Page 94 of Before You Say Goodbye

He nodded woozily, then swayed to one side without warning. Autumn reached for him, but he was too heavy and he fell to the floor. She straddled him, picking up his wrists and raising them up with her hands. His eyes had closed.

“Marley! Marley! You have to stay awake!” She was bawling into his face. He groaned in response, and she whimpered.

“Please don’t die. I need you, Marley.”

His eyes were suddenly wide and he looked at her as though he was seeing her for the first time.

“Is there really a baby?” he mumbled. She nodded. With no energy to speak left in him, he nodded too, looking at her intently. She knew that he was fighting with all of his might now.

She held on to his wrists and cried.

* * *

“Is it true?” Emma asked Autumn directly. They were sitting side by side in a deserted hospital canteen, surrounded by chairs mounted upside down on plastic tables. It was the middle of the night. The Whittles, in varying degrees of jet-lagged hysteria, had arrived an hour or so before, and Autumn had led them to Marley’s bedside and left them alone. She was more tired than she’d ever felt in her whole life and wasn’t able to cope with the noises they were making: crying, sobbing, exclamations of love and relief. She’d told them she was going to get herself a coffee and, although she’d bought one, it was sitting untouched on the table in front of her. She was looking out at the city lights from the window, picking thoughtfully at the congealed blood beneath her fingernails, when Emma had come to join her. Autumn hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to look at her. She forced herself to respond with a sombre nod.

“Look at me, my darling.”

Autumn shook her head, staring down at her nails. She knew Emma would be ready to fall in love with this baby that she thought was Bowie’s, and couldn’t bear to see that in his mother’s eyes. Emma stood and knelt down at Autumn’s feet, taking both her hands in her own. Autumn avoided her gaze. Emma sighed.

“Nobody knows but me, Autumn. I’ll keep it that way if you want me to.”

“Marley knows,” Autumn said.

“He won’t tell anyone either, my love,” Emma said. “He will know that this decision is yours to make. We both do. Even if Bowie were alive, this would still be your decision, darling.”

A whole host of emotions flooded through Autumn’s body. She had known that Emma, liberal as she was, would never seek to remove Autumn’s right to an abortion if that was her choice. Still, she’d expected her to try to influence her decision. As far as Emma knew, this baby was the only bit of Bowie they had left.

“I know what it’s like to be pregnant and scared witless,” Emma said gently, sitting back down beside Autumn. “Bowie and Marley are the best thing that ever happened to me, but they weren’t part of my plan. Oh God, Autumn, if you could’ve seen the way I reacted when I found out I was having two. I absolutely lost my shit. I howled as if the world was ending. The truth was, I’d barely talked myself into having one baby at that point, I didn’t know I would love being a motherso muchand I knew I might be doing it on my own . . .”

She stopped. She had forgotten herself and she frowned down at the floor. Autumn knew she was searching for something to say that wouldn’t reveal that Ben was not Bowie and Marley’s biological father, and that Maddie wasn’t her daughter by birth.

“I know that Ben isn’t their dad, Emma,” Autumn watched Emma leaping to the wrong conclusion. “Bowie didn’t tell me. Maddie did.”

“Ah.” Emma breathed a sigh, looking relieved. “That’s different, then. Bowie’s biological father was a selfish man. I loved him, but not half as much as he loved himself. I chose to go ahead and have the twins, despite what I knew about him. I hoped that having them might change him, but I was alwaysprepared that it might not work out that way. I knew I might end up on my own with them one day and I was one hundred per cent sure that I would find a way to manage by myself if I had to. I loved being a mum so much that I went on to have Bluebell even when things didn’t improve between us. They were all accidents, but I wanted them. I wanted them so much nothing else mattered. That’s the conclusion you need to come to. We’ll be there, but when your baby cries, or they’re being bullied, or they’re ill, or scared of monsters under the bed, or someone breaks their precious heart, it’s their mother they’re going to want. He or she should be all you care about from the moment you choose to keep this baby. If you can’t give it at least that, then you’re not ready. Nobody can, nor should, tell you how you feel in your heart of hearts.”

“What if I choose the wrong thing?” Autumn aired her greatest fear, her eyes wide with panic.

“You can’t, Autumn, not if you listen to yourself. Don’t be distracted by anything or anyone else. Deep down, you already know what it is you want.”

They fell into a comfortable silence. Autumn thought carefully. More than once in recent weeks, every time she had felt despair about what would happen next, her imagination had strayed to the fantasy life she’d dreamed up with Bowie in the bed they might have conceived a baby on in a hotel somewhere in London. To the cottage and the vegetable patch and the library full of books. Every time, there had been a baby Bowie resting on her hip. There was no question in her mind anymore ? if there was a way to guarantee that this baby was his, she would keep him or her in a heartbeat.

For the first time now, as she sat with Bowie’s mother in the chilly canteen, she let herself wonder what she might do if she knew, for certain, that Marley was her baby’s father. She realised, to her surprise, that she would probably still wantto keep it. They would have to tell the Whittles what they’d done, but that uncomfortable conversation didn’t warrant her terminating this pregnancy.

Really, it was the unknown she was afraid of. She couldn’t know who had fathered her baby until after she’d given birth. But she could know, eventually. There’d be months of internal torture, but she would get her answer, one day. It was complex, sure, but it didn’t have to be. She wondered if she might be overcomplicating things. If the baby was Bowie’s — and it probably was, because they’d made love twice around conception time versus three minutes of whatever that thing was with Marley — then there’d be no harm done. If it was Marley’s, they would deal with it. But it probably wasn’t.

“I need to get back to my boy, love.” Emma stirred beside her. She sank Autumn’s cold coffee theatrically, raising her eyebrows at her cheekily. Autumn groaned in disgust. Emma smiled warmly, holding her arms open and inviting Autumn into them. They held one another tightly.

“I have no idea what you’re thinking,” Emma murmured into Autumn’s hair. “But will you let me tell you one more thing? People usually want most whatever their head is trying its best to talk their heart out of.”

Autumn pulled away, smiling meekly.

“Are you coming too?” Emma asked. Autumn nodded. She didn’t need more time to think. She knew what she wanted to do.

* * *

Marley had made a terrible mess of himself. He’d calmly drawn a bath, then sat in it and slit his wrists with a kitchen knife. It looked as though he’d attempted to make vertical cuts, but he’d managed crooked slashes instead. He swore that he could hardly remember what he had been doing and his despair had completely taken him over. He’d have bled out eventually,but it would have been a slow death. Autumn felt such terrible guilt about leaving him alone, knowing how depressed he was. Marley begged and begged her to stop blaming herself. He’d inexplicably found a strength he hadn’t had before. After they’d stitched him up, he’d confessed to the hospital counsellor that he’d been exploring different options to end his life since he’d been back in New York. He’d been on a suicide mission, he said. It wasn’t her fault. Nevertheless, Autumn knew she’d never make that mistake with someone so vulnerable ever again.

“How are you feeling?” she asked him the following morning. Knocked out by sedatives and painkillers, he’d been sleeping when she’d visited with Emma the evening before, so she’d curled up on a bench outside of his bedroom and tried to rest herself. She had insisted to the Whittles that she’d needed her own bed and had planned to return to her apartment, until she’d remembered that the entire place was smeared with Marley’s blood. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go home.

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