The Accidental Mother (36 page)

“What reasons?” Bella had demanded, and realizing that none of them were things she could tell a child, Sophie had brushed the sand off her jeans and begun walking back toward the steps that led up to the harbor.

Bella had caught up with her quickly and hooked her arm through Sophie’s. “What reasons?” she had repeated.

“Adult reasons,” Sophie had said, hating herself for talking down to Bella. “I have to pay my bills, feed Artemis, look after my mum. Hundreds of reasons. You and Izzy don’t need me now.”

“But we do! We do still need you!”

Sophie had stopped in her tracks, hearing the tears in Bella’s voice. She’d looked down at the child; Bella’s cheeks were wet.

“Please, Aunty Sophie, please, don’t go back and leave us. We
do
need you,” Bella had pleaded.

Sophie had wound her arms around Bella and pulled her into a hug. “I have to go,” she’d said.

“You don’t have to,” Bella had repeated. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“I do,” Sophie had said, holding back her tears. “I do.”

Sophie reached London during the peak of the rush hour, rain teeming down. She sat in the tightly packed lanes of traffic, fidgeting with the radio until eventually she turned it off. Home was less than a mile away, but God knew how long it would take to get there. She resisted the urge to rest her head on the steering wheel, or to just get out of the car and walk the rest of the way. She bit down on her rising frustration, and suddenly an image of Louis just before she left, silhouetted against a clear blue sky, flashed in front of her.

“Don’t want to think about
you,
” she grumbled under her breath. “Done that already.”

T
he heavy scent of the lilies on Sophie’s desk mingled with the fresh spring breeze that drifted through her open office window. Two perks of her new job, fresh flowers twice a week and windows that opened on demand. It was curious that, even after a month, she still didn’t really feel like she belonged at this desk. But no matter what she had tried to do to settle herself back into her old and new life, nothing had quite done the trick so far.

She hadn’t expected to walk back into a promotion. In fact, it was the last thing she had been thinking about when she’d gone into work that day, just over a month ago. So she had been genuinely surprised when Gillian had called her into her office and broken the good news. “It must feel as if a weight has been lifted,” Gillian had said when Sophie told her about the girls going back home.

“It does,” Sophie had replied, even though the crushing burden of emotion that had almost overwhelmed her on Porthmeor Beach still seemed to envelop her.

Gillian had sat her down and made a long speech about loyalty, strength of character, and fortitude, which had begun to swim over Sophie’s head when she heard the word
promotion.

“Promotion?” she had said quickly.

“Yes,” Gillian had told her. “The time has come for me to take a step back. It’s been hard deciding between you and Eve, but I think you’ve shown how much you can do in difficult circumstances. I think that’s what won me over in the end.” Gillian had stretched out her hand over the desk. “Congratulations Sophie, you’ve got the job.”

Sophie had imagined this moment for such a long time, dreamed about it, enacted how it would be to hear those words and to know that she had finally reached the pinnacle she had been striving for, and now that it had happened? Well, it wasn’t quite as satisfying as she had imagined. It was Louis’s fault, of course. It was all his fault, he and his children throwing a wrench in the works and upsetting the beautifully oiled machine that had previously been her life.

“Thank you,” she had told Gillian, smiling at her, although she’d felt as if her lips were stiff and numb. “I’m so happy.”

The thing to do, Sophie had decided on the way back to her office, was to get as drunk as she possibly could, because that was what people did when they were celebrating. Gillian had asked her to keep the news to herself until she could make a formal announcement to the whole company, so Sophie had told only Cal, which was more or less the same thing as making an informal announcement to the whole company. But she’d had to tell somebody, so that person could tell her how marvelous it was. She’d thought she would believe it then.

“So tonight we have to go out and celebrate,” she had told Cal intently after he had congratulated her. “We’ve got that accounting firm do, so we can start knocking back the fizz there, and then—what do you think—a club? I know, I’ll call some friends and we can make a night of it. Excellent.”

Cal had looked confused for a second. “It’s a Monday, Sophie. I’m fairly sure most of the people you know—and by the way, do you actually know any people?—don’t go clubbing on a Monday.”

Sophie had thought for a moment. Cal was right, she hadn’t seen any of her friends in months, let alone spoken to them on the phone. Now she was back and free again, and she was going to change all that, she was going to change everything. She was going to fill her life up with so many events and nights out and dinners with the girls that she would have no time to think about…well, anything else.

“You’re right,” she had said. “We’ll just go to that party, and then you and I can go clubbing. I’ll get the several hundred people I know out on Friday night. We can have two parties. Hooray!” Sophie had made two small fists and shaken them with forced enthusiasm.

“Hooray,” Cal had said, looking slightly frightened.

It hadn’t really worked out the way Sophie had planned.

By nine that evening, she had been too drunk to do anything very much other than sleep.

Fortunately, she was not a noisy drunk, just a dedicated one. So when Cal had found her propped up at the accounting do bar, gazing miserably at the martini she was drinking, he had been able to usher her quietly out the kitchen door and into the back of a cab without any of her clients seeing her condition.

“What happened to our night of crazy fun?” he had asked her, after he’d told the driver her address. “You are such a lightweight, Sophie. I knew you’d never manage to stay up past ten. I’ll come back with you,” he had sighed. “You need a coffee or thirty.”

“No, no!” Sophie had flapped her arms in denial. “You gotta stay and sort out the…things…’kay?” She had burped noisily and giggled.

Cal had rolled his eyes at the anxious-looking cabdriver and climbed into the cab with her.

“I’ll come right back,” he had said. “Once I’ve got you home.”

It had been when they were at home and Sophie was stretched out on the comfortable and clean new sofa that she’d bought that Cal had knelt down beside her and asked, “What’s up, Sophie? This isn’t like you. Something’s happened—what is it?”

“It
is
like me—this is the new me!” Sophie had declared and then, rather morosely, added, “I hate this new sofa.”

Cal had sat back on his heels. “Is it because now you’ve got the job you don’t think you can do it?”

“Don’t be dericiclous…relidiclous…mad,” Sophie had mumbled, deciding it was safer not to attempt any words longer than one syllable.

“Is it the girls?” Cal had asked, as if he had just experienced a revelation. “You miss the little brats running around trashing the place, don’t you? Your biological clock has sounded the alarm, and you’re panic drinking! Is that it?”

Sophie had turned her face into the cushion.

“Sophie?” Cal had prompted her. “Sophie? Come on, tell me that I’m right, because you don’t need a man to get knocked up now, you know. All you need is a willing donor and a turkey baster. I knew these two women who…Sophie? Sophie?”

Gingerly he had leaned forward and looked at her face. She had passed out.

Sophie had sat up with a brain-wrenching start several hours later. Cal had left all the lights on in her living room, her head was thrumming, and her mouth was sticky and dry. It had taken her a second or two to work out how she had got there, but once she had remembered, she had flopped her head into her hands. “Oh, God,” she had moaned out loud.

Through her fingers she saw that Cal had left her a note on the repolished coffee table.

“Have gone back to save your career. You were out of it. Think you need to get laid ASAP.”

“Ha!” Sophie had laughed mirthlessly. “It was when I got laid that everything went pear-shaped. I should have been a nun. I have a lot in common with nuns. I would have been a natural nun. Plus, I look great in black.”

For a second, Sophie had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, talking to her empty flat. Once she had preferred her own company to anybody else’s, now she had to talk to herself just to be sure she was really there. It was all
his
fault.

“You have a great life,” she had told herself as she padded to the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water. “You have your own space, some really good clothes, a great job, lots of friends. You did the right thing, you did the only thing you could do. So just get over it and move on.” After drying her face, Sophie had gone into her bedroom and looked at the neatly made bed. With a sigh, she had turned around and gone back to the sofa, switching the lights off as she went.

Once in the semidarkness of her living room, Sophie had slipped off her cocktail dress and draped it carefully over the back of the sofa before lying down and pulling a quilt over herself.

For a long time in the half-light she had listened to the sounds of traffic and watched the pattern of headlights flickering across the ceiling. But she hadn’t slept; sleep was impossible with her hungover brain fizzing and humming with a chaotic jumble of incoherent thoughts that she could neither make sense of nor silence.

After a while she had heard Artemis come in.

“’Night, Artemis,” Sophie had said wanly. “Sleep well.”

But instead of climbing into her favorite armchair, Artemis had done something she had never done before. She had leaped onto the sofa and sat on Sophie’s stomach, looking at her with luminous eyes. Carefully, Sophie had stretched out a hand and stroked her behind her ears. Artemis hadn’t purred, but she hadn’t tried to claw out Sophie’s eyes either. Sophie had sat up a little and squinted at the cat just to make sure it really was Artemis and not some randomly affectionate interloper. Artemis had stared back at her. The cat had never sought out attention from Sophie before; it disconcerted and upset her to think that all the upheaval had affected Artemis as well. “Oh, Artemis,” Sophie had said, “you must miss them too.”

The cat had drawn back from Sophie’s strokes and turned her back on her before settling down to sleep.

“I understand,” Sophie had said and leaned her head back against her new faux fur cushions. “I don’t want to talk about it either.”

Sophie had considered the greatest triumph of her career to date, and she had wondered, What did it all mean?

Now, in her new lily-scented office, Sophie closed her eyes for a moment to rid herself of the memory of that particular escapade and concentrated on the caress of the warm air on her cheek, carrying with it the promise of summer, before going back to work on her doodle: a mermaid whose tail reached down the margin of her notebook and flared out across the few notes that she had made on the meeting she was now in.

Oh shit, she was in a meeting.

Sophie looked up, and sure enough everyone sitting around the table had stopped talking and was looking at her expectantly.

“So what do you think about that idea then?” James Winter, one of her new executives, pressed her. “I mean, everybody’s done the London Transport Museum and the aquarium, but you’ve got to agree that’s a one-time venue idea, right?”

Sophie glanced at Cal, who was sitting on her right-hand side and had scrawled in inch-high letters on his notepad “CONCORDE.”

“Well, yes, it’s a good idea, James,” Sophie said, sitting up in her chair a little. “But I think there are some issues that need clarification. I mean, where is the nearest decommissioned Concorde—in London? Close enough to get a busload of people there? And second, aren’t they a bit small inside? It might be like having a party in a really long, narrow living room. Maybe if the venue was the hangar and the plane was like a sort of chill-out room…but anyway, have you even found out if it’s possible to hire one for parties?” James looked sheepish. Sophie was not surprised—his ideas, though original, were often a bit pie in the sky. “Look into it and get back to me. Anyone else got any ideas? No? So, let’s catch up on new business leads—anything anyone?”

She knew Cal had some, but before he could open his mouth, Eve’s chair slammed forward and she grinned at Sophie from the other end of the conference table. “That’ll be me then,” she said.

Eight pairs of eyes swiveled in Eve’s direction.

Everyone had been surprised when Eve didn’t hand in her notice on the day Gillian had formally announced that Sophie was taking over from her. She had made the announcement in the open-plan part of the office, and the collective sigh of relief had been almost audible. Gillian had talked briefly about logistics, asked Sophie to come and see her in an hour or so, and then turned on her heel and returned to her office with a spring in her step that Sophie had never seen before.

Pretty soon everyone else who was still standing about and offering Sophie congratulations had noticed that Eve had not moved a muscle but was standing with her arms folded across her breasts, staring dangerously hard at Sophie. It was at that point that everybody had suddenly remembered a job they had to do elsewhere and scuttled away.

Eve had stalked purposefully over to where Sophie was waiting rather wearily for her, feeling that she should have her gun hand twitching at her holster, if only she had one. “So you’re angry you didn’t get the promotion?” Sophie had felt someone had to say it.

“Yeah,” Eve had said evenly. “But not surprised. I knew you’d get it. All that dead best friend’s kids business really gave you the edge, you bitch.”

Sophie had considered the statement. Ironically, it was true; being out of the office for weeks on end, looking after the girls, but keeping her hand in at work, really had boosted her in Gillian’s estimation.

“So you’re leaving?” Sophie had asked Eve flatly. Curiously, she’d discovered she didn’t want Eve to go. Gillian had said it had been a hard choice between the two of them, and Sophie had wanted Eve to stay and be her exit route. She had wanted someone able to take her place just in case she got up the courage to walk out of her job and go around the world or something. She didn’t think she ever would. She had had her one moment of reckless courage, and it hadn’t ended well. But she liked the thought of it being an option.

“No,” Eve had replied, eyeing Sophie. “I’m just going to work out some undetectable way of poisoning you.”

Sophie had laughed again, but a little nervously this time. “Believe it or not, I’m glad you’re staying,” she’d said.

“It’s mainly because I don’t think you’ll be here very long. You’ve gone even softer since you came back from nannying. I reckon you’ll find some poor investment banker to marry you and get knocked up before the year’s up, so I’m just biding my time really.”