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‘Can I tempt you with a cupcake to go with that? The banana ones are to die for.’ The woman was slight, and her fashionably ripped jeans hugged her slender frame as though they’d been sprayed on. She didn’t look like a cupcake eater to me.
Although I shook my head in refusal, my eyes travelled to the cake display cabinet at the counter. A male employee who had his back to us was wiping down surfaces and polishing a gleaming espresso machine that looked more like a modern art installation than a device for making coffee.
‘Just the latte, thanks.’
The pretty young barista didn’t need to know that I’d eaten nothing that day. She’d have little interest, I was sure, in hearing the reason why. Although, with the hospital so close by, she’d probably served scores of worried friends and family just like me in the past.
I watched her walk back to the counter, heard a low rumble as her colleague said something, and saw how she laughed in reply and leant towards him, laying her hand lightly on his arm. They looked like a couple, I thought absently, or if they weren’t, then she’d like them to be. As a journalist, my curiosity would normally have been piqued enough to watch them, observing the ebb and flow of their body language as they slipped past each other behind the counter. But my thoughts were elsewhere. They were winging back in time to earlier that day.
*
I’d missed the first wince, being too busy rummaging through dresses on the sale rack.
‘This would really suit you,’ I said, turning around with a vibrant red shift dress in my hand. I held it up for Hannah to consider. Her frown – which I now realised was a spasm of pain – I stupidly mistook as a commentary on my taste.
‘Or not,’ I said, replacing the dress with a shrug. I’d always hankered after wearing clothes in that particular shade of crimson and kept forgetting that with an ash-blonde tint currently masking my natural auburn, I could probably pull it off.
On impulse, I plucked it from the rail and added it to the others already draped over my arm.
‘Aren’t you going to try anything on?’ I asked, noticing for the first time that Hannah’s hands were empty. She was wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses, even though we were inside the shop. Perhaps if she had removed them, I would have seen the concern in her violet eyes or the way they tightened in almost perfect synchronicity with the spasms in her abdomen.
It was warm in the shop, and I naively thoughtthatwas the reason for the tiny beads of perspiration my friend wiped off her upper lip before replying.
‘There’s not much point in buying anything if it doesn’t have an elasticated waistband. In another three months or so, that’s all I’ll be able to fit into.’
I grinned excitedly. ‘I can’t wait.’
‘Varicose veins, stretch marks, and a strong possibility of haemorrhoids,’ she said, trying to sound wry. But even at that moment, as she tried to ignore the first warning pains, I could tell what she really meant was ‘Bring them on’.
Hannah and William had travelled a bumpy road to become a family, and after the tragedy of having a miscarriage the previous year, Hannah was happily embracing even the unlovely aspects of pregnancy.
‘Look, it’s probably going to be hot and stuffy in the changing room,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you find a seat somewhere while I try these on.’
Her lips formed a tight line as she nodded. I cursed myself afterwards for not realising why.
Fifteen minutes later, I was queued up at the tills with three dresses over my arm. Even in the sale, they were going to make a sizeable dent in my take-home that month, but working atGlowhad changed the way I dressed. While my new style might have looked great in the mirror, it was considerably less pretty on my bank statements.
Even though I was tall enough to see over the heads of my fellow shoppers, I couldn’t spot Hannah anywhere. The seat where I’d left her outside the changing room – the one where women usually parked long-suffering partners – was currently empty. That might have been the moment when I felt the first twinge of anxiety.
I kept scouring the shop for her, before finally asking the woman at the till if she’d seen my friend.
‘Therewasa woman sitting by the fitting room,’ chirruped her colleague at the next till. ‘But she left the shop about ten minutes ago. I heard her say something about needing some air.’
My throat tightened, and suddenly Hannah wasn’t the only one requiring that particular commodity. The assistant was folding my purchases with painstaking care, in a Rowan Atkinson,Love Actuallykind of way, but I was suddenly overcome with the urgent need to leave.
‘Just shove them in the bag,’ I said, leaning across the counter and doing it myself when she looked back at me with horror. I snatched up the receipt and hurried out of the exclusive boutique and into the hot July morning.
The shop was on a large piazza landscaped with trees and numerous seating areas, and in those first few scary moments I wasn’t a capable twenty-nine-year-old woman with a responsible job; I was a child who’d just lost her parent.
And then I saw her. She was in a far corner of the piazza, bent low over a water fountain. I hurried to join her, the heels of my sandals clipping on the cobblestones.
‘There you are,’ I declared.
Hannah was still bent over the water fountain, her arms braced on either side of the large stainless steel bowl.
‘You will never guess how much I’ve just spent,’ I said, revealing the figure that still made me wince.
Hannah lifted her head slowly, and this time there was no mistaking the pained expression that I knew had nothing to do with my extravagance.
