couldn’t just have a baby because your friend was having one. She’d made the right decision. Still, she felt as if she was losing Nia. Which was ridiculous, given that she’d been the one to move away.
‘I wish I was there,’ Anna said when the silence had gone on for too long.
‘I wish you were here too,’ Nia said. ‘You’ve always been the best person when it comes to holding my hair back.’
Anna laughed. ‘Listen, I have eggs boiling, can we talk about it properly next time?’ It was a lie, and not a good one. Would Nia be able to tell?
‘Of course. And what were you calling for, anyway? Anything in particular?’
Anna paused. Was it still okay to bring it up? To say that she’d been feeling a bit sad about Edward? She decided to go for it. She’d never held back when it came to Nia.
‘It’s my anniversary, mine and Edward’s. Or it might have been. You know what I mean.’
‘Oh. Anna, I’m sorry, I totally forgot.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly. I wouldn’t expect you to remember. I mean, what is an anniversary when you’re not even together any more? It’s nothing, is it? It just feels a bit…’
‘A bit what?’ Nia asked.
‘Funny. I don’t know.’
‘Do you miss him?’
Nia had asked this a lot in the early days. In the days of crying and packing up boxes of things and sorting out paperwork to do with the house and all of that. But she hadn’t asked it for a while.
‘I don’t miss him, as such,’ she said, then, ‘it’s just, sometimes I wonder about the life I didn’t have. The one I could have had with him, if I’d agreed to having a family.’
Nia was silent, but Anna knew it wasn’t judgement. She was just giving Anna the space to say what she needed to say.
‘Listen, Nia, I have to go,’ she said.
‘I don’t want you to be on your own over there and feeling sad,’ Nia said.
‘I’m not, honestly. I have a date tonight.’
‘Oh good. Listen, let’s talk properly tomorrow. I’m free all day.’
‘Yes,’ Anna said.
‘Have a good morning.’
‘Have a good afternoon.’
Anna ended the call feeling a little churned up. She ate a bowl of cereal, flicked through the TV channels. And then she called Lee. She’d met Lee on her second day in the New York office in a marketing meeting and had known immediately that she wanted him for her friend. She’d felt pretty lost up until thatpoint, finally understanding that thing she’d heard about Britain and the US being divided by a common language. She got funny looks whenever she attempted something funny or sarcastic. Lee had lived in London for three years as a student, and he claimed that was why he ‘got’ her, but Anna secretly thought he was just one of those people she would have clicked with no matter what.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘Do you have time for lunch or a drink or something later?’
‘Sure.’