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“Okay.” She released the breath she’d been holding. She lifted her cornflour blue eyes to Deb’s face and tried to smile. “I know you must think I’m terrible. But we were already separated… and I didn’t find out I was pregnant until I… until I… came here.”
Deb clucked sympathetically, and gently rearranged the pillows behind Jane’s head. “It’s none of my business, petal.”
Jane nodded, and felt that searing stab of pain radiate through her skull.
“The doctor will arrange for something to take that away,” she promised. “And I’ll come back and check on you shortly.”
“Thank you, Deb.”
Jane waited until she was alone, and then exhaled a long, slow breath. She eased herself further back into the pillows, and the plastic crinkled beneath her.
And so, she would see Carlo again. The certainty made her blood pound through her body.
She lifted her fingers once more to the tacky blood at the side of her head. Why couldn’t she remember what had happened? She’d had something in her hands, she remembered now. A shopping bag? Yes. It had been black. She remembered staring at it as the blow came down against her head.
But who would attack her? And why? Was it possible that she had been a victim of random crime?
She lifted a hand to her neck and felt for the familiar pendant she wore. It was the one gift from Carlo that she couldn’t bear to part with. Everything else had been disposed of. But this had been special. The two carat diamond solitaire had been a gift on her birthday. And that had been the night they’d conceived their baby. The two gifts had become inextricably linked in her mind; the baby and the bauble. Having lost one, and grieved for that loss every day since, she wore the necklace to honor the child.
It hung around her slender neck now, as it always did.
She made a sound of relief as her fingers wrapped around its cold shape. If she’d lost that too, she might just have fallen apart.
Jane must have dozed off, for she was woken with a start when the doors banged inwards. Two police officers entered; a man in his forties with a jagged nose and thin lips, and a short woman with bright red hair and a freckled face.
“Jane Santini?” The woman asked, her accent heavily influenced by the East end suburbs.
“Jane Lang,” she corrected huskily. “I use my maiden name.”
“Miss Lang, I’m Constable Warren. This is Constable Stuart. We’d like to ask you a few questions about your attack. Do you feel up to talking?”
Jane compressed her lips. “I’m sorry for your wasted trip, but I don’t have much I can tell you.”
Constable Warren sent her partner a look that seemed to say, ‘I told you so’, then stepped further into the room. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Make yourselves at home,” Jane muttered, looking around the austere room apologetically.
“We won’t keep you long,” the man promised, settling himself into one of the hard plastic seats at the foot of the bed.
At one time, Jane might have made a joke, to put them at ease. But marriage and heartbreak had changed her. She compressed her lips and kept her gaze level.
“Why don’t you start with what you do remember,” Constable Warren suggested, remaining standing close to Jane’s head.
“I remember having lunch...”
“Where?” Constable Warren interrupted, her pen officiously poised above her notebook.
Jane’s face flickered with a frown. “Agolini’s,” she said after a minor pause. “I like their gnocchi.”
“And who did you meet?”
“I went by myself,” she said matter of factly.
“By plan? Or did someone fail to show up?” Constable Stuart pressed.
Jane shook her head and almost swore when shards of light danced in front of her eyes. “Damn it, I have to remember to stop moving my head.” She lifted her fingers to her temples and held them there, to remind her to stay still as much as anything. “I don’t think I was meeting anyone. It’s near my home, and I go there whenever I want to… be amongst people.” She was lonely. So lonely. Every day was a challenge to be got through, to distract her from the fact she wasn’t with Carlo. Only her neighbour, and now friend, Liz offered any kind of pleasant distraction to her days.
“I see,” Constable Stuart murmured, though Jane was pretty sure he didn’t. No one could understand the stagnating emptiness of her life. It wasn’t just Carlo’s absence, but their baby’s too. The family she’d longed for since her own childhood had been ripped away from her.
