‘Nothing to see yet,’ she said with a small, cautious smile. ‘It’ll be a couple more months before I start to show.’ He nodded again, as if he had the faintest clue about any of this. As if at the sight of her hands on her belly he wasn’t remembering the last time he’d seen her fingers spread across her skin like that. He held her gaze, wondering if she remembered, too. But she gave a little start, pulling back her shoulders and straightening her posture—leaving him in no way uncertain that if she was remembering, she wasn’t too happy about it.
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ he said, giving her the space her expression told him she needed.
AS THEY STROLLED along the beach, Rachel felt the tension of the past few hours draining from her limbs, being replaced by the gentle warm glow of summer sunshine. They’d walked down the coastal path from the cottage, barely exchanging a word, but somehow the silence felt companionable, rather than awkward. She was taken aback, as she had been at the window upstairs, by the beauty of Leo’s home. It perched on a cliff above the beach, and even with the tarpaulin for a roof, and the building materials dumped in the yard, the way it nestled into the rock and sand, shutters on the outside of the window, even the way the front door reflected the colour of the sea all helped it look as if it were a natural part of the landscape, as if it had emerged from the Jurassic rocks fully formed and—almost—habitable.
With the sun warming her hair, and the gentle exercise distracting her from the slight queasiness still troubling her stomach, she reached a decision. They were never going to be able to be friends if they didn’t understand each other. Leo had asked her a question, one she’d avoided answering up till now, but he wanted to know why she needed a plan so badly, and if she was to stand any chance of him cooperating with it, then she at least had to expect to tell him why.
‘You asked me why I need a plan,’ she said, as they stopped momentarily to step over a pool of spray that had gathered on the rocks.
‘To feel safe, you said.’
She nodded, wondering how she could explain, where to start.
‘When I was fourteen, my parents left me home alone while they went out. It wasn’t anything special, just cinema and dinner, I think. I’d gone to bed, but woke up when I heard a noise from my dad’s study. I went downstairs and disturbed a burglar.’
Leo had stopped on the sand, and turned to face her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, his face lined with genuine concern. ‘That must have been awful for you.’
‘I got a nasty bump to the head—he lashed out as he tried to get away—but I recovered pretty quickly. Not that you would have believed that if you’d listened to my parents.’
She dropped to her bottom in the sand, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking out over the water.
‘They blamed themselves,’ she explained. ‘Thought that they never should have left me, that I’d been in huge amounts of danger and that I’d been lucky to survive.’
‘They must have been so relieved that you hadn’t been more seriously hurt.’
She shook her head, trying not to get drawn back into the suffocating anxiety her parents had forced on her.
‘It never felt that way. They spent so much time concentrating on all the terrible things that could have happened, it got harder and harder to remember.’ She fell quiet as she watched the waves, and glanced up a couple of times, following the path of the seagulls above the water. The sand was warm beneath her thighs, and she turned her face to the sun, letting the rays soak into her skin. Because she’d still not got to the difficult bit.
It had never occurred to her before that her planning might be a problem. That her need to know when and how the events in her life would unfold had become something that held her back, rather than helped her. It wasn’t until she’d seen the revulsion in Leo’s face when he’d glimpsed her plan that she’d realised how others might see her, how far from ‘normal’ her life had become. But it didn’t really matter what anyone else thought about it. Even when that person was the father of her child, because she didn’t know how to live any differently.
‘I understand it must have been a difficult time...’ Leo had dropped to the sand beside her, looking out over the water, as she was, so she didn’t have to worry about his intensely blue eyes following every emotion that fluttered across her face. She wanted him to understand, because she wanted, needed, them to be friends. So she fought away the instinct to hide what had happened next, to protect herself and her family, by skirting around the behaviour that had locked them all into their fears.
‘It was, but what happened next was harder.’ It was the first time she’d admitted that. That the love and care that her parents had shown her in the weeks after the burglary had been more difficult to cope with than the initial trauma.
‘My parents wouldn’t let me out of the house.’ She really hadn’t meant for that to sound so dramatic. And she knew from the way that Leo had turned sharply to look at her that he’d misunderstood. ‘They didn’t lock me in or anything,’ she clarified quickly, imagining a bevy of policemen or social workers or other officials turning up on her parents’ doorstep and accusing them of crimes they’d never committed. ‘They were just worried about me, and they liked to know where I was. They became anxious if I was out of the house too long, so I was never allowed to friends’ houses or after-school clubs—I didn’t really have any hobbies outside of home.’
‘I still don’t see what this has to do with the plan you presented this morning,’ Leo said. His voice was soft, and his hand twitched in the sand, as if he wanted to reach for her. For a moment, she wished that he would. That he would thread his fingers with hers. Somehow she thought that it might be easier, to draw on his strength, to face her past together. Ridiculous, she told herself. They had only known each other a few weeks. Had really spent only a few waking hours together. There was no reason she should feel stronger just for having him there. But she couldn’t deny how that twitch of his hand had affected her, how much she wished for the contact.
‘I’ll get to it, I will. It’s just all tied up with everything else. I don’t know how to tell you just that, if you see what I mean.’ She turned to look at him and he nodded. ‘I was still in school, they at least thought that I could be safe there, but I could see how much I was missing. I was losing touch with my friends, having to go straight home every night while they were meeting in parks and shopping centres and fast-food places. I was lonely, and I knew that things couldn’t carry on as they were, with me speaking to no one outside school but my parents. So I negotiated a system. I would be allowed out with my classmates and friends if I provided my parents with a schedule of where I would be and when. They would have the landline numbers of anywhere I would be so that they could call and check I was really there. I had a mobile as well, of course, so that they could always get hold of me.
‘If I was going out at the weekend, I’d plot out exactly what I’d be doing and when, give the itinerary to my parents, and then stick to it like my life depended on it. If they called and I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, I knew that all hell could break loose. It wasn’t just that they’d ground me—I knew that they would be terrified. And much as I didn’t agree with the way they were wrapping me in cotton wool, I knew that they were only doing it because they loved me. Everything they did was because they were terrified of me getting hurt and they only wanted the best for me. I would never do anything that would upset them. They’d been through enough. Or felt that they had, at least. I didn’t want to add to it.’
‘So how long did it take?’
She looked at Leo in confusion.
‘How long did what take?’
‘Until it rubbed off. Until you started to believe that the schedule kept you safe, the same way your parents did.’