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Silence groaned between them, heavy and pulsing, far from comfortable, so Millie toyed with the napkin at her side. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she spoke quickly, “Well, Zafar? I imagine you’ve got places you need to be. Why don’t you get down to it? Ask me whatever it is you want to know.”
He sipped his coffee, his eyes holding hers over the rim of the cup, so her skin began to lift with goosebumps. “Okay.” He placed his drink on the table with the smallest of noises. “How did you find out?”
She frowned. “Why does that matter?”
“I’m curious.”
“But it has nothing to do with the health of the baby.”
“No, but it’s part of their history and I’d like to know. Do you object to telling me?”
She felt childish and embarrassed at her opposition. “Of course not.” She forced a smile to her lips. “It’s nothing particularly exciting. I felt ill almost immediately. I thought I might have got food poisoning on the flight back, then presumed I’d picked up a stomach flu.” She left out the part about grief, how having Zafar leave her in the middle of the night had awoken memories of his initial rejection, so that she’d spent a week in her apartment, refusing to leave, to talk to anyone, disbelief at her own stupidity chewing through her. “It was just a lingering sense of nausea, when I first woke up. It would get better through the day, then come back around sunset. I went to see a doctor, they agreed I was likely at the tail end of some kind of travel bug.”
“Fool.”
His condemnation earned a genuine half-smile from Millie. “To be fair, I didn’t go in and say that I’d slept with someone while I was travelling. They had no reason to suspect I was pregnant.”
“As though an attractive woman in her twenties might not be at risk of this?”
She focussed on the pastry. “It doesn’t matter. He said I should start feeling better, but I didn’t. I got worse. I began to be properly ill each morning, and found I couldn’t eat much more than toast. I got terrible headaches and then this ache in my lower back. But it was more than that. I just felt…different. As the days went by, I could feel my body changing, without being able to describe exactly how or why. It’s like my subconscious was aware of the little passenger I have on board even when I had no idea of their existence.”
His eyes were locked to hers, his lips pressed into a tight line that gave little away.
“But it was still just by chance that I found out. I was in Tesco, picking up some aspirin – I had bad headaches, too – and had to bypass the reproductive health products. I literally stumbled over a pregnancy test someone had dropped in the middle of the aisle.” She shook her head, smiling. “I picked it up to put back on the shelf but it was like my mind blew up. I realised straight away – but quickly denied it to myself. I mean, we took precautions. How would it be possible?”
There was something in his expression that showed agreement.
“Nonetheless, I bought it. What’s the harm in doing a simple test, right? I could rule out pregnancy and book another doctor’s appointment, to work out what the heck was going on.”
“Because the doctor was so diagnostically brilliant, I can see why you’d give him a second chance.”
It was so like Zafar – a born perfectionist – to judge the doctor’s earlier misdiagnosis that she laughed. “It would have been way too early for a pregnancy test then, Zafar. There was literally no way for the doctor to have known what was going on.”
“Yet he didn’t even consider it —,”
“Nor did I.” She toyed with the napkin. “And nor, I should point out, did you. It’s not like you wondered if there’d been consequences to that night.”
“I took steps to be sure there wasn’t.”
“And look how well that worked out,” she volleyed back to him.
She had the sense that he’d been about to say something, but whatever it was, he swallowed it. An unusual act of subtlety for a man who believed he could do no wrong. She furrowed her brow, not much liking the sense he was concealing something from her.
“Anyway. I did the test. I actually forgot about it afterwards, made a cup of tea, called my mother. It was hours later that I remembered and went to check the results. That’s how confident I was that the test would be negative.”
“Did you want it to be negative?”
No. Even now, she fiercely rejected that idea. “I was sanguine about it.” She took a bite of the pastry, chewing slowly, going back in time to that fateful day. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw the positive result. I felt as though the floor of my apartment had developed an enormous crack and I was standing right on the edge of it. It’s something I’ve always known I wanted, but with you? Like this?” She shook her head. “Nothing made sense.”
“And it didn’t occur to you, for even a moment, that there might be another father?”
“No.”
He lifted a dark brow and she swallowed a groan. “Zafar, you’re the father. Okay?”
“How can you be so certain?”
Frustration zapped through her, so Millie felt something snap in her mind. “For God’s sake, Zafar, do I need to spell it out for you? There’s no way another man is the father. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else.”
