Page 58 of Prognosis So Done

assumed so. She’d told him earlier that there had been no one else and he had believed her. Which meant the baby was his.

His baby.

The words reverberated through every cell of his body and

his hand trembled as the fact sank in. He waited for the usual

feelings of rejection and denial but none came. The idea didn’t seem so antithetical to him now.

He remembered the moment during the operation when he’d had his hands inside her and he was panicking because her warm, sticky blood had been everywhere, but despite all that, there’d been this yearning for his child.

Gill screwed his eyes shut as a shaft of pain stabbed into his heart. Was this the yearning she had felt for the last couple of years? And why had it taken the death of his child and the near death of his wife to realise how strong these emotions could be?

The ache was too much and he forced himself to concentrate on the how’s and whys. The timing fitted with an ectopic pregnancy. Not that he’d been up on her cycle, but if she’d conceived almost immediately it would have put her in the right gestational bracket for a tubal pregnancy.

He knew she was on the Pill to help with the cyst situation and he’d seen her take it on more than one occasion on this rotation. But there had been those couple of days when she’d been ill at the beginning that could have interfered with the absorption of the contraceptive, leaving her unprotected.

She could even have gone on to have a normal period under the influence of the Pill, despite being pregnant, which would explain her obvious confusion when he had told her the news.

So he didn’t believe that she’d known and had been keeping it from him, or that she had deliberately got pregnant either. Her vehement rejection of Katya’s suggestion supported this and Gill felt sure that Harriet would have told Katya about the baby if she had known.

They did confide in each other and Katya had given her the perfect opening after all.

No, she had been walking around for weeks with a time bomb

in her belly, completely oblivious. His child had lodged in

her only Fallopian tube, instead of moving down to the roomy

comfort of the uterus, and when it could no longer grow within

the narrow confines it had met an inevitable end and had almost taken Harriet with him.

Him? Gill stroked her hand and wondered about the sex of the baby despite the ridiculousness of it. A boy or a girl — it hardly mattered now. Would the child have been like him, tall and lean, or like Harriet, toned and tanned? His laugh or her hip mole? His French-ness or her gypsy-ness?

These were questions he’d never have an answer to now. Questions he’d never even cared about or pondered before. But he was now. He’d been a father ever so briefly - many would consider not at all - but the loss he felt was surprisingly heavy.

He looked at Harriet’s pale pink lips and wondered if she’d ever forgive him for what he’d had to do. His paternal instinct had only just kicked in but her maternal instinct had been active for two years now. Her reduced fertility had caused her a lot of grief and he could only begin to imagine how devastated she was going to be.

‘I love you, Harry. I’m sorry,’ he whispered, and gently stroked his thumb in a butterfly caress across her mouth. She stirred a little, murmuring something in her sleep, and he quickly withdrew his hand.

He knew she would wake up eventually but he was relieved to see her sleeping so heavily. She’d been through so much that she needed it — her body stretched to its limits of pain and

blood loss.

But also, while she slept, it delayed the inevitable. He was going to have to tell her the bad news and he couldn’t bear to witness her distress when he told her that not only was there no longer a baby but her ability to have another had been severely compromised.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Katya

standing there. ‘Did you know?’ he asked her quietly.

Katya shook her head solemnly. ‘I don’t think she even knew.’

He nodded, pleased to have confirmed what he’d already surmised. Katya pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the bed and they watched in silence for a few minutes.

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ said Katya. ‘You did what anyone would have done.’

Gill’s gaze didn’t leave the rise and fall of Harriet’s chest. ‘But I’m not just anyone, am I?’ he asked.

‘There is more than one way to have a baby, no? She still has an ovary. She still has eggs. IVF will help. And if not, you can adopt. Or foster.’

‘I know,’ said Gill, turning anguished eyes on the Russian nurse. ‘But she’s still going to be devastated.’

‘Da. She has lost something very important to her. But as I said, Guillaume, there are other ways and don’t forget, you are important to her, too. I suspect as long as you’re the father, she’ll be OK.’

Gill felt the weight of the shrewd gaze - too shrewd for one so young. Him, a father. Something that had horrified him a mere few hours ago suddenly appealed immensely.

The pain of losing the little life they had made together seemed to have kicked started his fatherly instincts. And it had been like rousing a sleeping lion — they had well and truly tripped into overdrive as the desire to see Harriet holding their child almost crushed him.

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