How had she ever contemplated going into that world voluntarily?
She could see just how terrifying it was going to be. Where was she going to live? How was she going to be able to afford everything she and the baby would need? How would she cope if the baby got really sick and she was all by herself?
Her future was not going to be anything like her fantasies of a big, happy family having picnics. She’d probably made it even less likely that she would ever find someone to share her life with. Look at Laura, who hadn’t even been on a date in the last five years as far as Maggie knew.
Her flatmate came back into the kitchen with a thermometer in her hand. ‘It’s normal,’ she said.
‘That’s good.’
‘It’s probably just a twenty-four-hour bug of some kind. Or maybe he’ll bounce back by tomorrow morning. Oh...thanks...’ Laura reached for the mug of tea Maggie had made and then sat down at the table. ‘Now...tell me what’s going on with you.’
‘Hmm...’ Maggie sat down beside her. ‘You’d better brace yourself...’
* * *
It was easy to pick up speed in this much wind.
Easy to hit the wave at just the perfect angle and push down with your legs and then jump and grip with your toes to roll the windward edge of the board to catch the wind and to bend your arms and knees to fly even higher.
Not so easy to keep the tail of the board in the right place so you didn’t spin out when you touched down again on the choppy surface but Joe had done this a million times.
It never got old.
And it never failed to clear anything else out of his head. He just couldn’t think about anything other than how to keep upright and sailing. He couldn’t be aware of anything other than the chill and splash of the water, the rush of wind and the adrenaline spike of every jump and successful landing. The burn of tired muscles had to kick in at some point, of course, but it was almost dark by the time Joe finally hauled his gear across the beach to the car park.
The things he didn’t want to think about were already creeping back by the time he was tying his board and sail onto his roof rack and it didn’t help that going windsurfing had reminded him of being on the beach, not so long ago, with young Harry—another fatherless little boy like he’d been himself. Another reminder of just why he’d never, ever wanted to be in this situation. Having consumed so much physical energy by the windsurfing session, the raw emotional edges had blurred more than a little. But he still felt betrayed.
He was still too angry to ever want to speak to Maggie again. Joe cast a sideways glance at the familiar buildings as he drove past the Aratika Rescue Base on his way back into the central city and his apartment block. It was just as well that Don was forcing her to stand down for a few days and was removing her from front-line duties. Joe was nowhere near ready to see her again.
She’d used him. She’d probably been planning it ever since that day they’d delivered the baby with the shoulder dystocia. When she’d been carrying the kid and said, ‘I think I want one...’ She’d asked him to be the sperm donor but then had just gone and done it despite him telling her exactly why it could never happen.
A stop at a red traffic light on a big intersection was long enough to let his thoughts throw a curveball into his anger. Okay, it was a bit of a coincidence that the fertile time of her cycle had just happened to be on a day they’d had the kind of job that almost never happened and Maggie had been close enough to hypothermia to have difficulty getting out of her uniform. She couldn’t have actually planned that.
So it hadn’t been entirely her fault, had it?
He hadn’t dealt with those unexpected feelings of attraction towards Maggie and made sure that nothing ever happened. Worse, on that night in the shower room, he could have walked out. He could have kept walking so that they’d never opened that Pandora’s box of sex between them. Or he could have, at the very least, gone to his locker, found his wallet and taken out that condom he always carried, just in case.
He’d been stupid.
It was no excuse that he’d trusted Maggie and believed her when she’d said it was safe. He had to take at least part of the blame.
Maggie got the rest of the blame.
The only one that couldn’t be blamed was the new being that existed because of what had happened that night.
The baby.
His baby.
History was repeating itself. Two people who were entirely unsuited to be in a relationship were now bound to each other for ever as the parents of a child. An accidental pregnancy that would produce an unwanted child, like he had been.
No...that wasn’t entirely true. Maggie wanted this baby. She was never going to tell that child that they had ruined her life. But Joe had a sudden flash of what her face had looked like earlier with tears rolling down her face. Her body language when she’d been standing beside her bike watching him leave with those slumped shoulders and air of defeat. She might have thought that a baby was what she wanted but she certainly wasn’t too happy about finding out she had one on the way, was she?
So perhaps she hadn’t planned it at all.
But it didn’t actually matter now because it had happened and everything had changed.
He’d lost a friend he’d thought he could trust above anyone else.
He’d lost his colleague. There’d be no more shared excitement about getting dispatched to a challenge that was ‘hot’ enough to be a thrill.
He’d lost the freedom that had gone with an unencumbered future as well. Joe had no idea just how he was going to face up to the kind of responsibility of being a father but he wasn’t about to repeat history and be the kind of man his own father had been. His own child was not going to grow up feeling like they didn’t have a father.
It was too much loss for one day, he decided as he parked in the basement car park of his downtown apartment block. Too much change.
But it wasn’t quite over.
The letter he pulled from his box in the foyer didn’t get opened until Joe had showered off the sea water and had a nice, cold beer in front of him, but any comfort he was trying to give himself evaporated as he read the notice from his landlord.
This apartment block had been deemed an earthquake risk and needed urgent strengthening work.
Joe had little more than a month to find himself somewhere else to live.
* * *
He wasn’t coming.
It was already fifteen minutes after the scheduled time for Maggie’s appointment at the antenatal clinic for her first ultrasound examination.
She hadn’t seen or spoken to Joe since she’d been stood down from her duties at the Aratika Rescue Base nearly two days ago. It was becoming automatic to check her phone repeatedly to see whether she might have missed a reply to the text she’d sent yesterday. She’d informed him of the results of her first appointment with an obstetrician that had confirmed what they already knew, and where and when this appointment for the first ultrasound was happening.
A part of Maggie was also clinging to the admittedly very faint hope that, somehow, the chaos of what was happening in both their lives would begin to settle down to a point where it might still be possible to salvage some of their friendship. They had to be able to talk to each other, didn’t they? To make decisions about the future?
Not that Maggie expected anything from Joe. She’d tried to make that clear when she’d finished the text she’d sent him yesterday.
I’m not telling you this because I expect you to be here. It’s entirely your choice. It just feels wrong not to keep you in the loop.
‘Margaret Lewis?’ A technician came into the waiting area.
‘That’s me.’ Maggie got to her feet, wincing a little at the discomfort her very full bladder was creating. ‘I’m about to pop,’ she told the technician. ‘I hope I can last long enough.’
‘You’ll be fine.’ The technician smiled. ‘Most women forget about their bladders once they can see their babies. My name’s Stella. Is your partner coming?’
‘I...um... I’m not sure. He may have been held up.’ Not that it felt accurate to refer to Joe as any kind of partner. She wasn’t even working with him any more, let alone anything more personal. ‘He’s an air ambulance paramedic.’
‘Oh, wow... That would be such an amazing job.’
‘It is.’
And Maggie was missing being at work. Missing Joe. Grappling with the disturbing realisation that she’d fallen in love with someone who would only ever see her as a friend. Even though she had her flatmates around her at home, and Laura was being so sympathetic to her situation, Maggie was feeling very alone. Her mother had offered to travel to Wellington and come with her to this appointment but Maggie had declined the offer—just in case Joe decided he wanted to come. If he did, things would be tense enough without giving him the added pressure of being assessed by one of his child’s grandparents.
‘Okay...climb up on the bed here. We just need your tummy exposed. I’ll tuck a towel over your clothes to protect them from the gel.’
‘Ooh...that’s cold...’
‘It’ll warm up in no time. Right...let’s get started. I’ll let you know what I’m doing as I go along. First up, I’m just going to check your ovaries and uterus and things like where the placenta is lying. Then we’ll—’ Stella broke off as there was a soft tap at the door. ‘Yes?’ she called.
The door opened a crack. ‘They told me to come through,’ a male voice said. ‘Is that okay?’
Stella glanced at Maggie, who nodded, even though her heart had just skipped a beat. ‘That’s Joe,’ she said. ‘My...the baby’s father.’
He came into the room. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he told Maggie. ‘I had trouble finding somewhere to park.’
His gaze slid away from hers, which made Maggie think that maybe the difficulty hadn’t had anything to do with finding a parking space and that it had actually been deciding whether he was going to come at all. It didn’t matter. He was here now and...and it felt right.
Better than that, even.
‘Stand behind the bed,’ Stella told Joe. ‘Close to Maggie’s shoulder. That way you can both see what’s happening on the screen.’
It felt really good to have him in the room. Maggie had to close her eyes for a moment to force back the prickle of tears. She had to clench her fists to remind herself that this wasn’t anything like any fantasy she might have had about seeing her baby for the first time. Having the man she loved beside her sharing images that were all about their future together as a family.
That nobody was going to be holding her hand as this little miracle unfolded...
* * *
He almost hadn’t come.
Joe had started to answer Maggie’s text on a dozen or more occasions but, every time, he had deleted his messages before they got sent. Any words he chose felt stilted and couldn’t come anywhere near expressing what he wanted to say—probably because he didn’t actually know what he wanted to say.
He was still angry at being put into a position he had been so determined to never be in. He still felt betrayed. But mixed into those feelings was that determination not to be the man his own father had been. He was going to do better and that meant being somehow involved with his child’s life right from the start. Starting with this examination that had actually taken quite a lot of courage to face up to.
Things were about to get very real.
‘So we use the crown-rump length for dating,’ Stella the technician said, as Joe took a deep breath and focussed on the screen of the ultrasound machine. ‘It’s the most accurate method, giving us a date to within five to seven days, but it’s less useful after twelve weeks because the baby’s starting to curl up by that stage.’
The images on the screen were just a blur of smudged black and white to Joe but Stella was pausing the cursor and clicking to make a mark before moving confidently to another point to repeat the process.
‘I see the date for your last period would put you at about eleven weeks, but you had an episode of bleeding when you would have expected your next period?’
‘More or less,’ Maggie said quietly. ‘But definitely a bit late. And, looking back, I was worried and then I was so relieved that I didn’t think about it any more. It wasn’t...um...it wasn’t exactly planned...’
Joe clenched his jaw. That was an understatement. The tone of Maggie’s voice echoed in his head for long moments after she’d stopped speaking. She sounded so unlike herself.
So subdued. As if she was having as much trouble as he was getting his head around this shocking development that was going to change his life for ever. Change both their lives but it was going to change Maggie’s life far more than his because she was going to parent this child twenty-four seven. He would be a supportive but far more distant figure.
‘These measurements confirm that,’ Stella told them. ‘I’d put baby at eleven weeks, four days. Almost twelve. You’re pretty much through your first trimester.’
Yes... Joe could feel the remnants of those shock waves.
He hadn’t been wrong to trust Maggie. She really had believed that they were safe.
In silence, he kept watching the screen, taking a professional interest in the images that Stella explained to them both. The view of the four chambers of the heart was fascinating and it was getting easier to identify structures as they glimpsed organs like the bladder and kidneys. The long bones of the legs and the movements of joints had his eyes glued to the screen and then Stella changed the angle of the transducer and pressed it a little more deeply onto Maggie’s abdomen.
‘Oh...nice,’ Stella murmured. ‘We don’t always get such a good 3D mug shot.’
And there it was. Their baby’s face in such astonishing detail it felt like he could reach out and touch this newly forming little person.
His child...
Stella was taking a screenshot. Joe could imagine Maggie keeping a copy of that photo. Showing it to their child in years to come.
This was the very first time we saw you...
Something very unexpected was happening for Joe right now. He had come here prepared to put his hand up to take responsibility and be part of his child’s life. What he hadn’t anticipated at all was that he was going to feel...so connected. So emotional. He was swallowing a rather large lump in his throat as Stella finished up her examination and moved the transducer again. They got a final, and poignant, glimpse of the baby.
The bottom of a single foot, with each tiny toe clearly visible.
‘Cute.’ Stella smiled. ‘Let’s get a picture of that, too.’
And then it was over and Maggie was walking through the corridors of the Royal’s maternity suite’s outpatient department, holding an envelope that contained several black and white images.
Joe walked beside her. The silence between them felt odd but not hostile.
‘Can I buy you a coffee?’ he asked.
He saw the flash of surprise in her eyes. Wariness, even. But then Maggie gave a soft huff of laughter. ‘Maybe a tea?’
‘Oh, sorry... I forgot.’
‘That’s okay. You’ve had a lot on your mind.’
‘Yeah...’
Instead of taking a table in the small café in the hospital’s foyer, Joe bought their drinks in takeaway cups and they went outside to a courtyard area away from the main entrance, where there were plenty of bench seats and a small garden with a fountain.
For a while, they sat side by side in silence. It was Maggie that broke it.
‘I really am sorry, Joe. This isn’t your fault and I feel really bad because I know how much you didn’t want it.’
‘It is partly my fault,’ he said. ‘It does take two to tango.’
His choice of words reminded him of dancing with Maggie. Of how solid their friendship had seemed, the night of Fizz and Cooper’s wedding, when he’d told her stuff about his childhood he’d never told anyone else. It also reminded him of holding her in his arms when they hadn’t been dancing and of how good the sex had been. No, not good. Totally, unbelievably amazing.
So what if they weren’t in love or they’d never had any intention of being in a ‘real’ relationship? They had so many things in common, didn’t they?
Including a baby now. Maggie had put down her cup to open the envelope and she’d pulled out one of the photos. The one of that tiny foot.
‘It’s so real now,’ she said softly. ‘I know it’s not what we wanted and I know it’s going to be tough but...you know what?’
Joe nodded slowly. He knew exactly what. ‘You already love this baby.’
‘Yeah...’
‘I’m going to be here for you. For him...or her...’ Joe gently touched the foot in the photograph with his fingertip. ‘We can do this together. Like the “dream team”.’
‘You don’t want that, Joe.’
‘Actually, I think I do.’ Joe turned to meet Maggie’s gaze. ‘I came here today because I was determined to be a better man than my father was but right now I can understand what he was trying to do and...maybe it would have worked if my mother had actually wanted me. If she had loved me from the moment she first saw me, like you do with this baby.’
Maggie was looking bewildered. ‘Maybe what would have worked?’
‘Their marriage. Being able to provide a happy home for their kid. For me.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
Pregnant with Her Best Friend's Baby Page 11
