“This will put your job search on hold,” he reminded me.
“I can freelance. I’ve done it before.” But I shook my head. “You’re trying to talk me out of it. It was a bad idea.—”
“No!” he said quickly. “Not at all. Believe me, the prospect of staying all alone in my house in London, just filling up time being sick... it sounds incredibly lonely and awful. I’m just afraid that it’s too much for me to ask of you, to bring you along when things are going to be so... unpleasant.”
I knelt on the couch so we could be eye-to-eye, and I took his face in my hands. He looked at me warily, clearly unsure of what I would say or what he should do.
“I love you. It’s not too much to ask me to go through this with you. It’s too much to ask me to let you do it on your own.” I kissed him, bending my head to brush our lips together. One big hand came up my back, resting between my shoulder blades, pressing me closer to him. I smiled against his mouth. “You need me as much as I need you.”
“Possibly more.” He leaned back just slightly to look at me. “And that scares me, Sophie. It seems selfish to ask you to give up your entire life to be with me. And I’m almost fifty years old. I don’t want to steal your youth. I don’t want you to wake up one day and realize your life could have been better without me.”
“Never going to happen.” I kissed him again. His hand moved from my back, into my hair, holding my face to his. With his other arm around my waist, he jerked me into his lap.
We spent the rest of the night on the couch together in front of the fire, me a mess of hormones and sadness, him supportive and wonderful despite the fact he was the one who might die.
Later, after Neil had fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling evenly under my cheek, I considered five years, and what that would mean. Neil would be forty-nine in just a few months. In five years, he would be fifty-four. I would be twenty-nine or thirty.
Was I going to be... well, not widowed, because we weren’t married. But was I going to be a grieving girlfriend at that point?
In his sleep, Neil put his arms around me, one hand splaying possessively across my lower abdomen.
Oh, shit.
I thought of his first reaction to the ultrasound, and the way he’d looked immediately to Emma’s photos on the wall. It was obvious that a part of him wanted to keep this baby, but I didn’t. Plus, he was sick. We had no idea what the future was going to be like for us.
Better a grieving girlfriend than a grieving single mom, I reminded myself. If he was having reservations, he would be too supportive to voice them. I would just pretend not to notice those reservations, and do the right thing for both of us.
CHAPTER THREE
When Neil had said money could move mountains, he wasn’t kidding. At eight AM on Saturday morning, we were at Dr. Nora Jacobson’s office in an Upper West Side medical building. The doctor didn’t usually see patients on a Saturday, so there was one mountain moved, already.
Neil and I sat across from Dr. Jacobson at her sleek glass-and-steel desk. She was a very kind woman I estimated to be in her late forties or good-looking early fifties, and her blonde bob was immaculately highlighted. She smiled easily as she showed me a smartly printed table comparing the two different methods of termination from which I could choose.
“I really feel that at your gestational age, a surgical abortion would be best,” she explained, tapping the paper with the end of her pen. “We’ll put you under light sedation, then numb your cervix with an injection of local anesthetic—”
“Nope. Nope, I don’t want to hear about it, I just want it done.” I shook my head. The idea of a needle going anywhere near my vagina just... urgh. “I want you to give me the minimum information required by law. Possibly less.”
“Sophie has been suffering from morning sickness,” Neil explained hesitantly. “And she’s squeamish about medical procedures. Perhaps you could keep the descriptions vague?”
“Of course.” Dr. Jacobson nodded in sympathy. “We’ll dilate your cervix and use a vacuum catheter to remove the product of conception. That’s really all there is to it.”
Neil shifted in his chair.
“And we can do this today? Here?” I chewed my lip as she nodded. “Is it going to hurt?”
She gave me a mild, non-specific answer. “We do our best to keep you comfortable during the procedure. Most women experience some bleeding and cramping afterward. I’ve heard it likened to heavy period, but some patients only have light spotting. If you can take a day off from work—”