Chapter 3

Two hours in, I put my bag on the empty chair beside me so it would hold something.

His coat had been over the back of it at half six. My husband took it with him when he said he was going down to move the car. The car was still in bay fourteen. I went to the corridor window twice to check, and both times it was sitting there, and both times I came back and sat down again.

Our son Oliver had gone through the doors at ten to seven. A nurse came out at eight and said the first part had gone well. I asked her what time they had started.

"Seven oh four," she said, and she checked the board behind the desk to be sure.

"Seven oh four," I said.

"He's through the opening now. The surgeon's quick, he's always quick." She crouched down to be level with me. "Is your husband still parking?"

"He went at half six." I folded the leaflet in my lap into a smaller square.

"I'll send him through when he comes."

"He'll find me," I said.

The woman two seats down had her phone turned out so the man beside her could see it. By the time I looked, three of them were leaning in.

"That's the garden centre," the man said. "The one out by the ring road."

"They've had the cannons up since ten." She tilted the screen so he got it straight on. "Half the town's gone."

A voice on the phone counted down from three. Then screaming, and a man shouting pink, it's pink, over and over.

The smoke came up in a wall of it. A man walked out of the wall with one hand still on the cannon. His other arm was straight out across the front of a woman in a green dress, keeping the smoke off her, the way you hold someone. He was laughing. He had his coat on.

It was Nathan. The woman in the green dress was Bridget, the girl he loved before he ever met me.

The woman two seats down looked up at me, then back at her screen. She did that twice.

"Sorry," she said. "Is that your husband? He was sat here earlier, he asked me to move my bag."

"He was." I said it to the double doors at the end of the room.

"Oh." She smiled at me, and it was a kind smile, which was the worst of it. "Congratulations, then. Looks like you've got another one on the way."

"That's not mine," I said.

She didn't hear it, or she heard it and put it somewhere else. "How far along is she? She's carrying high."

"I don't know."

"Boys are low, girls are high. That's what my mum says." She turned the phone back towards herself. "Is that seat free? She's coming up from the car park now."

"Take it," I said, and I lifted my bag down between my feet.

She put her coat on it. Every time she shifted, the sleeve slid, and she pushed it back up, and the empty chair had somebody else's coat on it for the rest of the hour.

At twenty past nine my phone went off against my leg. Nathan. *How did the scan go??* Under it, a pink heart. Under that, *give him a kiss from his dad.*

He still called it a scan. He had signed nothing. Mine was the name on the consent form, in my own handwriting, twice.

At the doors Oliver had asked me if the baby would be his brother. I had not answered that one either.

I went to the desk and asked the woman for a pen. She passed me one on a chain and I said I would bring it straight back. I wrote 7:04 on the back of my hand, above the knuckles, where I would have to keep seeing it. I pressed the nib down until the ink went thick and the numbers sat up wet on the skin. Then I sat back down and did not reply.

His pink-heart text still lit on my screen, and 7:04 drying on the back of my hand.