remembering the night before. He pulled her down on top of him, but she stiffened, drawing away until his body and his bed felt cold.
‘Bye, Fraser.’
He lifted his head and blinked his eyes at the sound of high heels on deep carpet, heading towards the door, and it was only in the dawn light creeping round the edge of the curtains that he saw Elspeth’s face.
‘Bye.’
He croaked out the word and then fell back on the pillow as the door closed behind her.
He didn’t have her number.
The thought occurred to him and then he was sitting up without realising he’d decided to, and he had a foot out of the bed before he’d thought about what he was doing. Before he stopped himself, as he always had before.
No strings. They’d never actually said the words last night, but it had been clear enough in the way they had been with each other. Well, if he’d had any doubt she’d just proved it by walking out with barely a kiss goodbye.
For a fraction of a second he wondered if he could catch her before the lift reached their floor, but that summer breeze brushed him again, colder this time, and he realised what he was thinking.
He didn’t do relationships. He’d seen when he had still been barely more than a child the harm they could do. What happened to people and their lives when they followed their desires rather than making sensible, objective decisions.
He’d sworn that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Just the fact that he was even thinking of acting on a whim now was all the proof he needed that it would be a bad idea. Of all the women he might have a second date with, the one who was making him question all his carefully set ground rules was not the one to try it with.
He collapsed back, letting his arm fall over his eyes as he remembered falling into this same bed last night, with Elspeth pulling at his clothes and her body warm and supple beneath him.
Last night wasn’t going to be easy to forget. She wasn’t going to be easy to forget.
ELSPETH THREW DOWN her work bag by the door and shouted out as she walked through the hallway. ‘Mum? Sarah?’
‘In here,’ her sister called back from the direction of the kitchen.
Elspeth crossed the hallway and smiled at the sight of the pair of them at the kitchen table, the huge pan of chicken and pasta she’d left in the fridge the day before sitting between them. Thank God. She was starving. All she wanted to do was carb-load and fall straight into bed. Again. She’d not made it past nine o’clock a single night this week, and she wasn’t planning on breaking her streak tonight.
Her patients had been back to back from eight o’clock that morning, and the only food she’d had all day was a sandwich at her desk while she caught up on notes and phone calls. She was used to the workload, to the stress and the non-stop appointments, but for some reason this week it had caught up with her. Her body felt heavy, weary in a way she’d not felt since she’d been caught in an endless cycle of night shifts, studying and revision in her first years as a junior doctor.
She just had one last thing to do before she went to help Sarah with her evening routine of medication, personal hygiene and changing for bed.
She had to pee on a stick.
It was just a formality, really. Just to rule out the flashing light that her inner doctor wouldn’t allow her to ignore. She was a week or so late, but that wasn’t unusual. She’d never had a cycle she could set the clock by. And she’d never taken risks—she always used a condom. But if she’d had a patient sitting in front of her, complaining of the sort of fatigue she had been feeling, she would have ordered a pregnancy test, so it only made sense to rule it out.
She smiled through dinner with her mother and Sarah, listening to stories of their day. Her mother’s at work, her sister’s at college. But in the back of her mind she couldn’t shake off the thought of that little test sitting at the bottom of her bag.
As soon as her fork hit an empty plate she tidied the kitchen, thanked her mum for dinner, made her excuses and headed upstairs. Locking the bathroom door behind her, she thought for the thousandth time what a luxury it would be to be able to leave the door unlocked, free from the fear that her mum or Sarah could walk in on her.
Living at home in her thirties wasn’t exactly ideal. But with her mum in her sixties, it wasn’t fair to expect her to take on the full responsibility of caring for her sister. They all worked hard to ensure that Sarah was living as independently as possible, but she still required extra support and Elspeth was determined that her mother wouldn’t have to take on all that herself. And she wanted to be able to buy a house. Somewhere for her and Sarah to live—a home that they could be certain would always be theirs—and that meant staying at home and saving for a deposit.
Elspeth peed on the test and set it on the side of the bath as she glanced at her watch. Three minutes and she’d be able to dispel this nagging doubt and get her head on the pillow. Which meant she had three minutes during which she could legitimately let herself think about Fraser.
Because for the past three weeks she’d not let herself do that. She’d pushed her memories of that incredible night out of her mind, knowing that with all the responsibilities in her life she couldn’t afford the luxury of a relationship. No matter how good the sex had been. And, oh, it had been good. Better than good. Better than sex, actually. Because for those few hours there had been a connection between them. They had laughed, joked, challenged each other.
And when the sun had crept over the horizon in the morning she had crept out of his bed with a sigh of regret, wishing for a moment that her life could be different.
But here, in the cold, stark light of the bathroom, she knew that it couldn’t be. She had responsibilities, and she and Alex had already done a fine job of proving that those responsibilities were not compatible with a romantic relationship.
It was a sobering thought, she realised as she kept her eyes averted from the pregnancy test. Looking ahead to a life without romance. Without marriage. Without a family of her own.
Elspeth loved her mum and her sister. She was devoted to them, and it was no sacrifice to set aside what she might want for herself for what was best for her family. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. That she didn’t wonder what sort of life she might have had if her decisions had been her own to make. Maybe she would have been peeing on one of these sticks hoping for it to show a smiley pregnant face rather than dreading the result.
She glanced at her watch. Three minutes. Well, there was no point putting it off any longer. All she had to do was check the test, put her daydreams and her sister to bed, and then climb in between the sheets herself.
She turned the test over.
Pregnant.
For a second she wished she’d bought one of those cheap, old-fashioned tests. Where you had to scrutinise the stick and the leaflet to work out if there was a line. What the line meant.
Seeing the truth just sitting there, so unvarnished, was a blow to her chest. She couldn’t pull in air and sat heavily on the side of the bath, staring at it, unable to tear her eyes away.
She was pregnant. She did the maths in her head. Just a few weeks. Six weeks gestational age, at most. Barely a grouping of cells.
She had options. She ran through them as she would for any patient who wanted them, and in her head she was halfway through the referral process to end her pregnancy before she realised that the thought of doing so made her feel sick. Sick in her stomach, sick in her bones.
She realised that it wasn’t the right choice for her.
And that was it, Elspeth thought, as she looked at herself in the mirror.