Second Chance - Jane Green [51]
She had tried to be normal for the sake of Dustin and Violet. Had even attempted to drive Violet to pre-school one day despite the protestations of an appalled neighbour who had taken on that role. She had strapped Violet in the car, had climbed into the driver’s seat in pyjama bottoms, bare feet and an old sweatshirt of Tom’s, and had pulled out of the driveway.
An hour later she had found herself on I-9 5. No idea how she got there, what she was doing there, or where she was heading. Violet had been happily sucking her thumb in her car seat, listening to XMKids on the radio, and Sarah had started to shake before pulling to the side of the highway and bursting into tears.
Paul hovers in the doorway of the living room and watches Anna tickling Violet, whose peals of laughter ring throughout the house.
‘I’m guessing it won’t be long before you have children of your own,’ Maggie says, placing a hand on Paul’s arm and smiling up at him.
‘Fingers crossed,’ Paul says, and as Anna looks up and catches his eye, he feels a wave of sadness wash over him. Life never turns out to be the way you expect. How could Tom possibly be taken from them at such a young age, and how is it that he and Anna, Anna who would make the most wonderful mother in the world, have not been able to have children?
This morning they had been back to the hospital for egg collection. Egg collection. Sounds so innocuous. Paul remembers how they had laughed when they first heard the term, imagined themselves as country bumpkins, reaching under fat, happy hens to collect the eggs.
When Anna came out of sedation, the specialist told her they had released six eggs from the follicles. Better than last time, and they both left feeling a surge of optimism and hope.
Tomorrow, as always happens, they will receive a phone call to tell them how many of the eggs have been fertilized, or, as happened before, that no eggs have been fertilized, and there are no embryos to potentially carry their hopes and dreams into the future.
It seems inconceivable that out of six eggs, none should be fertilized, but that has been the case so many times already, and Anna doesn’t think she has the emotional fortitude to go through it again, not to mention the financial ability.
Anna never minds being the breadwinner, never minds that the money that keeps the joint account afloat is almost exclusively provided by her. Paul puts the money he earns from freelancing into the same account, but it seems to be a drop in the ocean towards their lifestyle.
Not that it is particularly extravagant – heaven knows Anna could choose to live in a super-smart area of London – but they travel well and often, go to all the best restaurants, and a couple of years ago, just before finally deciding to go forward with IVF, they bought a house in the country.
Well, not so much a house. More of a barn, and one that needed work; it hadn’t been touched since the early seventies. It is on the top of a hill with views for miles over the Gloucestershire countryside, and even though it was just about habitable, they brought their friend Philip, an architect, to see it; and Phil’s enthusiasm for the project was so infectious they found themselves, shortly afterwards, the proud although slightly apprehensive owners of White Barn Fields.
Plus the barn was a bargain. At the time, it seemed so cheap they almost felt it would have been rude to say no. So cheap they paid cash for the entire thing, planning on starting the work immediately. Phil designed an incredible house. A modern stainless-steel and glazed-concrete kitchen, huge windows to take in the views, four bedrooms off a steel gallery upstairs: a huge master, a guest suite, and two bedrooms for the children that were undoubtedly on their way.
A local landscape architect designed a spectacular garden. There would be a cobbled courtyard with huge oversized terracotta pots that would hold