‘We’ll open that right now,’ Nia said. ‘Thank you, really.’
‘Is it what you imagined?’ Anna blurted out. It was the question she’d most wanted to ask but she hadn’t known quite how. She didn’t want it to sound like she was asking if Nia had any regrets, not with her beautiful baby daughter lying there, fast asleep with her tiny chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly with each breath.
‘Nothing like,’ Nia said, and Anna couldn’t determine what emotions lay behind those words. She’d always been able to read Nia, but Nia was changed. Anna felt as though she was looking at her friend through a shower screen, or an obscured window.
‘It’s harder,’ Nia continued. ‘It’s really fucking hard. Did I mention that? And I don’t fully understand why, because there is a lot of sitting around. I think it’s hard emotionally. And there’s all the stuff about never getting to eat a meal without being disturbed. That’s hard too. And Jamie and I are never together, because I sleep in the evenings and then I’m up with her half the night while he’s asleep. And we hadn’t been together that long, had we? It’s quite a jolt to go from that honeymoon period to talking about how to get shit out of a cot sheet.’
When Nia stopped talking, Anna wasn’t sure it was because she’d run out of things to say. She gave a slight nod, to show that Nia should go on, but she didn’t, at first. Anna let the silence settle, looked down in case her eye contact was preventing Nia from being able to speak.
‘You know that you can tell me, don’t you?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna said. ‘Just… anything. If there is anything. You don’t have to feel like I won’t understand, because I haven’t been through it. Even if I don’t, I’ll listen. I’ll do my best.’
There were tears in Nia’s eyes. ‘I haven’t said this to anyone, but sometimes I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake. I can’t unmake it, of course. I can’t go back. But I feel like this is it now, for the rest of my life, and I don’t know whether I like it.’
‘It won’t stay the same,’ Anna said. ‘Nothing does.’
‘That’s another thing, I go to playgroups and these women with older kids say stuff about how they miss the newborn stage because the baby slept all the time and stayed still, and I want to strangle them. I want to say that if it’s going to get harder than this, I can’t cope with it.’
‘I bet they’ve just forgotten what it’s really like. They say your brain does that, don’t they? It blocks out trauma. Like childbirth. If your brain didn’t forget, no one would do it again.’
Nia shuddered. ‘I’m not doing it again any time soon.’
‘Well, no,’ Anna said. ‘I mean, you’re all set now, aren’t you? One big love, one child.’
It was what Magda had predicted for Nia all those years ago.
‘So now we need to concentrate on you,’ Nia said. ‘Met any J men lately?’
Anna batted the question away, as if she didn’t always feel atwinge of hope when she was introduced to someone she liked the look of that they might fit the bill.
‘Let’s go out for dinner, you and me. Your J man can have Cara, can’t he? If you feed her just before we go and we stay local…’
Nia looked uncertain. ‘I’ve never left her. I don’t know.’
Anna shrugged. ‘It’s up to you, of course. Let’s see how you feel a bit later.’
When Cara stretched and woke, Anna lifted her carefully from the basket and held her for a minute or two, but then she started to root around and cry and Anna had to pass her over to Nia for a feed.
About twenty minutes later, she heard a key in the lock. Anna felt oddly nervous. Usually she met Nia’s boyfriends after the first couple of dates, and her approval was one of the hoops they had to jump through to be in Nia’s life. But this was a done deal, wasn’t it? Jamie and Nia were living together. They had a baby, they were a family. Where did Anna fit into this picture? What did her approval matter, now? God, she hoped she would like him. She looked over to Nia and saw that Cara had finished feeding and they’d both fallen asleep. Nia was sitting up on the sofa, her head slightly back. Anna stood and took Cara from her arms, and then went into the hallway.
Jamie was locking the door, but when he turned, Anna found herself taking a sharp breath in.
Because Jamie was James. The James she’d met on the bus almost a decade ago, who’d promised to call, but hadn’t. The James she’d held every first date up against since. Wasn’t it? It was. How had she not seen this in the photo Nia had sent her of the two of them together? Perhaps it had been a strange angle or something. Perhaps she’d been blinded by how happy Nia looked. She saw him recognise her, saw his expression change.
‘You’re Jamie now,’ she said. It was all she could think of.
‘Anna?’
How was this possible? She had quietly hoped to find this man, and then she’d left the country and her best friend had stumbled across him.
‘I didn’t realise…’ he started to say.
‘Of course,’ Anna said. Why would he? It was one date. One magical, totally perfect date.
‘Where’s Nia?’ he asked. He looked worried, as if he thought perhaps Anna had done away with her best friend and stolen her baby.
