While I Was Sleeping by Dani Atkins

Author:Dani Atkins [Atkins, Dani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2018-09-08T07:31:09.690151+00:00

PART THREE

Chapter 12

Maddie

It was too big. It looked too try-hard. And it was wrapped in the wrong sort of paper. The expensive silver-foil gift wrap had been a mistake. All the other presents were wrapped in colourful paper with Disney princesses or cartoon characters on them. The large square box, with the bright red ribbon around it just showed more than anything else that I knew nothing at all about six-year-old little girls. Somehow I suspected it wouldn’t be the only mistake I made that day.

This was nothing like the childhood birthday parties I remembered. There was no clumsily drawn donkey waiting for his missing tail to be pinned into place; no newspaper-wrapped bundle for pass-the-parcel. This was slick and efficiently organised. Almost as though they’d hired a professional party planner. Perhaps they had. Maybe that was a ‘thing’ these days. From my unobtrusive position on a small padded bench, I looked across the large converted barn (the kind of place people might book for a wedding reception) and watched Chloe efficiently masterminding the event. No. She looked as if she’d need no help in organising something like this, she was clearly a natural.

From the moment I’d woken that morning I’d felt a peculiar sensation building within me. More nerves than excitement; more fear than anticipation. When I’d stood before the full-length mirror in my bedroom, still trying to decide what to wear, I’d run my hands over the smooth white skin of my stomach, that was still just a little bit concave, and tried to imagine it stretched and swollen with the child I’d given birth to six years earlier. I’d shaken my head, as though dismissing the idea as some kind of improbable myth. If it hadn’t been for the photographic evidence in the memory book, I would truly have doubted it had ever happened. My fingers slid over the unblemished skin, longing for a single whispery silver thread of a stretch mark, but there wasn’t one. I was probably the only woman in the world to feel sad about dodging that particular bullet.

But of course there was evidence, real irrefutable evidence, that I’d been a mother. Was a mother. For there was Hope. And today was about celebrating that she was here, that she’d been born against the thousands of odds stacked against her. It wasn’t about me, I told the sad-faced reflection in the mirror with a decisive nod. She nodded back at me, so I guessed she got it.

Ryan had phoned during the week to give me details about the party. ‘There’s going to be about thirty kids there,’ he said, his voice making that sound like a problem.

‘Okay.’

‘I just thought you should know; these parties tend to be a bit full-on.’

‘In a rock and roll, and too much alcohol kind of way?’ I joked.

There was a pause, and then suddenly the familiar sound of his laughter travelled down the phone and filled my head with a million memories I would do far better to forget.

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