39 Weeks (55 page)

James didn’t answer, didn’t even look at anyone, while Tricia continued ministering to him and tried to mop up his bloody nose.

Shelley held on to Robs arm but he shrugged it off and turned his back on James.
Dad still grinning said to me ‘g
uess Rob’s driving you home then?’

‘Guess so.’ I said.

And that’s exactly what happened. Rob took me home and Mum
, Dad and Shelley followed.
Tricia
stayed with James and as we walked away I saw her helping him up. 

28
th
February – Week 39 + 1 Year

It
’s
been a year since Ella was born. Today was her first birthday and we were having a bit of a party get-together to celebrate. Everyone was there who’d been there at the birth, including James. I know impossible to believe but he was.

He was with Tricia and
she was six months pregnant with James’s baby. A
nd unbelievably
Rob was okay about it. As soon as he began to accept the fact that I wasn’t in love with James
, had never in fact been
even a little bit
in love with James, and
it became obvious that
after Rob’s caveman outburst James and Tricia had commiserated with each other over how rubbish love is, well when you’re with the wrong one it is anyway, and James had switched his affections to a much more eager recipient, name
ly Tricia who was only too pleased
to be the recipient, Rob was fine. We didn’t see them often of course, well I met Tricia quite often as always but as a couple we didn’t see them often, but when we did Rob and James were extremely civil to each other and didn’t mention the past at all, as if it had never happened. 

Marsha and Mac were there, and Harry and Flora were being unusually well behaved.
Marsha doted on Ella, and had been such a help to me over the past year that I’d come to think of her as my adopted
big
sister.

Mum was there, and Dad was there. They weren’t together exactly but they weren’t exactly separate either. Dad had broken up with Stella last Easter, and Mum had only seen Colin a couple more times after their trip to York, and since then Dad had taken Mum out to dinner a few t
imes, and they’d even been away for a weekend together
in
Paris just before Christmas, so maybe they were finally getting over their second go at puberty, or maybe not
,
judging by the way Mum was flirting with him
today
. 

Shelley and Nick were boring everyone to death with their wedding plans, due to take place in July, and an expensive sumptuous affair it all sounded as if it was going to be as well. I was to be the maid of honour, and I was, honoured I mean, and the rest of our ‘gang’ were going to be bridesmaids.
Nick’s brother would be the best man and Rob was going to be chief usher.
She’
d landed her job at Schuster’s and the increased salary she was now earning was helping to pay for the whole wedding extravaganza they’d planned.

Doreen and Jack had come, and Shirley. I was still looking after all the accounts for Shirley and she and her daughters had branched out a bit and were cleaning the building opposite Fishers now as well. But I hadn’t gone back to work, well not at Fishers anyway. When the time came for me to return to work I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t bring myself to leave Ella with someone else or at a nursery. Jack had done a good job while I was away, and he’d passed another exam so now it was his job, permanently, and I’d taken on some more accounts that I could do at home,
Norman Steadman had asked me to do his sons tax return and that had led to a couple of his friends asking me if I’d do theirs, and well it all sort of snowballed from there.

Rob and I had picked up where we left off before his excursion to the Orkneys and had moved his stuff upstairs to mine. It wasn’t an official moving in or anything like that, but over the following few weeks after Ella was born more and more of his things ended up at my place until he was just living there instead of downstairs. Of course things weren’t exactly the same
,
I mean we had Ella now
,
but Rob was brilliant and more often than not was the one who got up in the middle of the night to see to her
in those first few weeks
.
He’d landed a job on the local paper, it wasn’t his dream job or anything but it was a regular salary
, and it did mean he didn’t
have to go away, although he still did
the odd bit of freelance when he got the chance.

Ella was growing all the time, she’d taken her first steps all by herself a couple of weeks after Christmas and was now toddling around on her own, which was good and bad. Good because it was great she was walking albeit clumsily and falling over a lot, and bad because it meant she could now reach everything you didn’t want her to touch and was trying ever more adventurous things. She’d learnt a few words but hadn’t quite got to making a sentence yet, but she was so cute and doted on by so many people that to tell the truth she barely needed to be able to talk much
anyway
.

And me? I was as happy as
could be. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever got along without Ella, she was everything to me and the best thing that had ever happened, very closely followed by Rob
. I was so lucky
,
I had the man I loved and my beautiful daughter, what more could a girl ask for or want.

There was one blip on the radar, if you could call it a bl
ip, my period was a week late
.

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