Oh my God. Oh my God. The sick helpless feeling of the dream was back, and I heard myself gasp. Aaron murmured in his sleep, throwing an arm over his face. He couldn’t see this. I didn’t even want it between us, the ugly word, the end of the spectrum of ‘jokes’ people made about us. Cradle-snatcher.
Hands shaking, I clicked on it and made it go away. Luckily, my settings meant no one would have seen it yet. Then I clicked on the profile, the stupid fake name. The icon was a single rose, colourised against a black and white background. There was no info, and the person had made no other posts. The profile was brand new. What the hell was this? Someone had it in for me, but who? I ran my mind over my life. Who had I hurt, enough that they would do this to me? I’d dated lots of guys in my single years, of course, and some of them I had probably hurt without meaning to, just as I had been hurt. All part of the contact sport known as dating, which injured more people than rugby. Would anyone come out of the woodwork after all this time, and say such terrible things? Or was it as I’d thought first, a disgruntled service user? But I had only ever done my best to help them, the troubled kids we worked with.
Before Aaron I had never dated anyone younger. Even in my teens, I’d been too much of a good girl to have any boyfriends. My mother would not have allowed it. And I worked in a charity that protected children from abuse! Of course, that didn’t mean much – I thought of the recent scandals around Oxfam and Save the Children. That couldn’t happen to us. We were too small, we wouldn’t survive. They would likely have to fire me if anything got out, wash their hands of me as thoroughly as possible to save the charity. I’d lose everything I’d built up all these years, my chance to be a CEO. And it wasn’t true. The unfairness of it made me gasp again. Who was this? Who could possibly hate me enough to do this, and when I was heavily pregnant too?
The answer came to me as if it had always been there. The name I had pushed out of my mind when making lists of who would want to hurt me. The person I had genuinely wronged, who made me feel clammy all over with guilt if ever I thought about her, which I tried not to do.
His wife.
When Aaron got up the next day, he found me dozing in the living room with the cat draped over me, body bent out of shape, eyes dry and restless. I’d spent most of the night refreshing Facebook, terrified something else would appear, although I’d updated my privacy settings to draconian levels and blocked the anonymous account. I wished I had taken a screenshot to prove it was real, apart from anything else. I would have to tell Sharon. Oh God. Of all the things.
‘You OK, babe?’ He was frowning, worried. He looked so sweet in his shirt and tie. I’d had to take him to buy a real one, show him how to knot it. ‘Did you not sleep?’
‘Bad dreams. About the stupid baby class.’
He stroked my lank hair back from my forehead. ‘Oh hey, how could you know what to do when you never learned before?’
‘Poor baby with a dummy mummy.’ I was trying to joke but my tone was as exhausted as I felt.
‘Maybe you should stay home today.’
‘No, no, I’m not on leave for another month.’ Having covered the pregnancies and child-related emergencies of work colleagues for seventeen years now, I was determined to inconvenience no one with mine. Certainly not before the baby was even born.
He cleared his throat. ‘Got some news just there now.’ He held up his phone.
‘Yeah?’ Not something else bad, please.
‘They finally found my adoption details – I can see my birth records, if I want.’
I should have been pleased for him. But all I could feel was a weight of dread in my chest, that things had taken a wrong turn somehow, and I didn’t know how to find my way back. ‘That’s great, babe.’
‘You’ll come with me?’ He looked so vulnerable as he said it, so young.
‘Of course I will.’ I forced a smile, but I couldn’t help thinking that this was another step away from peace, towards the chaos I feared so much.
That morning at work, I was no earthly use to anyone. Dorothy had to tell me three times to answer my phone to one of our biggest donors. I could see her looking at me, thinking poor cow, the baby is eating her brain. Was that what happened? I’d read that they formed their bones from yours, leaching you out like a husk. I felt so helpless – I’d always been able to rely on myself, and now I’d have to lean on Aaron, who could barely take care of himself. I turned the messages over and over in my head, no idea what to do.
I had to tell Sharon. But I was afraid. I told myself I’d wait till the mailing was over and done with. It would have gone out that morning, so donations should start coming in later today.
After lunch – I forced myself to eat a salad from Tupperware at my desk, which was wilting in the heat of the plastic – Sharon called me in. It was when she liked to strike, to catch people at their lowest ebb. She had my mother’s instinct for that. I resented everything about the process, having to drag my lumbering self to Sharon’s office, the fact that she didn’t ask me to sit down right away so I stood there as she peered over her glasses and typed two-fingered at her computer.
‘Jax.’
‘You wanted to see me?’
‘I thought we ought to have a little chat.’ The words little chat were so innocuous. They should mean a cosy catch-up over tea and cake, but in a work context they meant, you are in serious trouble.
My breath hitched. ‘I need to sit down, Sharon.’
Her eyes flicked to me. ‘Of course.’
We adjourned to the softer chairs to the side of her desk. The coffee table was marked with rings and stacked with copies of our in-house magazine, Protect. A simple word that packed an emotional punch. There were things I wanted to protect. My child. My relationship. My job. Lately it felt like everything was at risk. As I lowered myself into the chair, I realised I wouldn’t be able to get out again without help. ‘What is it?’ My heart was pounding, and I felt as nauseated as I had at the start of my pregnancy.
She smoothed out her skirt. Sharon was very much of the Birkenstocks and tie-dye school of charity CEOs, but that didn’t mean she was soft. ‘The mailing went out as planned?’
‘I believe so, yes.’
Sharon slid two pieces of paper across the table to me. One was an envelope, with her own name on it – she liked to be part of the mailing, to check it was all up to scratch. The other was the letter that went inside it. ‘Can you look at that for me, please?’
I leaned over, with difficulty. It looked fine to me. I opened my mouth to say so, then I saw it. The name on the letter was not the same as on the envelope.
A flush of dread rinsed through me. How – what . . . ?
The names had been transposed. ‘Is it . . . ?’
‘It’s every one, yes. I already spoke to the printer.’
This was a disaster. Every single mail-out had been addressed to the wrong person. In theory people might still open the letter and donate, but our supporters were old-fashioned and easily riled. A slip-up like this could cost us thousands. ‘I . . . don’t know how this happened.’
‘You signed it off with the printer. They showed me your signature on the proofs and the mailing list. You didn’t notice the columns were off?’