Chapter 7
Attending the infertility support group had been a revelation for Esther.
It wasn’t because she’d been told about any potential treatments or options to parenthood that she wasn’t already aware of – after all, she was a medical professional and a dab hand at googling.
Instead, the revelation had come from knowing, with a certainty that she hadn’t really had before, that she wasn’t alone in how she felt about the possibility of never having a child.
Of course she’d been on plenty of online forums and taken part in discussions with other women, but there was nothing like sitting around a table, sharing stories with people who really understood.
It had been an easy decision to tell Joe about having gone to the group without him, and he seemed completely unfazed by her decision, understanding her reasoning for wanting to check it out first. She knew that if she wanted him to go with her in future all she had to do was ask, so that’s exactly what she did.
‘You should come with me next time,’ she’d said, already counting down the days to the next meeting in her head.
‘I don’t think Danni is going to be able to disguise her pregnancy for much longer – when she got up to go to the loo, Danni caught the side of the table with her bump and it was only because Jess was so quick at grabbing the cup that Danni didn’t get a nasty burn from the coffee she upended.
It’s not fair for me to make her feel like she needs to keep hiding it, I’ve done far too much of that already. ’
‘You didn’t make her hide anything.’ Joe had pulled her into his arms, the stiffness in her spine relaxing as it always did.
She was barely five foot one, and he was at least a foot taller, but somehow it felt as though they were the perfect fit.
Although not even Joe could ease the guilt she felt entirely.
‘I did, though, didn’t I? She felt she couldn’t tell me about the baby and that makes me feel so awful.
I should have been the first person after Charlie that she told, because she should have been certain I’d be thrilled.
Instead, she had to treat it like it was something to feel guilty about.
I’ve robbed Danni of joy, and I hate myself for it. ’
‘You didn’t rob Danni of anything, and she’d hate to know you feel like that.’ Joe tipped Esther’s chin up then, forcing her to look at him. ‘I know nothing I say will stop you from wishing that things had been different, but there is a solution.’
‘What?’
‘We celebrate Danni and Charlie’s news in the biggest and best ways possible from now on.’
Esther smiled, loving Joe just that little bit more than she already did. ‘I think that would make me feel a bit less guilty, but how are we going to do it?’
‘For a start, we’ll throw them a party, or a baby shower or whatever Danni wants to celebrate the news, and we do whatever we can to help out with Caleb.
My sister and Charlie already know how much we love our gorgeous nephew, and we just need to show them that we’re going to be the same with the new baby, whatever happens for us. ’
She reached up then, pulling his head towards hers and pressing her lips against his. ‘Do you know how much I love you?’
‘Yes, about half as much as I love you and that makes me the luckiest man in the world.’ Joe stroked her cheek with his thumb.
‘And of course I’ll come to the group with you next time.
I’d do anything for you, for us, because as much as I want a family too, as long as there’s an “us”, that’s more than enough for me. ’
He’d said the same thing to her a hundred times before and every time she wanted to be able to say ‘me too’, but she just couldn’t do it, because she’d never lied to Joe and she didn’t want to start now.
Instead, she said the only other thing she could think of to convey how she felt.
‘You are the best man I know and the only one I’d want to go through life with, whatever it holds. ’
She took his hand then and led him up to their bedroom, for once not thinking about whether it was a fertile time of the month or what chance they had of conceiving, just the desire she had to be with the man she loved. In that moment, being part of an ‘us’ with Joe really was all she needed.
It had been a week since the infertility support group meeting and Danni had finally announced her pregnancy to the rest of the department, which had lifted a bit more of the guilt from Esther’s shoulders.
Things were moving forward, as they always did, and Esther decided to focus on the future too.
She and Joe would get their family, one way or another.
Somehow, she felt far more certain of that now, they just had to keep moving forward too, and she shouldn’t allow it to consume her the way she had.
Work was always a good way of avoiding that and life in the A&E department ensured there was never a dull moment.
By 4 p.m. she’d already worked alongside her colleagues to deal with a broken arm, a pitchfork embedded in the foot of a sixty-three-year-old man, a suspected case of pneumonia, a third degree burn from a pan of water slipping out of a patient’s hand, a case of appendicitis and two minor head wounds.
She was on her way back from a coffee run in her break, feeling dead on her feet and looking forward to the end of her shift, when a man charged into the department, carrying a woman in his arms.
‘Help me, please. It’s my wife, she’s been refusing to drink anything for the last couple of days. I’ve been trying to persuade her, but she thinks the water is poisoned. I was going to try to take her to see her midwife, but she fainted and I just panicked and brought her straight here.’
‘You’ve done the right thing.’ Grabbing a wheelchair, Esther helped the man manoeuvre his wife into it and tried not to gasp when she spotted an undeniable truth.
The woman was almost due to give birth, by the looks of her.
She was also conscious but incoherent, mumbling something unintelligible, apart from the word ‘no’, which she repeated several times.
‘What’s your wife’s name?’
‘Elena, and I’m Tomá?.’
‘Okay Tomá?, I’m Esther, one of the nurses. We’ll get you through to a cubicle and have Elena assessed. How many weeks pregnant is she?’
‘Thirty-six and she’s been doing so well until now.
’ Tomá? wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, not quite managing to sweep away evidence of the tears that had formed there, and Esther wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to try and suppress his emotions, but there was no time for that now.
The next bit of information he revealed made the situation even more pressing.
‘She came off her bipolar medication. She was switched to one she was told was safe during pregnancy, but then she came in at thirty-four weeks because she was worried she couldn’t feel the baby moving.
Everything was okay, it was just the position the baby was in, they said, but Elena wouldn’t take her medication after that and these last few days…
’ Tomá? seemed to trail off, the toll that recent events had taken on both of them written all over his face.
‘That’s really useful to know,’ Esther tried to reassure him.
‘Once Elena is stable, we’ll ask for teams from the maternity and mental health departments to come down, so we can make a plan, but the most important thing for now is to make sure Elena is rehydrated and that everything is okay with the baby. ’
As Esther took hold of the handles of the wheelchair, her heart hammered in her chest at the thought of running the scanner over Elena’s bump and revealing something terrible.
Please let the baby be okay. The silent prayer she offered up pushed aside her usual prayer for a baby of her own.
There was only one child that mattered right now and all she could do was hope it wasn’t already too late.
It had been a busy night with a tricky delivery to end the shift, and Hope was already an hour late finishing when she took the call from the emergency department to ask if one of the team could go down to talk about a patient.
A consultant obstetrician had been requested too, as well as someone from the mental health team, for what sounded like a complex case.
Hope had recognised Esther’s voice immediately, but she’d decided not to say so.
The other woman would probably have thought it really odd that she had known it was her so easily after just one infertility support group meeting, but then she didn’t know that Hope had sat in a toilet cubicle, listening to Esther share her deepest pain, and that she’d have recognised her voice from that encounter alone because the words were so imprinted on her brain.
Instead, she made an offer she wasn’t sure was wise. ‘I’ll come straight down.’
She reasoned with herself that she’d done it because her colleagues were already very busy and all she’d been planning to do was go home and binge watch the latest Harlen Coben series on Netflix.
She did want to ease her colleagues’ burden, that much was true, but she wanted to spend more time with Esther too, and she wasn’t sure she could have explained why, even to herself.
She couldn’t imagine anything changing her decision not to tell Joe that he was her biological father, but she had wanted to go down to A&E all the same, even before Esther had mentioned asking someone from the mental health team to attend as well.
There was a very slim chance that that someone might be Joe, and Hope couldn’t miss the opportunity to meet him, even if he was never going to know why that encounter would be so momentous to her.