Tom has his head in his hand on the sofa and I am sitting barefoot on the floor with my knees to my chest, and we are spent.
‘We should eat,’ I say.
Tom looks up, sighs and nods.
‘That sounds good,’ he says with a tentative smile, because as soon as I told him what the doctors had said, his anger subsided.
This was bigger than me going behind his back. Bigger even than Rachel; than unknown underwear.
When Tom walked in, bag slung over his shoulder, I couldn’t hide it.
Tom, at first, worried about my tears and holding me, but as I told him he zoomed in on one very crucial part: that I had gone to the doctor to start discussions about our potential family without him, the potential father. Understandable.
‘But I was moving forwards,’ he said, hurt. ‘I had been to get tested myself.’
‘I know,’ I sobbed. ‘But I didn’t know that then. When I went to the doctor. Months ago when we had had a row and I was frustrated. I just needed to do something.’
I tried to talk more over my tears but it was difficult because my head was so foggy from crying.
‘I am trying to understand,’ he said. ‘But it’s hard because I wasn’t there, I didn’t hear exactly what they said and I don’t know what tests they did because you didn’t invite me. To the appointments to discuss our family, our baby. You didn’t even tell me it was happening.’
The hardest thing was that he sounded less angry and more devastated. And that he still hugged me, knowing I depended on it. And that in the midst of this – which was so vast in itself – we still had the other thing to deal with. I felt exhausted, spent.
I’d messed up and I knew it, but my own pain was too great to be magnanimous and apologise. Instead, like in Sweden, it all went into hot, brutal anger.
‘You wouldn’t have cared, Tom,’ I snarked, shrugging out of the hug I still desperately wanted to be in. ‘There would have been a trip to be on, or some work to finish, or some pictures to send to some woman. And way, way down the pile, the appointment. I didn’t want to put you out.’
And out I stomped from the living room to the kitchen, where I stayed, tucked into a ball against the dishwasher, for an hour. In the meantime Tom, too, retreated. He went out, came back, had a shower. Stayed in the bedroom for a while.
And then he walked into the kitchen like it was normal that I was there on the floor and awkwardly got down there himself, putting his arm around me as I sobbed with relief that he hadn’t gone away any more.
‘I didn’t send any pictures,’ he said quietly, no rage. ‘Let’s deal with the rest, but can we at least get rid of that worry. There is no other woman. There’s only me and you and a baby we really want.’
Later in bed, we talked into the early hours about exactly what the doctor had said and what there was to try. When the letter comes through, we’ll go for the follow-up appointment. Together.
We’ll be proactive. It will be hard to unpick the reasons why I got pregnant once and never again, but fixing it isn’t impossible. In the end, the exhaustion of sadness sends me to sleep until I wake at 4 a.m. and feel my eyes hurt, and I remember, horribly, why.