Page 21 of Falling for His Best Friend

‘I’m keeping Kitty company,’ she said.

‘How many weeks are you now?’ Joe asked Kitty. ‘Twenty-two?’

‘Twenty-four.’

His question had purely been conversational. He knew exactly how many weeks she was.

‘We had a scan today,’ Jess told him. He thought it was strange that she said ‘we’. He knew that genetically the baby was hers and she obviously felt a connection but Kitty was the one who was pregnant. ‘Would you like to see the picture?’ Jess asked.

‘Sure.’

‘I’m not sure that Joe is as interested in our baby as we are,’ Cam told his wife.

‘It’s fine,’ Joe said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

Jess went to the fridge and removed a small square black and white picture from where it had been held in place by a magnet. She held it out to Joe.

This was OK. He’d seen plenty of ultrasound scans before. It was just a baby. As long as he didn’t think that this baby was responsible for the change in Kitty’s shape and the subsequent change in his perception of her it was all good. At this stage, it just looked like any baby. With a perfect profile, sucking its thumb.

‘Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?’ he asked.

Jess shook her head. ‘We can’t agree. I want to know, but Cam—’

‘I want a surprise,’ Cam said, finishing Jess’s sentence for her as she started coughing. Cam fetched her a glass of water and Jess drank it in fits and starts, between coughs, until she could speak again.

‘I want to know because I want to decorate the nursery. If we’re only going to do this once I’d like time to be prepared.’

Joe suspected that meant that they would find out the sex. In his experience the woman got her way in these things. But who would have the final say? Who would the doctor listen to? Technically, Kitty was the mother. What would she say? He didn’t want to ask that question. He decided to stick to a safer topic. ‘Only once, you say?’

‘I’d be happy with one,’ Cam said. ‘It’s one more than we thought we’d have.’

‘I’d like more, but I’m not going to be greedy,’ Jess admitted.

‘Let’s just get this one here safely,’ Cam said.

‘I know, I’m not going to get ahead of myself but I loved growing up with a sister. I couldn’t do this without her,’ Jess said as she took the ultrasound picture back from Joe and hugged Kitty, ‘and I’d like to think of my own children having the same relationship with a sibling.’

Joe had brothers and sisters, but none of them were full siblings, and he certainly didn’t share the bond with any of them like Kitty and Jess had. ‘There’s no guarantee that they’d get along, you know. I’ve got five siblings and I don’t really get along with any of them.’ In fact, he had always thought Kitty was more like a sister than his real ones. Until the past week at least, when he’d started having very unfamilial thoughts about her.

‘I find that hard to believe,’ Cam said. ‘I picked you as one of those blokes that gets on with everyone.’

Joe laughed. ‘Maybe that says more about me than them.’

Kitty came to his defence. ‘You’re not really close in age to any of them and you didn’t really grow up together. That makes a difference.’

‘I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up virtually as an only child, and in a lot of ways I think I had a happier childhood for it.’ His teenage years maybe hadn’t been quite so happy, but that was because he’d been old enough to realise that he didn’t really fit in with any of his families. But that wasn’t because he didn’t have siblings—that was because his mum and dad hadn’t been able to stay married. To anyone. And that had meant he’d constantly had his boundaries and his living arrangements changed around him, completely out of his control. He hadn’t like that and had become rebellious, which had made him difficult to live with. Not just for his parents but probably for some of his brothers and sisters, too. It was circumstances that had made him.

‘I didn’t know you were one of six,’ Jess said.

‘Two half-siblings and three step-siblings. In some ways I’m surprised it’s not more. My parents divorced when I was four. Mum was Dad’s second wife, but they’ve both been married three times now. That’s a lot of families to juggle and a lot of different dynamics. I think I preferred it when I was on my own. In a lot of ways it made life easier.’

Joe didn’t think much of a typical family unit but he knew his reservations were due to watching his parents struggle to keep marriages together. Although struggle wasn’t the right word—neither of them really seemed to put much effort into making their marriages last. They both seemed to prefer just to give up and move on to the next one. Joe knew that Kitty and Jess had grown up in a stable family unit, at least until tragedy had taken both their parents when Kitty had been nineteen, and he could understand why they expected to have the same stable environment. But in his experience that was virtually impossible. The impossible dream.

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