Page 57 of The Village Midwife
‘Could you help me out here?’ Zoe asked. Then Billie rummaged in the folds of her blanket and offered up the remote. ‘Thanks,’ Zoe said before switching it off, the room suddenly quiet.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Billie asked.
‘I don’t know. He let me in, but I don’t know where he is now. Would you be happier if he was here with us?’
‘It doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t very well.’
‘I’m guessing that must have been the case, otherwise you’d have gone to your ultrasound, right?’
‘Yeah. But I wasn’t up to going.’
Zoe put the remote to one side and leaned in. ‘Not up to it here?’ she asked gently, pointing to her head. ‘Or here?’ She pointed to her heart. ‘Or were you really just sick? Whichever one it is, it’s all right to say so. We can work with any of them.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Billie, I can’t tell you what to do, but you realise it’s important to go to these appointments? If there’s a problem with you or baby, these are good opportunities to pick it up. I’m not trying to scare you, but I’d hate for there to be something wrong and we didn’t know about it until it was too late to do anything. Unless being scared is the reason you don’t want to go?’
‘I told you, I wasn’t feeling great.’
‘OK…’ Zoe said slowly. ‘So that’s twice you weren’t well enough to go. Should I be worried about that? It seems a lot, doesn’t it?’
‘You’ve never been ill more than once?’
‘But it’s a coincidence that both times you were ill were the days of your scans. Billie, you no-showed at one of my clinic appointments too. I only want to know that there isn’t something deeper going on. I can’t help you if you keep it to yourself.’
Billie gripped her phone as she rounded on Zoe. ‘There’s nothing wrong! Stop saying it! Stop talking to me like I’m going mental!’
‘I never said that.’
‘It sounds like it to me.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I’m only trying to understand what’s going on.’
‘Nothing’s going on – I was ill.’
‘Will you do me a favour?’ Zoe asked after a pause. ‘When the next appointment comes through from the hospital, if you’re not up to going, will you phone and tell me? Even if you don’t want to call the ultrasound department, please tell me. Or your dad so he can tell me. It’s important, as your midwife, that I know. And I realise this sounds patronising, and I’m afraid it has to, because I need to get through to you how important this stuff is. I have to know, and I have to somehow find a way to make sure you go to these appointments, and I have to be sure that when the baby comes, you’re going to be in the right place, mentally, to cope. Because if not?—’
‘You can’t take my baby away!’
‘Nobody wants to, but you have to understand that, even though we’re friends?—’
‘We’re not friends.’
‘—even though we’resort offriends because we’re neighbours, my first duty is to the protection of you and the baby. I have to do what’s right no matter how I might personally feel about it. So believe me, Billie, if I have any doubts, any at all, I will act on them.’
Billie stared at her. It was hard to tell what was going on behind her eyes. ‘Is that a threat?’ she asked finally.
‘No; it’s a promise.’
‘Dad!’ Billie yelled.
Alex appeared at the door almost immediately, and Zoe motioned for him to leave them again.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Give us another minute.’
‘We don’t need another minute,’ Billie said, but when Zoe asked him again to leave, he did.
Zoe took a deep breath and did the thing she hadn’t wanted to do. But her hand was being forced, and she couldn’t see any other way to get through.
