From Provence, With Love (A Year in France #2)

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Five minutes.

It wasn’t a very long time at all.

But, when the rest of your life could depend on what happened at the end of that five minutes, it felt like a very long time indeed.

Laura Gilchrist put the cap back on the plastic stick and put it on the cold porcelain edge of the bathroom basin. She set the timer on her phone to three minutes. Then she glanced in the mirror over the basin.

It was automatic to smooth a single stray hair back into place so that her sleek, red-gold, shoulder-length bob was as perfect as it usually was.

How good would it be to be able to smooth away the visible fear she could see in her eyes?

Laura hadn’t seen herself look like this since she learned how to hide fear when she was no more than about nine or ten years old. When she’d learned how to control her own emotions so that she could protect the people who were the most important in her life.

Her family. Her mother. Her younger sisters.

She turned her back to the mirror. It was too disconcerting to see that everything she had worked so hard for in life – her control, success, independence – could be slipping away from her.

She stood very still. And waited. She jumped at the sound of the timer and turned it off instantly. As she reached to pick up the stick, she realised she had known all along what she was going to see in the tiny plastic window.

Two lines.

She was pregnant.

How, in God’s name, had this happened?

A sound that was probably closer to a sob than the intended huff of laughter escaped Laura’s suddenly dry lips.

She knew exactly how this had happened.

She also knew that this was entirely her own fault.

Had she, on some deeply hidden level, wanted this to happen…?