The text is shockingly brief: Just checking this is your number. I stare at it for a long moment, hardly able to believe that such a pithy sentiment is how she’d choose to connect with me after four years of silence, as well as the complete fallout that precipitated it. Just checking?
I put my phone down and get out of bed, my contented, languid mood replaced by something edgy and restless. I pull on my workout clothes and trainers and hit the pavement for a run, something that usually helps me gain some perspective.
&nbs
p; But the only perspective I gain is an even greater fury and resentment that she’s texted me this way, after so long. After so much. And then I question whether I have the right to feel that way, if in fact I’m being unreasonable, considering my part in it all.
The trouble is, I reflect as I pound down the pavement, I have no one to talk this through with. The only person who knows about Milly, and more importantly, Alice, is my therapist Ellen, whom I stopped seeing two years ago. I could ring her, but it feels like overkill. It’s just a text.
Exactly.
Back at my flat I shower and dress and then stare at my phone again. She hasn’t sent another text, and I haven’t replied to the first one. I have no idea what I’d write: Yes, that’s right! Still here! How on earth am I supposed to respond? She sent a text as if she’s confirming my address for their annual Christmas card.
I tell myself to ignore it, to forget about it, but of course that’s impossible. It’s just a text, but it’s sent my fragile, carefully ordered world into a tailspin. One text and I start to remember. Wonder. Regret, and worse, want.
What if she wants to get in touch for a good reason? What if she wants me to be in Alice’s life again? Instinctively I know that’s not the reason. It can’t be, and I can’t let myself hope. It hurts too much when it falls apart.
That evening, Will comes by to watch the latest drama series on the telly, and after just a few minutes he can tell I’m out of sorts.
‘Anna.’ He puts one warm, heavy hand on my knee. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s nothing, really.’ I try to shrug. ‘Just a text I received this morning from an old… friend.’ The word doesn’t sit right on my tongue.
‘An old friend? And that was a bad thing?’
‘It was… surprising. We fell out a while ago.’ I pause, deliberating how much to tell. ‘Quite spectacularly, actually.’
Will smiles, his forehead crinkling. ‘I’m having trouble imagining that.’
‘Believe me, it happened.’
I must sound rather grim for Will cocks his head and asks gently, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Do I? How would I even begin to explain? And yet I know if I don’t, I’ll have missed an opportunity and, worse, I’ll have hurt Will. He’s told me some of the secrets of his past – an abusive father, an absentee mother, the uncle with stomach cancer who stepped in, and his own rebellion in the teenaged years that was even more defiant and dangerous than mine. None of that was easy for him to share, and yet this feels like something else entirely.
‘It’s complicated,’ I say. I’ve already told him a lot about me – my parents’ divorce, my disastrous sixth form, and even my abortion. He was understanding about it all, but this…
How could I tell him that I have a biological daughter somewhere, except I really don’t? That I held her and loved her and had to let her go? Four years on, my own actions – wanting to keep Alice, talking to that lawyer – are a tangled mix of justifiable and completely crazy. I have no idea how Will would respond to any of it.
And yet if I don’t tell him… what does that say about us? Three months in and I feel good about our relationship. I feel hopeful. Will this torpedo it before it gets off the ground? Or will keeping this secret be the thing that sends it off the rails?
‘Try me,’ Will says with a smile. He squeezes my knee.
I take a deep breath, let it out. ‘I had a best friend,’ I begin slowly. ‘Ever since we started secondary. She was like a sister to me…’ Just saying that much hurts. Over the last four years, I’ve chosen to cast Milly as a villainess, the manipulative friend that took me for granted and then used me, but that narrative falls apart as soon as I think about her properly. Remember how kind she was, how we did everything together. How I was the one who offered to donate. If anyone manipulated anyone, it was me.
‘And what happened?’ Will asks gently, and I tell him, in halting, painstaking sentences, explaining about her infertility, and then my part, and Jack’s as well, in creating Alice. Will’s forehead crinkles as he listens. ‘So you and your boyfriend donated the egg and sperm? Wasn’t that a bit…’
‘We weren’t dating at the start. That happened afterward.’ Sometimes, when I remember my time with Jack, it feels like looking back on a hazy dream. Did that really happen? I knew all along, whether I wanted to admit it or not, that it was never going to last. And I don’t miss Jack the way I miss Milly. Not a bit.
‘So how did you fall out?’
‘After Alice was born…’ I stop, make myself start again. ‘Milly had trouble coping. She was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and she ended up leaving for a few weeks, while I took care of Alice.’ And so I tell him, slowly, painfully, how I fell in love with Alice – and how I tried to take her away.
When I’ve finished, Will sits back, absorbing all I’ve said. I stare at him fearfully, afraid he’ll judge me: What on earth were you thinking, Anna? Are you insane?
Then he turns to me. ‘That must have been so tough,’ he says, and it’s enough to make tears come to my eyes. He understands. He’s not judging.
‘Yes, it was,’ I manage, and then Will takes me into his arms. ‘It’s the hardest thing that’s ever happened to me.’ Which is saying something.