A Part of Me. Anouska Knight

      James knew how to knock all of the air right out from inside me. The radiator was too hot behind me, but I tried to hold on to it anyway. I needed something to take my focus from James’ sugar-coated words. ‘I can’t talk about this now, James. Not here, like this.’

      ‘So come home. Please, Amy. We can work through this, I know we can. We’re a team. We’ve pulled through worse because we stuck together. Come back home with me, Amy, please?’ James leant in and cradled my head in his palm. There were lines to his face that hadn’t been there when we’d met. He was no less handsome for them. I realised that this was everything Mum had ever hoped for. The man who had wronged her pleading for another chance, promising a lifetime all neatly wrapped up in a white picket fence.

      But it felt wrong.

      It was going to be hard fighting our way back to okay, but I realised it was going to be even more difficult pretending we were already there. I gently moved James’s hand. ‘I need some time, James. I need to be sure of what’s happening here. I don’t … trust the choices I might make right now.’ I’d never been like this, unsure as to what move to make, which path to take for the best solution. I didn’t like feeling so out of control, bad things happen when you’re out of control.

      James held his position. ‘That’s fair, Amy. It’s more than fair. But we don’t have time, do we? Anna could call any time now, we both know that. What do you want us to say to her while you’re thinking on everything?’

      Cool nervousness swept over my neck. James knew he had me in a corner, just as I knew it was the best I could hope for. Bringing our child home was the priority, everything else we could sort through after the adoption was finalised.

      James knew what I would say before I said it. ‘We say nothing, James. She only wants to arrange a meeting to talk through the matching process.’

      ‘And what if we’ve already been matched?’

      ‘Matching can take months, James.’

      ‘And sometimes it doesn’t. You know that, Amy. They could have had a child in mind for us for months, you know it happens. If Anna turns up with a child’s file, are you going to turn around and tell her that you need time?’

      He was right. These were the thoughts that had been banging around my head when I didn’t fill my mind with other things. It had been a month since the panel had approved us, Anna would be in touch any time now. James turned at the movement out in the hallway. We watched my mother’s broken silhouette move past the mottled glass. ‘Let me make you dinner, tomorrow night?’ he said. ‘We can talk properly, without company.’

      This was what I knew had to happen. It had to, or there was no chance of Anna not suspecting something was going on with us. But the offer of dinner nearly had me breaking out in a nervous sweat. My scrawny plan was already falling down. Put a brave face on to the world – yes. Jump back into dinners for two and bed-sharing? I didn’t think I was ready to do that. ‘No dinner, James. No distractions. Just talk.’

      He was watching me, careful blue eyes trained on their target. He seemed more than ready to slide right back into normality. The thought of it made my skin prickle, but that was what we needed, after all. To pretend Sadie had never happened, our family never jeopardised.

      James nodded. It was a small victory for him and we both knew it. I felt as though I’d just been handed my own heart to hold. ‘I have to get back to this fee proposal, James. I’ll come over, but not tomorrow. I’m behind at work, I have contractors waiting on me. After the weekend, things will be quieter.’ James nodded again, resuming a more rigid posture. He glanced at the papers on the dining table.

      ‘The proposal’s not for that tit in the baseball cap, is it? What was his name?’ James began to play with his keys again. He’d achieved his goal.

      ‘Bywater.’

      ‘Bywater? What’s a guy like him doing at Cyan anyway?’

      Outshining James on the big-boy injuries, if I remembered correctly. I moved past him and opened the dining-room doors. James followed me slowly across the hallway. ‘Who wears a baseball cap over the age of fifteen, anyway? Knob.’

      I didn’t give the obvious answer of James’s golfing buddies. Instead, I opened the front door for him and watched him through it.

      James turned on the step, his eyes cautious. He was sizing me up, surveying me like one of his buildings, working out where was safe to tread. ‘Look, I’m mostly on site for the rest of the week so I won’t hassle you, Ame. But we are gonna talk soon, right?’ I was still nodding when he leant in unexpectedly and kissed me chastely on the mouth. I watched, rigid and ineffectual as he turned and walked away. James was efficient in the art of closing deals. For some reason, I remembered the time I’d nearly been had by a smarmy car salesman.

      I closed the door after him.

      ‘Everything all right, sweetheart? I was just coming to put the kettle on.’ Mum was about as subtle as an atom-bomb.

      I nodded and passed her into the dining room. She knew not to ask, leaving me to tidy up my work things in peace. I didn’t spend long at my laptop, I didn’t even sit. James had thrown my head for the rest of the night, so I fired off Bywater’s email and, much to Mum’s dismay, headed upstairs.

      I was hoping sleep would find me more easily tonight, but the hours soon slipped away as I replayed James’s visit through my mind. At least the time issues we were facing with Anna were something we were both aware of. A small voice had been whispering to me that James might take the upheaval of the last couple of weeks as his opportunity to change his mind, to pull out altogether, but he’d sounded genuinely concerned tonight that we be ready for our next meeting with Anna.

      I tried to visualise it all being okay, the two of us and the child we didn’t yet know, living somewhere picturesque and wholesome, like the mill. Fishing on the riverbank, balloon-adorned birthday parties on the lawns, friends and family coming over with their own kids. We didn’t need a super-home. We didn’t need anything but the people in that picture, yet still it felt like an unreachable fantasy. And still sleep evaded me.