I have a baby bump now and I feel simultaneously obsessed with it and guilt-ridden by its existence. Is a baby-on-board badge for the bus smug? Am I ruining people’s day just by walking into a room? I won’t ever not be self-conscious about pregnancy. I try hard not to shout about it.
For Tom and I, there is a fresh start with all of the new baby clichés that you would expect. Off we are headed to the outskirts of Essex, where people tell me there are good schools and we can just about afford a tiny square of garden, with Tom’s parents helping. I know, we break the mould.
We’ll be near Anais, too, and I feel a little like I’m starting to build a life again. To build myself again.
I see a counsellor every week – a different one to Angharad – and now I am out of the fog I have realised that seventy pounds an hour is a bargain to remake myself and to remake Tom and me.
Because we have struggled. Tom with the guilt, me with the thoughts of what if, what if, as my belly begins to swell and make tiny movements.
I have struggled with dreams of Harriet, with jumping whenever anyone enters a room, with the wondering of who will live next door to us in our new house, and of how I will keep them at a distance.
With Tom’s betrayal too, despite it being a far watered-down version of the one I at one point thought we were dealing with. I had thought it was possible that he could cheat on me. Tom had thought it was possible that he had cheated on me, he has told me since. Harriet told him that they slept together and he wondered, for a time, if he could genuinely have forgotten something so big. Until Harriet attacked me, when he knew this had just been part of her menace.
But if you can both believe that? Things have changed between us, immeasurably.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom says to me every night in the dark.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ I say and I kiss him as we lie, closely entwined with our Almost Baby between us.
Am I right to forgive him for the messages, for the lies? That’s an unanswerable question. But for me, Tom is my baby’s father and he is my partner. He is a human being who made a mistake during a time when we both lost ourselves. The intention was there, at the time I needed him to be fully in my corner. But he didn’t touch anyone, didn’t sleep with anyone and that’s a distinction for me, even if it isn’t for some. His was a forgivable mistake and now we move forward, flawed. But loving each other, still.
Today, we are back at our flat, emptying it out and packing our things in boxes with ridiculous names like ‘Alcohol, sieve x3 & Xmas tree lights’. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remember people talking about packing boxes only with things that belong in the same room. I remember this when we are 95 per cent finished with our packing.
‘Charity shop?’ Tom asks occasionally, but I cling to it all.
I’m nostalgic. We’re ending a life. I want to remember it and out of the bubble of what I now see clearly was my depression, I value it. I want to remember our life here as more than Harriet, too. I want to remember laughing and eating and reading one word on a urine-covered stick that changed our lives.
There are three items sitting lonely in the bin bag marked for the charity shop while the rest of our life is coming with us to sit for a couple of hours in angry East London traffic jams.
Tom goes out to get more boxes.
I am sitting cross-legged on the floor sorting through a box of clothes. I pause. Hear a sound that makes me think of all the other sounds I heard, all the other times that I listened in.
It’s impossible to be here and not to think about Harriet.
I know she isn’t there, I know she is in hospital, and that the noise I just heard came from downstairs or outside, not next door.
I feel her presence anyway.
I shuffle up to the wall, close, still sitting down. My hand rests on my protruding belly.
And I lean my head gently against the wall.