Chapter One
Ashley
Fifteen minutes until I can smoke, Ashley Bennett reminded herself as she drummed her chipped purple fingernails on her chair. Just fifteen tiny little minutes…
For the millionth time that night she scanned the room, checking the babies and making sure no parents or visitors were attempting to sneak into the nursery. Technically it was the ‘Specialist Infant Care Room,’ but she and all the other midwives at Southern Star Hospital called it the nursery.
It was nine at night, and all the preemies were in their little chambers, the jaundice babies dozing fitfully under UV lamps. Tiny humans, born not quite ready.
Ash stared at the closest baby, a purplish walnut of a thing, wriggling on its back. The little girl was probably confused as hell. Eight hours ago she was tucked inside her mother, warm and safe. Wholly connected to someone she loved without needing to do a thing. Now she was here, pinned by gravity, surrounded by light and noise. Ash couldn’t imagine how confused she must be. As she watched, the baby let out a tiny hiccupping squeak, a prelude to the scream Ash could feel coming. She stood and walked over to the crib, running her hands over the warm plastic. “Everything will be okay, baby. Everything will be all right.”
Ash wasn’t if sure what she was saying was true. In her experience things started out beautiful, then turned to shit. Lovely promises bled into bland reality. High hopes crumbled into mundane disappointment. Still, that wasn’t something you told a baby, especially one that wasn’t yours.
As she performed another spot check, Ash’s stomach gave a low rumbling growl. Her breakfast had been vending machine chips washed down with Diet Vanilla Coke. Usually she ate a big meal before a shift, but Zach had woken up, and Ash had eaten a forty-minute argument instead.
Her boyfriend’s gripes were always the same; she was ignoring him, she didn’t love him, she ‘judged him’ for not making as much money as she did. Today he’d followed her around the house, refusing to give her her car keys, insisting she needed to ditch work so they could ‘talk it out.’
In her heart, Ash knew there was nothing else to say. She and Zach hadn’t been happy for months, they weren’t in love anymore, but she couldn’t handle another half-baked breakup. It was just easier to snatch her keys and run out the door, to turn off her phone and come to work.
Work, where everything had its place. Work, where there were rules and order, and lots of other women to talk to. Ash loved being a nurse, but she also loved who she was when she was a nurse; her hair tied back in a ponytail, her scrubs neat and clean. At work she had all the answers, she could solve people’s problems, deliver their children. At work no one knew about her grubby past as a welfare baby turned wild child or her shitty present tied to a man who felt more and more like a ten-kilo bag of cement around her neck.
So go, her mind whispered for the hundredth time. You know it’s not right, so go.
Ash stared at the sleeping baby, all Zen-like and still with her little UV blindfold on. A baby for whom all the world was still a lovely promise.
“It’s not that I’m scared of him,” she whispered. “It’s just every time I tell Zach I want to break up, he says he won’t leave until he finds another place to stay, which he never does because he’s not really looking. And then he’s so nice, I forget why I tried to dump him in the first place, which is crazy because the things he’s called me…”
She shook her head, unwilling to say the words out loud. She left them in the haze of three am arguments when he was drunk, and she was crying and a small part of her whispered, is this the time? Is this the time he picks up the ashtray and throws it at me instead of the wall?
Ash stroked the baby girl’s crib with her finger. “My sister hates Zach. Her name’s Julia. She designs video games.”
The baby made a soft cooing noise that Ash chose to interpret as a sign to keep talking.
“Julia and I are really close. People say we look the same but she’s way smarter than me. And taller. She thinks Zach is a complete,” Ash glanced around to make sure no one was watching, “fuck-knuckle. She won’t come home if he’s there; she goes to her boyfriend’s place instead.”
Ash wasn’t being honest with the preemie. Two weeks ago Julia had come home to find the PlayStation broken, her new Fallout game lying on the filthy carpet and the bottle of gold vodka in her room empty. She’d confronted Zach who claimed Julia owed him money and the PlayStation was broken when he got there.
Ash could only watch as her favourite human in the world packed a bag and left. Before she got in her car Julia told Ash that she loved her but she wasn’t coming back until she ‘dumped that toxic tyre-fire shitheel fuckface on his arse.’
All their lives she and Julia had been practically joined at the hip. Their mum was a train wreck, and their dad took off when they were young. Ash, three years older, had basically raised her baby sister, but she and Jules were more than family, they were best friends. They lived together, knew every detail of each other’s lives, and exchanged roughly ten million texts a day. Except now for the first time since Valeria Zolnerowich told Ash she had a sister, there was silence between them. And all because of an ex-Nitro Circus stuntman who refused to do the washing or get a proper job but still had a hold on Ashley’s heart.
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?” Ash asked the baby. “No, I think you’re mummy’s first. Well, let me tell you something. I hope she has another baby, and I hope it’s a little girl. Sisters are the best thing in the entire world. Much better than boys.”
The baby made another cooing sound, like a baby pigeon.
Ash lay along the preemie’s tank, a hard lump welling in her throat. “Julia used to be the reason I dumped guys. No matter how bad it got, when she sat in front of the TV and refused to move, that’s when I knew it had to end.”
The baby frowned, its tiny mouth puckering slightly. To Ash’s weary brain it seemed like disapproval. “You don’t need to tell me I’m pathetic. Julia already did that.”
“I’m so sick of you letting guys treat you like this,” her sister had yelled as they stood in the front garden. “You deserve so much better!”
“That’s easy for you to say!” Ash had yelled back. “Not all of us get to be tall and hot.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You used to be a model!”
“Yeah, used to be! And it was only ever print work!”
Julia had screamed with hysterical laughter. “Moving past the fact that guys still Facebook friend me to ask if you’re single, and there is a subreddit thread full of your old modelling pictures called ‘I would ten out of ten smash Ashley Bennett,’ what are you doing with this dirtbag?” She pointed toward the window where Zach was sulking. “He makes all your other boyfriends look like Jesus.”
Ash had rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry about the game and the vodka. It was an accident, and I’ll replace them as soon as I get paid.”
“I don’t give a fuck about that!” Julia’s face was scarlet with rage. “I give a fuck about you. That man is scum and I know he’s abusive. I heard him call you an ugly bitch last night and I don’t care how fucking drunk he was, he wasn’t fucking joking.”
Ash’s skin had gone tight and hot. She hated Julia for saying what he said out loud, for making it real in a way she didn’t want it to be real. “Grow up,” she told her sister. “Relationships aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. Not all of us get locked in a cupboard with their perfect narc boyfriend like you did.”
“Max is not a narc!”
“Yes, he is.”
“He’s a cop! And even if he was a narc—”
“He is a narc.”
“Yeah, well at least he treats me well!” Julia pointed a finger in Ash’s face. “Why can’t you find someone who treats you well and just be with them instead of all these fuckheads?”
Ash had laughed in her sister’s face. “Like who? I’m almost thirty, I’ve had a million boyfriends and I can tell you there is no one better out there.”
“So why don’t you be single?” Jules had screamed. “Are you that scared of being without a man that you’d let someone abuse you rather than be alone?”
Ash, without thinking, had said yes.
That was the last straw. Julia had gotten in her car and driven away without looking back. But in the days that followed, Ash realized she was wrong; she wasn’t afraid of being alone, she was afraid of something else. A future that was impossible without a man in it.
Ash smiled at the newborn girl. While all babies were precious, there was no denying the fact some of them came out looking like gnomes. This one, however, was perfect. She had a cupid bow mouth, smooth skin, and a surprisingly thick head of chestnut hair. Get rid of the yellowish tint of jaundice, and she’d be one of the prettiest babies Ash had ever seen. She clutched her belly and imagined the newborn in front of her was her own. That she’d grown inside her body, feeding off her blood, her life, until it was time for her to come into the world.
Ash wasn’t afraid of being alone, but she was so, so afraid of never becoming a mother.
She’d always thought it would happen in her mid-twenties, but here she was almost twenty-nine, and baby-less. Julia didn’t understand, she and Max were years away from considering kids, caught up in their relationship and professional lives, but for Ash the dream had always been a family. A family in the most Disneyfied sense of the word: a father, dependable and strong, a mother full of affection and love. Cute kids in pretty clothes who didn’t flinch when someone knocked at the door or stand on chairs to microwave their tinned spaghetti dinners.
She wanted the fairy tale, everything she and Julia never had, and that picture wasn’t complete without a man.
It was embarrassing, really. With her past, she was as far from a Disney princess as a blonde woman could be and Zach was more Mel Gibson than Prince Charming, but at least he was there. He was a handsome guy who was open to the idea of having a baby. If she dumped him, what next? Start again? Go out on the hunt for another guy and pray that he wanted kids? And what if Zach was right? He was mostly okay with her past, but a lot of guys didn’t want to marry the girl whose bedpost was more notches than wood and who paid for her nursing degree doing nipple-heavy bikini photoshoots. They preferred to have terrible sex with her, then brag to all their friends and never call again.
What if Zach was her last chance to have a baby? She knew there were other options, but she just couldn’t reconcile herself to them. It was painful to admit you wanted a fairy tale family, but it would be even more painful to admit you’d never have it. To go to a fertility clinic in search of a sperm donor, a stranger who would never love their child, or her, the way she’d always dreamed the father of her children would.
But she was almost twenty-nine with a family history of early menopause and a boyfriend who was meaner than a cut snake. The fairy tale option was starting to look like exactly that; a hideously unrealistic fantasy that she should never have believed in in the first place.
Ash traced a finger over the plastic above the sleeping baby’s cheek. “What do you think about me dumping my terrible boyfriend and having a baby on my own?”
Maybe Ash was only seeing what she wanted to see, but it looked like the tiny newborn smiled.
“People would talk,” Ash warned. “They’ll say I’m selfish. They’ll say my kid needs a dad, even if he’s rude and prematurely bald, and on Snapchat the entire time Mummy pushes a human out of her vagina.”
The baby let out a gentle crooning noise.
“You’re crazy,” Ash whispered. “It would never work.”
She kissed the top of the incubator lid and walked away. After looking over the other babies, she sat back on her plastic chair and resumed drumming her fingernails against the arms. The Winnie the Pooh clock on the wall told her she had five minutes of her shift to go. It seemed an unbearable stretch of time, like the minutes you spent waiting for a pregnancy test to flash one line or two. But where was she going to go once work was over? Zach would be waiting at home full of beer and fresh accusations and she couldn’t pretend anymore. She couldn’t keep hoping that maybe he would turn out to be different in every possible way. Julia was right, she needed to end things, but that meant putting her hope of having a baby on the backburner, leaving it to chance that she would meet someone before it was too late for her to become a biological mother. Except…
“What if I did it?” she said, testing the words in the open air. “What if I just…had a baby, by myself? I’d love them more than my mum ever loved me, I’d give them everything I had. Would that be enough?”
The room was silent. The babies, dreaming under the UV lamps, were quiet, but Ash’s guts fizzled, and she knew it wasn’t from hunger. It was the realization that maybe, just maybe, things could be different.
“It won’t look the way I wanted it to look,” she told the room. “But nothing about my life looks the way I wanted it to look. What if I quit smoking and bad men and fantasising about something that might never happen and just…have a baby? On my own?”
The idea seemed to hang in the air like a glowing apparition. Ash felt a huge surge inside herself, as though she’d just been struck by lightning. Suddenly she wasn’t tired. Not even a little bit and she knew exactly what she had to do.
The second her shift was over Ash power-walked to the carpark. As she passed the outdoor bin, she reached into her bag for her cigarettes and threw them in, swish! Then she dug out her phone and called Julia. It went to voicemail.
Ash took a deep breath. “Hey, Jules! I’m so sorry I yelled at you. You were right and I was wrong and I’m going to dump Zach. Do you think you could send Max around to the house tomorrow, so he’ll leave with a minimal amount of wall punching? I can’t be bothered dealing with him tonight so I’m going to stay at a motel. I’ve missed you so much by the way, let’s never fight ever again. I’m sorry for not listening to you and I’m sorry I called your boyfriend a narc. He’s alright, I guess. For a divorced bag of man-pain. Also, I’m going to have a kid!”
She smiled at the night sky, then realised what that sentence would sound like to Julia. “Shit! I didn’t mean it like that, I’m not pregnant and I’m not going to have a baby with Zach, I’m thinking a sperm donor. You know, someone smart and hot with good bone density, if that’s a thing sperm donors have to prove before they’re allowed to wank into a tub. I’m not sure. I’m gonna go look it up. Call me back! Love you! Bye!”