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Libby delivered her ultimatum.
‘I don’t do well with maybes so if you leave it till then don’t bother calling—it will be too late,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’
His car didn’t sit idling until she was safely inside.
And neither did Libby turn and wave.
He was in or out and so was she.
She just hoped that some time this century her heart would catch up with that fact.
* * *
To her shame, that night Libby took her phone to her bed and plugged it into its charger.
Just in case.
But she woke to no calls or texts and no flowers, either.
He’s on a business trip, she reminded herself, though it was a poor excuse because he could probably have a koala bear delivered to her if he so chose.
And on Tuesday, again nothing.
Even her period refused to make itself known. That evening, Libby came in the door and tried to pretend to Rachel that she wasn’t scanning the hall, kitchen and lounge for flowers and she asked, oh, so casually, ‘Any phone calls?’
‘Only your parents call you on the landline. I warned you...’
‘He might still be flying...’
‘Oh, so his personal pilot would have told him to turn his phone off? You shouldn’t have pushed so hard,’ Rachel said, because Libby had told her some, if not all, about the weekend she and Daniil had shared.
‘Why not?’ Libby said. ‘I’d be being ignored now whatever I’d said. At least this way I know he’s not interested.’
On Wednesday she played good toes, naughty toes with a group of very wriggly four-year-olds and listened to the sound of babies crying in her tiny waiting room.
She couldn’t possibly be pregnant, Libby thought as she pointed her toes down.
‘Good toes,’ she said, deciding that she was lovesick, that was all.
‘Very, very naughty toes,’ Libby said, wondering why the hell she’d been foolish enough to do it without protection.
Eight little girls blinked at the deviation from the script and the sound of their ballet teacher’s slightly strange laughter.
‘Good toes,’ Libby said, because, hell, he hadn’t come inside her.
But they were soon back to naughty toes and dark thoughts that maybe he was so potent that his sperm would be the same, brutally tapping away at her poor egg just as he had at her heart.
As she waited for her older students to arrive Libby went into her locker and looked at the pregnancy test kit she had bought but hadn’t had the courage to use.
She was scared to find out.
There was the temporary distraction of a young adult class later that evening. For now it consisted of three—Sonia, a girl called Oonagh and a young man called Henry, who had so much talent it both thrilled and scared her to have a hand in moulding it. But her fears caught up with her as she made her way home.
A broken heart she could deal with.
Possibly, an unexpected pregnancy, too.
It was Daniil Zverev who had her stomach somersaulting.
He was the most remote, distant man she had ever met.
The antithesis of her.
A man who had told her from the very start he didn’t get close to anyone, and now with every day that passed it was more and more likely he was going to be the father of her child.
‘You look like death,’ Rachel said, as she came in the door. ‘Your father called...’
‘I know,’ Libby said. ‘I just spoke to him.’
Dr Stephenson was retiring and had asked Lindsey if he could organise the party, and he also wondered if Libby might consider travelling to Oxford to discuss it.
‘He was most impressed,’ Lindsey had said.
‘I’m not meeting with him, Dad.’
‘You’re a point of contact.’
‘No,’ Libby had said. ‘I’m not.’
The last thing she wanted now was a trip to Oxford and a trip down memory lane when it looked as if the next few months would be taken up getting over Daniil.
Getting bigger by him.
Libby looked over at Rachel, wondering if she should tell her friend just what was on her mind.
Rachel would be brilliant; Libby knew that. She’d dash off to the chemist and in half an hour or so...
She’d know.
Maybe she already did.
‘You didn’t ask if there had been any phone calls or deliveries,’ Rachel observed.
‘You’d have told me if there had been,’ Libby sighed. ‘Please, don’t say you warned me.’
‘I shan’t.’
‘Maybe I should have done what you said and—’
