Not My Daughter

‘Thanks for the warning.’ I am stung, and I am also reeling. More hurtful than her words about Jack is the fact that she said them at all. Milly and I never talk like this. We’re not arguing precisely, but somehow it feels worse.

After the call, I end up ringing Jack, which feels a bit reckless. I don’t even know if we’re at that stage yet; we’ve been in the mode of me waiting for his call, not the other way around.

‘I think Milly is a bit weirded out,’ I blurt as soon as he answers.

‘By what?’

‘By… us.’ He is silent, and my hand turns slippery on the phone. Should I not have called? Should I not have said that? But then I suddenly feel exasperated by it all; I am thirty-four, not sixteen, and if Jack is playing games, I want to know. ‘Is there an us, Jack?’ I ask levelly, and he lets out a light laugh.

‘Anna…’

‘I’m not asking for a commitment or a ring or anything like that, just clarification. Are we seeing each other?’

The silence stretches on for a few awful seconds, and then Jack finally replies. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Of course we are.’

And I choose to believe him, even though it comes at a cost: Milly doesn’t call or text for a week, and I don’t reach out, either. It’s the longest we’ve ever gone without being in contact, and it feels awful.

But I make myself not mind, and after a little while it becomes surprisingly easy. I am busy with work, and with Jack, and when he sends me a bouquet of pale pink tulips at work, any concern about Milly goes right out of my head. For once Milly’s friendship is not the centrifugal force in my life. For once I have someone else to think and care about, and that feels like a very good thing.

And then, two weeks later, she does call, her voice full of tears. ‘Anna,’ she whimpers. ‘I need you.’

Eleven

Milly

I knew it was too good to be true. Deep down, I always knew that. And when, at just fifteen weeks pregnant, it all goes wrong, I’m both utterly devastated and completely unsurprised.

It’s the day of my mum’s surgery, and so I’m already on edge. Over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to visit her as often as I can, and every time I see her I’m seized with a terror that she’s already leaving me. Each time, she seems paler, thinner, less. I tell myself things will get better with the surgery, the chemotherapy, but I’m still afraid. A lot rides on today.

Another worry on my mind, albeit low down on the list, is Anna and Jack. After the dinner where we celebrated the end of my first trimester, I turned to Matt as soon as they were out the door.

‘What’s going on there?’

Matt raised his eyebrows. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Matt. Surely you’re not so clueless that you didn’t realise…?’ I stared at him in disbe

lief. ‘They came here together, in the same car. He put his arm around her…’

‘So?’

‘So? Do you think they’re dating?’

Matt frowned, and then shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s not really any of our business.’

But this was Anna, my best friend, as well as Matt’s brother. Plus, there was the not-so-little fact that they were the genetic donors of our child. Of course it was our business.

I rang Anna the next day and asked her about it straight out, but her calm reply that, yes, they were dating threw me, perhaps more than it should have. On an instinctive level, I didn’t like it, but I didn’t feel I could say that without sounding mean or paranoid. And so I acted as if it wasn’t weird, when we both knew it was.

‘I’m worried for Anna’s sake,’ I told Matt when he reminded me once again that it was not my business. ‘She’s had so few relationships… she’s innocent, Matt.’

‘Milly, she’s thirty-four.’

‘I know, and has she ever had a serious boyfriend?’

Matt shrugged. ‘She’s dated a few guys, hasn’t she? And she’s always seemed happy in her own company, to me. Some people are like that. Jack is like that, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Matt, you can’t deny that Jack is…’ I hesitated, because even after ten years of marriage, I wasn’t always entirely sure about Matt’s relationship to his brother. They were friendly without being all that close, which is how his whole family works. Distant without acknowledging it or feeling there’s anything amiss, so different from my own tightly knit family. ‘He’s a bit of a player when it comes to women,’ I finished.