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Yes, she might have had a promotion, but a café manager’s wage in London wasn’t going to change her world and she had no idea how long she’d be able to work into pregnancy.
And after?
She wasn’t exactly tripping over relatives who wanted to mind the baby while she went back to work.
It was daunting.
‘Could you think about telling the baby’s father?’ Flo had gently broached the subject, because at that point Maggie had said nothing about Ilyas.
‘I can’t tell him.’
‘He has responsibilities,’ Flo had said.
‘Absolutely he does,’ Maggie had agreed. ‘He’s going to be king.’
Flo had been shocked.
In fact, she had opened the wine!
‘What do you think he’d do if he knew?’ Flo had asked over and over again, but the answer was always the same.
‘I have no idea,’ Maggie had said, over and over. And then she’d made up her mind. ‘I don’t want him to know.’
Maggie had been too scared of the ramifications if he did.
Now, nearly six months into her pregnancy, Maggie woke before her alarm and looked at the little glass bottle that she had since moved from the shelf to her bedside table.
Every morning when she awoke, he was the person that came first to mind and he continued to dance through her thoughts as she went about her day.
She had managed.
Better than that, with more than a little help from her wonderful friends, Maggie had a future in place.
She had started a course in bookkeeping with the hope of being able to work from home for a while once the baby arrived. Kerry and Paul’s son was about to move from his cot to a bed and so that was taken care of. As well as that, she was working every hour possible to save up what she could.
Maggie had found a flat that was a little more baby friendly and in two weeks’ time she would be moving.
Again.
Yes, she had plans in place, and the future looked far more secure than it had in those first weeks after she had found out.
Now that she could finally breathe a little easier, her absolute certainty that Ilyas must never know faded.
Her first scan had looked like a blob of grey on grey and Maggie had simply headed straight into work afterwards, still unable to reconcile herself to the fact that she was going to have a baby.
But her second scan, yesterday, had changed all of that.
There was a nose and eyes and fingers and toes and a complete little person on the screen.
‘I don’t want to know the sex,’ Maggie had said, but her tiny baby had taken that decision out of her hands and had waved for the camera.
Maggie was having a boy.
He was a he and already she loved him.
It had been a long night, one of immense soul-searching, and one during which Maggie had done her level best to push her own feelings aside and focus on Ilyas and their son.
She had no family.
