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Chapter One
Sarah sat on the sofa and scrolled down the page in front of her.
Four-bedroom detached house with a substantial garden.
Four-bedroom semi with two en suites.
Three-bedroom townhouse in a sought-after area with a large garden.
She clicked on the photo. Perfectly decorated, tastefully decked out, and with a kitchen that could fit the whole family without the worry that someone was going to pull a pan down on themselves. The whole house was beautiful. Modern yet classic. Ideal for families like hers if only it wasn’t a million miles out of her price range. Her living room, with its peeling walls and stained, brick fireplace, looked practically derelict compared to those she fantasised about. The carpet, which had once been cream, was now very definitely taupe. Grubby little fingerprints dirtied everything up to a height of three feet, and the whole place, no matter how much she cleaned, seemed to hold on to a weird aroma of unwashed children and over-boiled pasta. She shifted her gaze to her husband, Drew, as he mindlessly darted his fingers across the screen on his phone. Just a standard night: Drew on his computer games and Sarah dreaming of a home and life she would never be able to afford.
They had met at a party in their second year of university. Drew had an ineffable ease about him; at least that was what Sarah had thought as they chatted all night about very little: bands, places they had visited, places they both wanted to visit. Half a dozen times, she took her phone out as a subtle hint that maybe he might want to ask for her phone number. It was a hint he didn’t get. In the end, she had bitten the bullet and suggested they go for a drink later in the week. Needless to say, she was more than a little surprised when she turned up at the bar to find he’d invited three of his scruffy, long-haired flatmates along too.
‘I thought we were going on a date?’ she hissed, as they stood at the bar waiting to be served. ‘Why did you bring them?’
‘This is a date?’ Drew looked horrified, although whether it was because he was on a date or because he had invited his friends, Sarah wasn’t quite sure at the time. ‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I’ll get rid of them. I’ll make them go.’
‘You can’t do that,’ she said, secretly hoping he would anyway. He didn’t.
In the end, the five of them, Sarah, Drew, and company, all got food together. Drew spent almost the whole night apologising. Still, it hadn’t ended too badly, really. Just perhaps not quite how she had expected it to.
The truth was that sometimes it all got a bit too much. Sometimes, she needed to rant. And it was hard to do that without feeling like an utter bitch. How many of their friends had struggled to get pregnant? How many were struggling still? How many conversations had ended with friends weeping into her shoulder after yet another month of disappointment after failed IVF or acupuncture or whatever alternative route they had gone down? Sarah and Drew were amongst the lucky ones. She knew that. It’s just some days, she had trouble remembering it.
Her eyes drifted back from her fireplace to the computer screen and images of perfectly manicured gardens and beautiful bay windows – ideal for a covered seat or reading nook. She barely had room for a bookshelf now, what with all the children’s toys. Not that she had time to read anyway. The last time she had had any real time to read was on her honeymoon. She definitely looked back on those two weeks in the sun with mixed emotions.
Three days in and Sarah had already got the best tan of her life.
‘We should start trying now,’ she had said, grinning as she sipped the dregs of her fourth mojito and gazed out over the crystal-clear Maldivian waters. ‘It’ll probably take us years. It takes most people years.’
‘We should definitely start practising,’ Drew replied. ‘I think we should get in as much practice as possible.’
Caught up in the endless sun and the rainbow-coloured cocktails and being sickeningly in love, they had been oblivious to reality.
‘It took my mother years to conceive.’
‘Then the sooner we get started, the better.’
And so, on the third day of their holiday, they had started practising on a pristine hotel bed decorated with origami towel swans. They practised all week: morning, night, and even sometimes in the afternoon after a brief siesta and even more cocktails. Only when they got home and back to the real world did they discover they hadn’t been practising at all.
George arrived nine months and ten days after that once-in-a-lifetime trip. His room had been painted and decorated a month before his due date and, despite knowing the gender, Sarah and Drew had gone for neutral colours: yellows, greens, and browns. Part of it was idealistic first-time parenting, so very conscious of not wanting to create any gender bias. The other part of it was practical parenting as they could keep it the same for the next one. They definitely wanted two. That had always been the plan. Although, perhaps not quite as quickly as they had imagined.
‘How does that even happen?’ Drew said, staring at the pair of blue lines on the testing stick, just eighteen months after George’s arrival. ‘I don’t even remember having sex.’
‘Your birthday, remember?’ Sarah replied. ‘Your mum took George for a couple of hours. We said we were going to go out for dinner, but in the end, we just got takeaway.’
‘From the dodgy kebab shop.’
‘That’s it. And then your mum rang to say he’d fallen asleep, so she’d keep him for the night.’
Drew rubbed his temples in a circular motion.
‘Do you think I have some kind of super sperm? For it to happen again that easily?’
Sarah gave him a look that suggested it was probably best if he stopped talking.
‘Think of it this way,’ Drew had said, wrapping his arms around her and trying to make amends for the super-sperm comment. ‘We always wanted two. Now we’ve got them. And on the bright side, this means, by the time we’re in our mid-forties, they’ll both be packed off to university, and we’ll have the house to ourselves.’
‘As long as we don’t have any more,’ Sarah replied.
‘Don’t worry,’ Drew promised her. ‘We are not having any more.’
The realisation that she was expecting yet again had occurred during their daughter, Eva’s third birthday party. The carefully curated buffet of chicken nuggets, crisps, chocolate biscuits, and jelly sweets was perfect for sending children into sugar-crazed highs, although Sarah had also ensured a small plate of rapidly drying cucumber and carrot sticks took centre stage on the table, just so people wouldn’t judge her parenting skills too harshly. As Drew hung up the birthday banner, she grabbed a chicken nugget. Two chews in, and she spat it out into her hand.
‘Here,’ she’d picked up another and handed it to Drew. ‘Does this taste funny to you? I think they’re off. Perhaps I can take them back to the shop. We can’t give everyone food poisoning.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.’ Drew climbed off the chair and put two more in his mouth at once to prove his point. ‘They taste fine to me.’
That was when she realised. Only twice in her life had Sarah not been able to stomach chicken nuggets, and both of those times, she’d been pregnant.
Shit was the only word that rattled around her head for the rest of the party. Shit, and every other expletive of a similar meaning. She wanted to wait, though. She wasn’t going to tell Drew just yet. Not until she was certain.
Even when her period was late, she failed to accept what was going on. After all, she had a lot on her mind. She’d been trying to get into freelance translation again. It was an ambitious task, attempting to set up a website, emailing all her old contacts, brushing up on her German and Italian, all with a toddler on her heels all day. And periods could be late. Stress did that. Only when she attempted to fit into her biggest, pre-baby, pair of stretchy elasticated jeans, and discovered that they would no longer go up past her thighs, did she break down on the bedroom floor and, while unceremoniously weeping, announced to Drew that he was going to be a father again.
‘I just don’t see how we’re going to cope,’ she had sobbed into Drew’s shoulder ‘I can’t do it, I can’t. What if it happens again? What if I…? If it…’
‘It will be fine.’ Drew said, his shirt getting wetter and wetter by the second. ‘You are going to be absolutely fine.’ Though as she lifted her head, Sarah couldn’t help but feel he looked unfeasibly pale as he spoke.