“I get that this is hard for you. It’s hard for me too. We need to decide, if having kids isn’t in the cards for us, if we can still make it as a family of two. At the moment, I’m not sure we can come back from this sense of malcontent hanging over us.” Her voice cracked, and Simone couldn’t help the split-second of sick satisfaction she felt at having elicited it. She needed to know that Evette was as devastated as she was.
“You haven’t had to come back from anything! You haven’t been through the injections and the hormones and the indignity and the knowing that something alive is inside you only for it to not . . . be anymore.” Suddenly she was rinsed out. Her anger was like a back draft exploding outward and then sucking back in, leaving her spent and regretful as the heavy awareness that she had doomed yet another conversation draped itself across her.
“You be the one to try next,” she said now, idly watching a squirrel dash up the Christmas tree outside the butcher’s shop. “You’re younger than me, maybe it’ll work better with you.”
“My darling, think about what you’re saying. We’ve discussed this countless times. I don’t feel the same physical need as you do to carry a child. The biology of our family simply isn’t important to me in the way it is for you.”
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.” She was annoyed by her own petulance.
Evette as always remained calm and irritatingly reasonable. “Let’s say for argument’s sake that I agreed to try, and I fell pregnant. How would you feel? What would that do to us?”
“We’d be a family, I’d love it!” Simone felt hurt by her wife’s assumptions.
“That you would love the baby is not in doubt. You will be a wonderful mother. But what about your feelings toward me? Would you be able to forgive me, knowing that I had been ambivalent about carrying and yet I was the one who managed to get pregnant?”
“It would still be our baby, I wouldn’t care.” She squeezed her eyes tight to stop the tears from escaping. The ugly truth was that she had thought about it, and she did wonder how she would feel if Evette did what she couldn’t. Would her sense of inadequacy eat her alive? She repulsed herself. Her insides burned with shame at her own traitorous thoughts.
“Don’t lie, Simone, not to me.” Evette’s voice was gentle, full of love. Of course, her wife knew her innermost secrets; she knew her better than anyone.
“I don’t want to feel this way.”
“I know.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I am not going to have IVF. Not because of you. Because I don’t want that experience for my body. I’ve made my decision. So, if it’s what you want, we’ll save up for one more try for you. And in the meantime, I think we should start the adoption process.”
Adoption had always figured in their family planning; ideally, they would have one child biologically and one by adoption.
“Okay.” Her voice sounded small to her own ears. “Let’s look at adoption. I need to think about the IVF, whether I want to try again, I mean.”
“Take some time. Did you hear back from your work yet?”
“Yes, I spoke to someone in HR earlier. She was annoyingly understanding. They’ve offered me a year’s sabbatical.”
“That’s great. So use this time. Throw yourself into your dad’s challenges. Let yourself grieve.”
Her gut reaction was that she didn’t have the time to take a break or to grieve. Every moment she wasn’t doing something to make herself a mother was a moment wasted. But she knew Evette was right.
“It feels fraudulent to grieve for something I’ve never had,” she said, and it was the truth; she felt constantly heartbroken while equally feeling she had no right to it.
“You’ve lost promises of babies. You are not a fraud, and you are allowed to grieve for what you’ve lost and what could have been.”
“Trust me to marry a counselor.”
Evette laughed softly. “You should take my advice, I’m fully qualified. I’ve got certificates, I’ll have you know. I don’t just counsel any old wife for free. Talk to your sisters. You need them more than you think.” Simone doubted that very much. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a client.”
“I love you.” Simone’s desperation was thick black tar. Why hadn’t there been better words invented? That overly used phrase was surely an insult to what she felt for her wife. “I love you so much.”
“I know. I love you too,” Evette replied, the fatigue evident in her voice.
Their arduous journey toward a family had changed their relationship. It overshadowed everything. They’d had to stop socializing because Simone couldn’t bear the inevitable questions about how “things” were going. They didn’t talk like they used to because her mind was consumed with thoughts she couldn’t express. And their once-active sex life had become almost nonexistent.
They held on to the call for a minute more in silence, just breathing together. And then the green phone icon changed to red, and Evette was gone.
Simone could feel her throat closing, clogged up with all the emotions that she didn’t seem able to express in a safe way. Instead, her hurt seeped out as snide, hateful remarks that half the time she didn’t mean, while all the time the lump in her throat seemed to grow bigger. She could feel it, a physical as well as a metaphorical thing. When it had first started happening six months ago, she was convinced she had a tumor, but her doctor had diagnosed stress reflux and prescribed antacids. He told her she needed to learn to decompress. Her stress was literally choking her.
She could see into the sitting room of the cottage opposite her: a boy and girl were decorating a Christmas tree in the bay window. Outside, fairy lights wound around a potted bay tree shivered in a wintry breeze. She sipped her wine and sighed.
9
Maggie bit her lip to stop from crying out and collapsed onto Joe’s naked chest. She rested there, spent and loose limbed, both of them breathing heavily. Joe kissed her neck and held her tightly, absorbing her shock waves as they lay tangled together in her bed.
“Can’t they start without you?” he asked.
It was Tuesday evening, and the very last thing she wanted to do was go out again after a long day at work, but go out she must.
She basked in his arms, relishing the warmth of his skin, his smell, the taste of him. If only she could simply enjoy this for the fantastic sex it was.
“No. I wasn’t around for most of the day, I need to make an effort.”
Yesterday had been full-on. Between her dad’s surprises at the solicitors’ and the enforced proximity with her sisters hunting for Monopoly houses, she had devoted the whole day to North family matters. Today she had begun to adjust her daily routine to make room for Augustus’s demands alongside her ongoing commitments. Unlike Star and Simone, she was not on a hiatus from life. She still had a business to run and a child who needed dropping off and picking up from school and feeding and helping with homework.
Patrick was meeting friends in Tenterden, and Verity was tucked up in bed, fast asleep, exhausted after practicing her lines for the school Christmas play—A Christmas Carol, in which she’d been cast as a pomegranate.