For Better for Worse

What he had always wanted? How much it meant to him? What about her? Ben wondered painfully.

‘I shan’t let you down.’

‘Let me down! Zoe, what—?’

‘I thought you said you had to go to work,’ Zoe interrupted him quickly. She knew her face was flushing, betraying her nervous agitation.

Why on earth had she said that? She could see from his expression that her comment had disturbed him. If she wasn’t careful he might start to query and question, to find out…

What good would it do if he did? she asked herself wearily once he had gone. What would it change? Not his feelings… his beliefs.

The day of his return from Manchester he had tried to tell her that she was being unfair in saying that privately he was pleased that Sharon had lost her baby.

But she had stopped listening to him.

Things had changed between them. There was an awareness, a tension, a distance which she would once have scornfully derided as an impossibility.

There was nothing they could not discuss… share… resolve, she would once have said. There was no subject they could not discuss… nothing which was taboo.

How wrong she had been.

Even sexually they were withdrawing from one another. The intimacy and closeness they had always shared taunted her now as she recognised how impossible it was for her to share her body with him when she could not share her thoughts and her fears.

And she was afraid, she acknowledged miserably… afraid and angry, sometimes hating the life growing within her for all the havoc it was wreaking, sometimes hating herself… sometimes even hating Ben… and yet at the same time she was still driven to protect him.

Because he needed that protection from her, or because she needed to give it to him? Who was she really protecting… Ben, or herself? What did she really fear? That he might not perhaps need her after all and that if he didn’t he might not want her?

She remembered the way he had looked this morning; the unfamiliar maturity and hardness she had seen, the feeling she had had that somehow she was no longer necessary to him…

No. She was wrong. He did still need her. She had heard the tension and anxiety in his voice when he’d asked her if she was having second thoughts about the hotel.

The hotel… Even that had been spoiled now, her excitement and anticipation doused by the shock of discovering her pregnancy.

This baby… this thing which she had never planned, never wanted, was like a parasite, draining her, not just physically stealing her energy and clouding her brain, but stealing from her as well her happiness and her future… And Ben’s love?

She shivered.

‘I don’t want you and I don’t love you,’ she told the child within her bitterly. ‘What right have you to do this to me… to take over my body… my life? Can’t you see? There is no place for you here… not with me and certainly not with Ben. We don’t want you…’

She said the words out loud and could almost feel the force of her own emotions trembling on the air.

She could feel the angry tears pressing against her hot eyeballs and she squeezed her eyes tightly closed, willing them to disappear. What was the point of crying? What good would it do? She needed time to think things through properly, the counsellor had told her gently, but she had been wrong. There wasn’t anything for her to think through.

Resolutely she picked up the phone.

Yes, she had telephoned her, the counsellor confirmed. Luckily the appointment with the doctor fell not only in her own off-duty time, but while Ben was at work.

‘And once I’ve seen the doctor… how long… when…?’ Zoe discovered that her mouth had gone almost too dry for her to speak.

‘The doctor will discuss the arrangements for any termination with you,’ the counsellor told her.

Was she imagining it, or had the woman’s voice become slightly cooler? Despite the fact that she had claimed to be impartial, in Zoe’s mind there had been no doubt which decision she had wanted her to make.

How did she think of her? As a murderer, destroying the life of her own child? But she didn’t know what it was like. She didn’t have Zoe’s responsibilities.

Zoe could picture what her life was like: a nice, safe, comfortable marriage, two neat, clean, tidy children who were now doubtless married with children of their own, their marriage secure carbon-copies of their parents’ marriage, in which parenthood would be a sacred, cherished commitment.

Angrily Zoe dashed the tears from her eyes and glanced down at her body.