Anneliese
ANNELIESE COULD BE the poster child for predictable cycles. She knew when she was ovulating. She knew when her period was due.
On the first day of her missed period, she woke early and headed for the toilet, too excited to stay in bed. She just knew she was pregnant, but Willem would want confirmation. After opening the pregnancy test kit, she peed in the cup and set the timer on her phone. Sitting on the toilet, she watched the seconds counting down. Three minutes crawled by like an hour. Then she peered at the test window. Blinked. She couldn’t believe her eyes.
Negative.
She swore and shot the kit into the wastebasket.
Did her egg get stuck in a tube somewhere?
Was her womb a hostile environment?
Had she taken the test too early?
What if she couldn’t get pregnant?
She had never had a desire to hold her girlfriends’ babies or envied their ordinary lives with a terraced house, a garden the size of a cemetery plot, and a yappy little mutt. Baby talk didn’t roll off her tongue. She couldn’t picture herself changing a smelly diaper or offering her tit to an infant. Maybe she hadn’t inherited a maternal instinct—Katja had obviously lacked one. Before meeting Willem, she had never given serious thought to having children.
But she had to be realistic. He was thirty-six and had never married or even lived with a girlfriend. There must be a reason for that. Her stomach lurched when she recalled his cool dismissal of the stuck-up psychologist at Antonio’s. How long before he grew tired of her too? A child would cement their bond and guarantee her a place in the Veldkamp family—her family, after all.
He would think twice before dumping the mother of his child.
Her new—and very weird—craving for juicy, slightly sour white grapes returned. She had stocked up yesterday at the Albert Cuyp Market. Since she wasn’t pregnant, she must have a shitty stomach virus. As if on cue, she felt an odd hollow feeling in her tummy, quickly blooming into nausea. Kneeling on the tiles, she dry-heaved into the toilet.