Chapter 6
ORLA
Orla noticed Keli leaning backwards so that she could peer over the garden fence, and was about to ask what she was doing, when Keli volunteered that information.
‘Okay, so I know your ovaries have been the subject of conversation all afternoon, but I just need to tell you that mine have just done a backflip. Who, in the name of the holy Chris Hemsworth, is that?’
Orla leaned forward, then immediately blushed when Aidan from next door spotted them staring and waved from the depths of his garden room office.
‘That’s Aidan. But I’m not letting you near him for your own good. He has enough women going in and out of that house to start a conga line.’
She waved back, mortified that he’d seen them.
Damn, she hadn’t even realised that he was in there.
It was Keli’s birthday and Orla had invited Keli, Yvie and Emmy over for the afternoon to celebrate with Prosecco and an afternoon tea on three-layer stands that she’d picked up in Home Bargains at the weekend.
Not that she was indulging in the Prosecco, just in case…
The weeks between ovulation and the start of her periods were nothing but angst and hope.
At least the merriment today was taking her mind off it.
Although, she did feel bad that they were probably pissing off the neighbour with the noise they’d been making.
It was rare that they all managed to wangle the same day off, so there had been much enthusiastic chat, endless laughter, two choruses of ‘Happy Birthday’ and there had been a definite screech when Keli had announced that her brother, Noah, and his wife, Tress, had bought her tickets for a Coldplay concert in Miami as a birthday gift.
‘Yep, that’s single life, ladies. I can spend ridiculous amounts of dosh on a gig and I’ve got no one telling me it’s a bad idea. Other than my mother, of course. Gilda needed a lie-down in a dark room before she could even discuss it.’
Orla’s first thought had been that her mum would have had exactly the same reaction.
Her second had been a pang of envy that Keli had her mother nearby.
Orla had worked with her long enough to know that Keli spoke to her lovely mum, Gilda, every day, there was usually a night out to the cinema or a restaurant every week and huge Sunday lunches with their whole extended family and friends were compulsory.
Both Keli’s parents were from Ghana and the food they served up was incredible.
Orla had joined them on a few Sunday afternoons when Kyle was working overtime and they’d been some of her favourite days, although every time, it did cross her mind that her own mum would love it too.
‘How’s your mum doing?’ Yvie asked, reading her thoughts.
‘She’s grand. I spoke to her this morning. She came back from Africa and now she’s in Romania and they’re heading towards…’ There was a pause as they waited for her to fill in the blank.
‘Towards?’ Emmy prompted her.
‘I’ve no idea, because that’s when she got cut off. Happens all the time. She really needs to get a better phone.’
Yvie reached over and lifted a large slice of Victoria sponge from the top layer of the cake stand. ‘Or, you know, a hobby that she can do at home? Much as I think she’s fricking fabulous, you must worry.’
‘I do, but she loves what she does now. To be honest, she’s always been like that.
Even when she was nursing, she was always setting up support groups and doing fundraising drives for any cause that she felt passionate about.
That’s how she found me, actually. Twenty-eight years ago, she was raising money for an adoption charity, and I was about to come into their care. ’
Emmy was curious now. ‘Did you ever think about tracing your birth parents?’
Orla shook her head. ‘No. It was a closed adoption so that means there’s never been any contact.
I don’t hold any ill feeling towards them, but I just think everything worked out the way it was supposed to.
I’ve honestly never felt a need to track them down because as far as I was concerned, my mum – Nula, that is – was all I needed. ’
‘I once watched one of those DNA tracing shows on TV and a mum and daughter in America were looking for each other,’ Emmy went on. ‘And it turned out that they worked together. I mean, what are the chances of that? Out of the whole population of the country. It was incredible.’
Yvie paused on the cake. ‘No way!’
Orla wasn’t quite as shocked. ‘I watched that one too. Apparently, that happens more than you’d think.
People trace relatives and it turns out they live in the same street.
Or go to the same gym. Or the same church.
But unless one of you lot is my secret sister, which would be great, then I’m fine not knowing.
My mum is who I was meant to be with. She said she knew right there and then that I was meant for her.
Her parents had not long passed away, and she was an only child, so she was always convinced that they somehow sent me for her. She said it was fate.’
‘Oh no, we’ve set her off on the fates again,’ Keli teased.
‘And I remain unapologetic about that,’ Orla protested, laughing.
‘If I hadn’t met you lot in the café that day, we wouldn’t be here.
If I hadn’t been called in to do an extra shift and met Kyle on the one weekend he was in Cork, then I wouldn’t have come to Glasgow.
And if my mum hadn’t been working for that charity twenty-eight years ago…
I’m telling you, my life has been full of wild coincidences that aren’t actually coincidences at all. It’s the fates.’
The story of her mum finding her had shaped that belief, and it had been one of her favourite stories as a child.
Even though Orla knew every detail, she’d still ask her mum to tell it again and again.
Sometimes she wondered if that was why she couldn’t wait to have her own child.
She wanted that connection. That feeling of absolutely belonging to someone.
She’d had it with her mum, and from the moment that she’d met Kyle too, but she craved more.
If Kyle was up for it, she planned to raise the population significantly.
Although, it would help if she could get started with the first one.
The thought made her hand automatically go to her stomach.
Her period was due today and she had a test ready and waiting.
She’d hoped she would have time to do it this morning, but Kyle was working on a job in Dundee and had stayed overnight there last night.
His construction team often did that to save the two-hour drive back and forward.
‘Well, I’m just glad that the fates sent you to us too,’ Yvie said, Victoria sponge suspended in mid-air, just waiting for her to take the next bite. ‘Because you’re the best addition to our team since Emmy wandered onto the ward and we forced her to stay.’
Emmy nodded, her expression deadpan. ‘She’s right. It was like a hostage situation. Two years now and I still haven’t managed to escape.’
Their laughter probably made Aidan in the garden room next door wince. Orla just hoped he wasn’t on some vital Zoom call that might be interrupted by the sound of four women having an afternoon soirée on the first sunny day of the year.
‘Right, well, talking of my mother,’ Keli began, ‘I’d better get going. We’re having the full squad for my birthday dinner tonight and she’ll send out a search party if I’m not there on time.’
It was the cue for the rest of them to reluctantly leave too, and after shifting all the plates, bottles and glasses inside, there was a flurry of hugs and goodbyes.
The high from an afternoon of chat and laughter was still there a couple of hours later, when Orla was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, and heard the sound of Kyle’s van coming into the driveway.
Her smile was automatic because this was the first night he’d been home before six o’clock in weeks.
He was obviously making an effort because he remembered that they had the test to do tonight.
‘Hey, babe,’ he said, coming in behind her and wrapping his arms around her as he kissed her on the top of the head.
She swivelled around on her stool so that she could kiss him properly, her gaze taking in his work cargos and the black polo shirt with his family’s company logo.
Kyle and his brother had worked for the family business since they left school, but they were now fully fledged partners and that came with the kind of responsibility and weight that had him grafting sixty-hour weeks.
Orla was incredibly proud of the work he was doing to secure a sound financial footing for their future family.
Although a bit more time with him wouldn’t go amiss. Especially at this time of the month.
‘Let me go shower, and I’ll be right back down,’ he told her, his hands pushing his brown wavy hair back off his way too handsome face.
The whole concept of love at first sight was one that used to make her roll her eyes, until the night Kyle Ferguson had walked into A&E in a Cork hospital four years ago, half carrying, half dragging a mate who’d overindulged on his stag weekend in the city and somehow managed to miss a kerb and fracture his ankle.
As she’d mentioned to the girls earlier, she wasn’t even supposed to be there that night, but they’d been short staffed and she’d gone in to help, and they’d been the last people she’d seen before she’d gone off duty.
It was the first time she’d ever ended a shift sharing a coffee with a patient’s pal, while a remorseful and rapidly sobering soon-to-be groom was in the fracture clinic, getting plastered while trying to call his future bride to explain why he’d be hobbling up the aisle. Fate. As always.