Ruth drew herself up and swung around to face the door, and with our eye contact broken, I was free to curl over in my seat, hunching my body against another spasm of abdominal pain.
“She’s not yours!” she shouted again. “Go away!” She swayed for a moment, and I rocked sideways in my seat, thinking to catch her, but she seemed to brace herself and didn’t look at me again. Instead, she set off into the kitchen, the baby moaning against her chest. Moments later I heard the distinctive scrape of patio chair against paving slab, and the baby’s cry faded into the garden. The doorbell chimed, not once but repeatedly, and then the knocker crashed down again.
“Let me in now,” Alex called, “or I’m calling the police.”
I looked at the bolt across the top of the door. I had a wild idea of flinging the door open, clambering into Alex’s car, and insisting he take me home. But the pain in my abdomen made me curl over again. Even if I’d found the strength to stand and reach the bolt, I didn’t have the strength to distract Alex from his goal.
Gravel crunched outside, and I strained my ears—were they moving away from the door? I remembered how easily Alex had jumped over the wall by the stable block, and I was unsurprised after a further minute to hear his voice in the back garden at the kitchen doors.
“Ruth? Hello? Where are you?”
He was inside then, brushing past me, tugging the bolt back and opening the front door. The midwife barged in with an infant car seat in one hand and a large brown medical bag in the other.
I hauled myself to my feet, and Alex caught me by my upper arms, squeezing them, almost shaking them.
“It’s a girl?” His mouth stretched into a pleading grin. “I’ve got a daughter?”
I wasn’t prepared for the tears on his cheeks. I nodded.
The midwife had moved around us into the kitchen and now loomed in the doorway. “There’s a baby blanket dropped on the lawn,” she said.
Alex gripped me harder. “Where’s Ruth?”
My knees trembled and threatened to give way beneath me.
“Laura?” he said, swaying his face in my field of vision, trying to make me look at him properly. “Where is she? Tell me.”
“Did she run out?” the midwife asked.
Alex shook me, less gently this time. “Has she gone to the cliffs?” His voice was hoarse.
My whole body trembled. I wanted him to look into my eyesand see everything that had happened to me and realize that I was the one who needed him. Ruth and her baby would be fine. I was the one who needed him the most.
“Did she take the baby to the cliffs, Laura?” His voice was much louder suddenly, his grip on my arms fierce. “Tell me! Did she take the baby with her to the cliffs?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
He released me, and as my hand shot out to steady myself on the hall table, I knocked the telephone onto the tiled floor with a smash. Alex sprang away from me, hurrying into the kitchen, and I stumbled to the doorway to watch him jog out to the garden. The midwife began to follow him, but then she made a startled noise and swung back.
“Stop!” she called out to him. “Wait—come back!”
Alex hesitated at the edge of the patio. “What is it?”
A smile crept over the midwife’s face, and she beckoned him back inside. “Listen,” she said. “I can hear her.”
I held on to the doorframe with both hands, my body rigid, and all three of us listened to the thin wail that floated from the direction of the day nursery. The midwife shot me a dark look, but Alex’s eyes were bright with wonder.
“She’s in there?” All his former urgency evaporated, and he pushed the door open and padded through the utility area to the day nursery quite tentatively, as if wary of startling the source of the noise. I caught my shoulder on the corner of the wall as I followed, and the jolt of pain stiffened my limbs. As the three of us hesitated at our end of the day nursery, a spindly white-clothed arm rose and waved feebly from the bassinet, and my heart battered in a frantic rhythm.
“No,” I said. But Alex and the midwife were already halfway there, closing the distance between their hungry expressions and my tiny daughter.
My throat constricted as they loomed over her. I had to explain. They had it wrong. It was all such a mess. I watched as Alex placed his fingertip in the baby’s palm, and her fingers closed over it immediately. He turned shining eyes to me.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, and his mouth curved into a smile that I hadn’t seen since our carefree racing on the beach months earlier. “Perfect,” he said. “What’s her name?”
My throat closed. The future hovered like a boat about to raise its sail, waiting for my next words, suspended between elements, tugged by guilt and love and desperation. Should I tell him the truth: that his daughter was outside with Ruth, probably on the cliff top, waiting for her next feed, oblivious to the adult battles waging around her? Should I tell him that this beautiful, fragile child holding on to his finger was unexpected, unwanted, nameless; not his?
I opened my mouth.
