The Passionate Mistake

by Amelia Hart

  Tonight, even with the anguish of hearing those words from them, seeing that raised fist, still it was different from how it had been before

  Fighting with her father and Damian used to twist her up in her own head until she wasn’t sure if she believed them more than herself; like the ground had shifted under her feet until she didn’t know where she stood.

  She was no longer living inside a world of emotion dominated by them.

  It was because she really stood outside it now. She mourned this loss of her father and her brother like they had been cut out of her but the sick dynamic between them . . . She wasn’t trying to figure out how to work with it, to survive inside it. She was free.

  It hurt. Oh it hurt. She could feel the shards of loneliness and abandonment already. But she had Mike. And Janet. She had herself, too. The person she was becoming. The person she could be proud of, standing on her own two feet. It would be okay, just like Janet had said. Everything would be okay.

  Maybe not now, this second. Nor for awhile. But she was on the road. This was the right way.

  She started the car and drove into the night.

  Chapter Twenty

  I had a bad day after I left you she wrote in an email to him when she got home, remembering how hard it had been to leave him early, just after lunch on a Sunday that in her mind belonged to him, to them; sipping kisses from his lips as he said farewell to her at the door of his house, naked against her thin cotton clothes. The day had been perfect while they were together, so it hardly seemed conceivable it had been so bad afterwards.

  Not the bake-up with Luke and Janet. That went really well. We made dinner together too and I was thinking I should do it more often with them. I was really happy.

  But then I told Dad I couldn’t work in the family company anymore, and he didn’t take it well. He made accusations about me not taking care of the family properly, about abandoning them when they needed me. It got really nasty, and Damian joined in.

  I know I’ve made the right choice. It’s been awful there for a while. I feel guilty to say it, but it’s such a miserable place to work. I want to find something better.

  It just looks like I can’t do that and stay on good terms with Dad and Damian, and that stinks.

  So I’m sad tonight. I wish I could come crawl into bed with you and forget about it. You’re so good at making everything feel alright. Better than alright. Fantastic. I miss you already.

  X

  Before she could log off, a response arrived in her email inbox.

  Do you need a shoulder to cry on? Shall I come over and comfort you? I can be there in fifteen minutes.

  She panicked. Her hair was already dyed and dried flat ready for work the next day, and he would expect her to be staying home tomorrow, having just quit acrimoniously, so how could she possibly turf him out early enough to dress in her awful baggy clothes and glasses and leave for DigiCom?

  She did long to see him though. Was this the moment when she simply didn’t show up to work as Cathy? In the middle of two projects, with another one almost complete and more scheduled in?

  She weighed one against the other: a night with him now when she felt so alone, against another few days, or weeks at DigiCom . . .

  Maybe she could call in sick tomorrow . . .

  But her hair was already dyed, and she couldn’t strip the color out in just fifteen minutes. That made up her mind.

  No, I’ll be okay. Just a bit down in the dumps.Maybe I’ll come over sometime this week and you can make me feel all better.

  His response didn’t take long.

  I can use another programmer, if you’re good. You want to show me some of your work?

  She sat and stared at the screen, flabbergasted. It was the ideal solution. One she had never thought of. One she had never dared to suggest, even to herself. How crazy would it be? How crazy and how perfect?

  Could she really have everything she had ever wanted, all at a single stroke?

  How courageous he was to make that offer, to welcome her so thoroughly into his life, his world. He trusted her so much. She would try, oh she would try to be worthy of that trust. She would be worthy of it, of him.

  What could she show him? What piece of work was different enough from the things he had seen from Cathy, but still sufficiently solid to demonstrate her skills?

  She had a website she had created as part of a uni assignment, then expanded in her free time. It really was designed as a showcase of programming stunts, with pictures morphing in response to movements of the mouse, transitions and cascading menus, a merging between art, play and functionality. She hadn’t settled on specific information to populate it, but the shell was in place and the images had a life of their own. She sent him the link and sat back to wait.

  While she was waiting, she logged in to the Techdos server, and copied all the letters from her Techdos work email into another file on her computer. Mike’s were already safe but there were other messages from friends and some nice thank you notes from customers that she’d kept. She had a feeling Dad would be in a slash-and-burn mood, and she didn’t want to leave anything precious within his reach.

  She also copied her list of contacts across and deleted the Techdos email address, setting an automatic response to any incoming mail that would deflect it and simultaneously say she no longer worked there. From now on she would use the email attached to another website of hers as her default email.

  Then she removed herself as an employee from the internal servers, wiping away the evidence of her from a system that had owned her for too many years.

  It was perhaps another fifteen minutes before Mike’s next letter arrived.

  That’s some really solid stuff. More ornamental than what we currently have going, but then we’ve been developing those aspects a little more lately anyway. Your work might dovetail nicely with that. If you’re not worried about being romantically involved with your colleague, come on in and we can hammer out a contractor’s agreement for you. I promise I can (despite temptation) be perfectly proper in the workplace. At least so long as you let me have my wicked way with you outside business hours.

  She sat grinning like a loon, reading and rereading his message, almost tap-dancing in place from glee.

  You’re on. How about Wednesday? Say Wednesday afternoon? What time would be good for you?

  She would tie off whatever loose ends she could on Monday and Tuesday, then disappear and never come back. Not as Cathy. She’d come back as Kate. If Mike didn’t recognize her as the same woman, neither would anyone else. After all, people saw what they expected to see.

  They made a formal appointment, then she signed off with a:

  Good night Mike. And thanks. This is some kind of wonderful. I’m excited to work with you, to see you in action. It’s going to be fun.

  He responded:

  It sure is. Good night, sunshine. Sleep well. Sweet dreams. Xx

  That night she did have sweet dreams. The sweet, satisfying dreams of a woman truly, profoundly happy for the first time she could remember in her adult life.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On Monday she woke up to her alarm clock summoning her to her walk. But when she sat up briskly and swung her feet the floor, the room whirled around her and her stomach kept on whirling with it. She scrambled for the bathroom and made it just in time to throw up into the toilet.

  “Ugh. Foul!” Mentally she reviewed her meals of the day before. Food poisoning? It could possibly be, as they had been cooking with chicken last night. Sure she had been careful, but maybe something hadn’t cooked right through.

  Was she well enough to work? She still felt nauseous, but it probably wasn’t too bad. She didn’t have diarrhea so work was a definite possibility.

  She skipped the walk and dressed, monitoring her insides cautiously. There was no further rebellion so she left for the office in good time and was even a little early. The first hours of work passed in swift contentment, interspersed with the e
xcitement of her brief glimpses of Mike.

  At morning teatime she stretched and ran through the quick collection of exercises recommended by the ergonomics specialist to prevent occupational overuse syndrome. Then she decided to go fix herself a big mug of green tea in the kitchen downstairs. As she used the swipe card and exited the Platform Division’s offices she glanced over the span of the atrium to see if Mike was in his office. He was, eyes, trained on his screen. She couldn’t see the expression on his face but it still made her smile to know he was so close.

  Her smile faded as she walked to the lifts. When she wasn’t preoccupied by coding it was easy to start thinking about Dad and Damian again. She didn’t like to leave things hanging but on the other hand they definitely needed a few days to cool down, and she needed some time to let the specifics of what they had said fade a little in her memory. Then she’d try calling and extend the olive branch.

  It was going to be different from here on in. She would make sure not to get caught up in all their angst. And a more distant relationship would also suit her desire to keep her secrets from Mike. She wouldn’t put it past Dad or perhaps even Damian to tell him everything just to destroy the relationship they would no doubt blame for her change of heart.

  It wasn’t pleasant to think they would put a desire for revenge above her happiness, but they could be destructive when they were angry. Yes, arm’s length would be best for now but she wasn’t comfortable with freezing them out completely. That sort of thing could go on for years once it got started and it didn’t sit right with her.

  As she walked into the lunch room the smell hit her like a wall. Someone’s sandwich heated in the microwave. Fried onions, pickles, egg. She gagged, choked and fled for the nearby toilets, making it just in time to heave up the remains of her tiny breakfast.

  Okay, so maybe work hadn’t been such a great idea after all. She sighed, leaning on one wall of the small cubicle. The nausea had ebbed again. After a couple of minutes she felt capable of making it back out to the corridor. She held her breath as she walked past the lunchroom door. Sarah came out at that moment, saw her and fell in beside her, saying: “Are you feeling okay, Cath? You went a bit green back there. Before you ran away.”

  “Yeah, it was really weird. The smell in there just set me off. I’ve been feeling a bit off color all morning.”

  “You poor thing. You should go home. Not pregnant, are you?” The last was said in a teasing tone, and she responded more sharply than she intended.

  “No. No I’m not!”

  “Alright then,” laughed Sarah, lifting her hands in front of her as if to ward something off. “I didn’t mean anything by it. But if you’re going to make a habit of throwing up around the place someone will start a rumor. You’d better go home, for sure.”

  So she went, silent and preoccupied, excused herself to Hamish then got into her car and drove home. She dropped her keys twice, trying to open her apartment door, and she went straight to the shelf where she kept her contraceptive pills. There were the rows of tiny tears in the foil, only one pill missed almost three weeks ago – she had forgotten to take that one – but one skipped pill wasn’t enough to be a problem. At least she was pretty sure it wasn’t. Maybe she should read the literature.

  She hunted out the unopened box for her next three months of pills, pulled out the paper that was included with it and squinted to read the tiny print, then removed her fake eyeglasses to see better.

  Skipping a pill, skipping a pill. There it was. No, skipping a pill was not likely to make her fertile. But it should have started her period, and it hadn’t. She hadn’t bothered to have a period in several months now, missing out that inconvenient row of pills and starting straight on those for the next month.

  She googled ‘Pregnancy symptoms’ and came up with a list of the top ten. Missed period, check. Nausea, check. Mood swings? Well of course she’d been moody. Look at her crazy life situation. Anyone would be moody under those conditions. Bloating? Not that she’d noticed. Sore breasts? Her nipples were tender, but then they’d had so much attention lavished on them lately that it was natural they’d be a bit chafed and sore. That wasn’t the only part of her that was tender, some days!

  Tiredness? Well, yeah, but then she’d been getting up earlier in the mornings for those walks, and barely sleeping on her nights with Mike each weekend, between talking and having sex. Tiredness was only natural. She had fallen asleep on the couch straight after dinner the last three nights in a row, regardless of her determination to get a little programming done for one of her websites. And not just a catnap, either. She’d woken long enough to stagger to bed, strip off her clothes and crawl under the sheet before nodding straight off again; and slept the night through.

  Oh God.

  Kate didn’t bother to read the rest of the list of symptoms. She looked up the phone numbers of local doctors and chose one at random. When they didn’t have a space available in the next hour she tried another, then a third, where she made a booking.

  Sitting in the waiting room half an hour later she didn’t pick up a magazine. There was no way she could read. A pregnancy? A baby? She wasn’t ready for this. It was crazy. There was no way.

  When her name was called she sprang from her seat and strode into the office of the doctor – a woman in her forties with freckles, masses of dark blond curls and tired eyes.

  “How can I help?” the doctor asked.

  “I’m wondering if I might be pregnant,” she said starkly. The doctor’s eyebrows went up slightly at her tone, tense and a little desperate.

  “You can just take a test. They’re available at any pharmacy. You don’t need to make an appointment. Unless you’re wanting to discuss your options . . .” she finished delicately.

  “Oh, no. I . . . uh, didn’t know I could just test myself.” It had never been an issue before.

  “Sure,” said the doctor, reaching for a drawer and pulling out a small plastic package, which she handed to Kate. Kate took it and held it limply. “Home tests are almost completely accurate these days. But here. If you want to visit the bathroom down the hall you can do the test now. I’ll wait.” She gave instructions and pointed Kate in the right direction for the bathroom.

  Numbly Kate did as she had been told, and waited for long, tense minutes as first one pink bar appeared and then a second, slightly fainter. Two bars means positive, the doctor had said. Positive.

  Positive.

  She was pregnant.

  “How could this have happened?” she asked the doctor, back in the cozy room with its soft blue carpet and green curtains. She clutched at the edge of her chair with a white-knuckled grip. “I take my pill every day. I thought the pill was supposed to be very reliable.”

  “Nothing’s one hundred percent, though you’re right, that pill is usually very reliable. Still, something may have interfered with its function. Some antibiotics can counteract absorption of the pill, some other drugs have been known to be a problem, and then there are natural substances like Saint John’s Wort and grapefruit that should be avoided.”

  Grapefruit.

  “Grapefruit?” she asked, her voice shaking.

  “Hmm, yes,” said the doctor, turning to her computer and typing in several entries, then pausing to read the text that had come up on her screen. “This type of pill has been known to fail when users eat grapefruit. It’s recommended you avoid it. You should have been told that when it was first prescribed, or at least told to read the literature carefully. It will have been in there.”

  She had been using the same pill for years now. She had no recollection of anything involving grapefruit, but then she’d never eaten it before. She might have dismissed or forgotten the warning, if it had ever been given.

  Oh God, oh God, what was she going to do now?

  “There are a range of options,” the doctor said softly, obviously reading her distress. “You have some decisions to make. We can talk it over together, or I can give you some reading mater
ial to go through and then you can come back when you’ve thought things over. This is totally your decision, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But you do need to think it over very carefully.”

  She couldn’t bear to talk it over with anyone, just yet. What she needed was solitude. She excused herself, gathered up pamphlets and the handwritten notes the doctor made, and thanked her. The woman patted her on the shoulder, gave her a little squeeze and a look of sympathy, and sent her on her way.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  She should never have gone into work the next day. It was pure, plain, unmitigated idiocy. She knew that. She knew it.

  But she could not bear to hold this news and sit quietly at home.

  God only knew what she thought she could do better at the office. Beam the information magically into Mike’s brain? Experience some sort of mystic solidarity with him? Feel less alone when they were separated only by a wall, she and the father of this . . . baby.

  This baby.

  She went to the office.

  That was the first mistake. The first and biggest. If she could only have undone that one error, nothing else would have gone wrong. If she had stayed safely at home, hidden under the covers, walked the streets of the city, whatever. All she had to do was make the decision to steer clear of the office altogether.

  She went in to the office. And sat in her chair, still, silent, oozing with misery, trying to imagine how she’d tell him. What she’d say. As close as he was, he felt a million miles away, separated from her by the huge gulf of knowledge between them. All the things she knew that he didn’t. A million miles.

  The loneliness, the feeling of a huge, momentous solitude overwhelmed her. She had absolutely no idea of how to raise a baby. She had never even held one, since Luke. She couldn’t picture it; simply could not imagine herself into that role: a mother; responsible for a life other than her own. She was terrified. She could not do this. Could not condemn a child to be raised by her, pitifully ignorant and inadequate her. It was impossible.