back into the bedroom.
‘Have you got any cramping?’
‘No.’
‘Everything might well be fine...’
She couldn’t believe it.
He tried to unfold her tight body but she wouldn’t relax and he got onto the bed beside her and brought her cold body against his warm one. ‘Match my breathing,’ he said. It was like he was breathing for her, and she tried to get hers as slow and as deep, and then he spoke.
‘Freya, a lot of women get bleeding. You’re eight weeks pregnant—’
‘Six.’
‘Eight,’ he corrected her, and smiled because sometimes he forgot she had studied brains, not bodies. ‘You add two weeks.’
How was he smiling and talking, all calm and normally? It wasn’t because he didn’t care, she knew that because he was lying on the bed beside her and she was curled into him.
‘Did you lose anything in the shower?’
‘I didn’t get into the shower,’ Freya said. ‘I just saw the blood and I freaked...’
‘I know,’ Zack said. ‘Well, I don’t exactly.’
How was she, Freya wondered, breathing and calming and starting to believe that it might be okay? And then she remembered how she had lashed out before. She had utterly lost it and it was something she had fought all her life not to do.
‘Turn over,’ Zack said.
‘I can’t,’ Freya admitted. She had screamed, she had hit at him, she had shown her worst self and all her fears, so how could she turn around?
‘We can go now and do an ultrasound,’ Zack said.
‘No.’ Freya shook her head. ‘I don’t want anyone at The Hills knowing.’
‘They won’t. I can—’
‘No.’
‘Have you got an OB?’
Freya nodded. ‘I’m seeing someone for fertility so I already had an appointment for next week.’
‘Do you want to call her and see if I can drive you in?’
‘On a Saturday night?’
‘Yes,’ Zack said, and then he realised she might be stalling. ‘Do you want to see someone?’
‘I don’t want to find out,’ Freya said. ‘I just want one more night where I might be pregnant. I don’t want to know yet if I’ve lost it. Zack, I’ve wanted a baby for years, I honestly thought I couldn’t have one. I wasn’t using you.’
‘I know that.’ Zack said. ‘Who told you that you couldn’t have children?’
‘In rehab,’ Freya said. ‘I had stopped menstruating and they said I was a shoe-in for infertility, osteoporosis...’
‘Whoever said what they did was trying to scare you into eating.’ He could only guess the damage of knowing for years that you’d blown your chances. ‘They were clearly talking rubbish.’
She turned around in his arms and he gave her such a nice smile.
‘Do you really think that I might still be pregnant?’
‘Well, I haven’t been anywhere near that field for many years but, yes, a little show, no cramping. I think it happens a lot.’
And from hell she entered calmer waters.
‘I’m sorry you saw me like that.’
‘I’m very glad that I saw you like that,’ Zack said, and Freya closed her eyes.
She knew she’d blown any chance for them now.
They lay for a while, Freya becoming calmer, Zack thinking.
‘You’ve got surgery tomorrow,’ Freya said, remembering he’d said he needed an early night.
‘I do.’ Zack nodded. ‘I’ll go and make something to eat.’
Zack got out of bed and went into the kitchen. He bypassed all the little measuring cups and returned to the room with two bowls of lovely creamy pasta.
‘We’ll go and get you checked tomorrow. I’ll call work and have them reschedule.’
‘No.’ Freya shook her head. It was his Sunday list and there were so many people relying on him. ‘Unless things get worse, you ought to go in. I’ve got to go in as well—I’ve got that young girl coming in. It would be awful for her if I cancelled.’
‘Okay.’
His calm control seeped into her.
They ate pasta and she found out he could cook and they lay in bed and watched a movie. Zack noticed something on the bedside table and asked what it was.
‘Cleo’s ashes.’
‘No way!’ Zack said, and he wasn’t Mr Nice now. He took them straight out to the lounge room. ‘I can’t sleep with them next to me.’
‘Are you staying?’
‘Freya?’ Zack checked. ‘You really think I’d leave you now?’
‘You want an early night.’
‘And you need one!’
He got into bed.
‘You’re not keeping the ashes, are you?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked at him. ‘Are they freaking you?’
‘A bit.’
‘I didn’t think anything freaked you.’
‘I’m a mystery,’ Zack said.
He turned out the light and he was back in her bed when she had never thought he would be.
‘I really am a mystery,’ Zack said. ‘It turns out that my mother thought I was gay.’
Freya laughed and she told him about the hotel events coordinator checking him out when he’d checked in.
It was nice to lie in the dark, talking and then falling quiet.
‘So, is this what parenthood looks like?’ Zack said when she was feeling a little calmer. ‘Knot in your chest and no sex?’
‘I think so.’
He rolled over and put his hand on her stomach and then he said the nicest thing.
‘I want you to be pregnant,’ he said. ‘I want the baby.’
And, because it was Zack, she knew he meant it.
‘So hang in there, little one.’
ZACK WOKE TO the mechanical sound of a blender.
Get used to it, Zack, he told himself, because he might well be waking to it for the rest of his life.
And so, as Freya pulped broccoli and blueberries and did what she had to do to keep her place on this planet in order, she watched as a dishevelled, barely dressed, sexy Australian came out of the bedroom and walked out of her apartment.
And there was no feeling of dread when he left this time.
A few moments later he walked back in with a tin of coffee, which kept his part of the planet in better order, and they shared a smile.
‘Why do you have coffee in your car?’ Freya asked.
‘Because I like coffee in the morning and I know you don’t have any.’
‘Oh,