In the meantime she’d spoken to Patrick once on his mobile. He’d taken Jack to a private hospital in Manly and they were waiting for an X ray on his arm. He hadn’t even asked about Saskia, and he obviously assumed that Ellen was still at home, because he told her to try to get some sleep.

How would he react when he heard she’d actually been at the hospital, and that she’d talked to Saskia? Would he see it as a betrayal? Was it a betrayal?

The thing was, talking to Saskia hadn’t just felt like the right thing to do, it felt somehow imperative, for both of them.

Ellen thought about the despair on Saskia’s face as she lay in that narrow hospital bed. She seemed to Ellen like someone who had lost everything in a natural disaster, someone who was trying to grapple with the fact that the entire framework of her life no longer existed.

Had she really hit “rock bottom”? Perhaps that despair Ellen thought she saw was just the pain (which the nurse had said would be considerable) and that once she was back on her feet, she’d be back to her old ways.

Her phone rang on the passenger seat beside her and she saw that it was Patrick calling. He must be home with Jack by now and was wondering where she was. She was only a few minutes away, so she didn’t bother pulling over to answer.

There was no question that this would mark a turning point for him. Now that Jack had been hurt he would definitely want to get the police involved. If Ellen tried telling him that she thought Saskia may have reached her own turning point, he probably wouldn’t believe her. She remembered him crawling across the bed in that eerie dawn light, his face ugly with fear and fury.

If she was wrong, if Saskia continued to stalk them, then Patrick’s hatred for her was gradually going to destroy him. It was like acid, corroding him from the inside. She felt that it had already given his personality sharp edges. Most of the time those edges were hidden by the identity he liked to show the world: the easygoing, straightforward Aussie bloke. But over the last few months, as she’d got to know him, to truly know him, as they both moved beyond the infatuation stage, she’d seen the edges reveal themselves. The bitterness. The mistrustfulness. The anxiety. And he’d already suffered so much grief in his life before he even met Saskia.

She wondered what sort of person Patrick would have been if Colleen had lived. They probably would have had more children after Jack. Patrick would have been a typical dad, involved with the school, leaving the domestic decisions to his wife—a simpler, sweeter person. A happier person.

And the tiny baby who had waved at them yesterday would never have existed.

Well, whatever. A foolish and pointless line of thought.

She yawned again. She was not only exhausted but starving: that urgent, ravenous hunger she’d never experienced before pregnancy. When she got home, she wanted to climb into bed with a huge plate of toast and a cup of tea, and then she wanted to pull the covers up and fall straight into a deep, dreamless sleep. She would tell Patrick she was too tired to talk, too tired to talk about anything—the past, the future, the present.

He doesn’t …

Don’t think about it, she ordered herself sharply.

But it was useless, because she knew that on some level she hadn’t thought about anything else since last night, even in spite of everything that had happened. It had added to the nightmarish quality of the past few hours.

He doesn’t love me as much as he loved Colleen. He has doubts. He looks at me and thinks of her and sees that it’s “not the same.” He will never love another woman the way he loved Colleen.

She examined her feelings, slowly and tentatively, as if she was lifting a piece of clothing to examine a gunshot wound.

Did it hurt?

Yes, quite a lot.

She thought about Saskia’s matter-of-fact acceptance that Patrick would always love Colleen best, and she understood something with simple, startling clarity: I don’t love Patrick as much as Saskia does.

Saskia hadn’t cared if she loved him more than he loved her, whereas Ellen did care. If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.

What she really wanted was to be adored. She was having a baby. She deserved to be adored.

Well, that was just infantile, wasn’t it?

Women had babies all the time without the support of an adoring partner. She had a loving partner. That should be enough! She was lucky! Her own mother had given birth without a man.

Ellen was lucky. She had more than her fair share of love. In fact, perhaps that was the problem. She’d been spoiled with far too much adoration.

She would forget about what Patrick had said about Colleen. She would never think about it or tell a friend, and she would certainly never mention it to him.

Yes, it might be difficult, but it was the right thing to do.

There was a polite toot of a horn from the car behind her, and she realized that the traffic light she’d been waiting at had turned green while she was sitting there feeling virtuous. She lifted her hand in apology and put her foot on the accelerator.

Lucky, she reminded herself.

“So you’re going to need a lot of support over the next couple of months,” finished up my doctor. He seemed very young, with flushed, baby-smooth cheeks. I must be getting old.

I remember when Mum was in the hospital she couldn’t get over the youth of her doctors. “I get the giggles,” she told me. “They sound so serious, but they just look like kids playing dress-up!” she whispered to me.