After a fitful afternoon spent napping, considering calling my mum then thinking better of it, worrying about what might be happening at the office in my absence, standing side on at the mirror in the bedroom to see if there was any evidence of a bump, and reading every available article on the internet, I was relieved when Jenny called to see what I was doing. There was only so long you could sit around being excited on your own and I’d given up on getting through to Alex after about four hours. He wouldn’t mind my telling Jenny, I rationalized. I couldn’t keep something this huge all to myself until he decided to return to civilization, I had to tell one other human or I’d go completely insane and, clearly, Cici Spencer didn’t count as a human.
‘I’m so glad you didn’t have plans tonight,’ Jenny said, greeting me on the corner of 8th Avenue and 14th Street. She waved the back of her left hand directly in my face with an enormous grin on her face. ‘Mason had to go out of town for a work thing and I was like, um, I just got engaged, I can’t sit in my apartment staring at the walls, can I?’
‘Not really,’ I said, bracing myself to deliver the news. ‘Jenny, I—’
‘I texted Erin last night and she was like, when can I see the ring? And I was like, how about tomorrow? And she was like, let’s order in, open a bottle of champs, start wedding planning?’ She was talking at a mile a minute, her hands flying around in front of her. ‘I picked up some magazines from Barnes & Noble at lunch. Do you have any idea how much wedding magazines cost? Actually, yeah, I guess you do.’
‘I got some news today,’ I started again. ‘I really want to talk to you about it.’
‘About the job?’ Jenny asked, not waiting for a reply. ‘Cool. We were up all night talking about the wedding. And boning, obviously, but we already agreed on a bunch of stuff.’
‘Such as?’ My news could wait.
‘We’re thinking destination,’ she said, the smile never leaving her face. ‘We both love Maui, so that’s the most likely option. We want to keep it small, just us, immediate family, close friends. I want it to be so special.’
‘Sounds perfect,’ I replied. ‘Any idea when it’ll be?’
Don’t say next summer, I added silently. Don’t say next summer.
‘Probably next summer,’ she replied.
Bollocks.
‘It’ll depend on the place, I guess.’ Jenny pushed her masses of curls behind her ears where they stayed for a second before immediately springing back around her face. ‘Mason is going to look at some resorts. He wants to pick the place.’
I couldn’t quite believe my ears. I’d assumed total wedding-related breakdown was imminent, but here she was, rationally including her fiancé in the plans for her small, special wedding. I was naturally very concerned.
‘Hey, before we get to Erin’s place I wanted to ask you something,’ she said. ‘While it’s just me and you.’
With a concerned smile, I bundled up my announcement and nodded.
‘Angela Clark.’ She stopped in the street and took hold of both of my hands. ‘Will you be my maid of honour?’
‘Yes!’ I shouted as loud as my English-girl-in-public lungs would allow. ‘Yes, I will! Wait, do I have to buy my own dress?’
‘Traditionally, in America, yes,’ Jenny began jumping up and down on the corner of 8th Avenue and Horatio, ‘but we both know I’m way too much of a control freak to let that happen.’
Starting as she meant to go on.
‘This is so amazing, thank you,’ I said, tears prickled at the corners of my eyes, and they had nothing to do with the bitter wind that whipped around the Manhattan high-rises. ‘You’re not going to make me wear anything stupid, are you?’
‘I’m going to buy two dresses,’ she replied, dragging me into a tight, warm hug. ‘A really cute one and a really heinous one. Which one you get depends on how good of a maid of honour you are between now and then.’
I thought back to Jenny’s behaviour before my wedding. By her reckoning, I should have made her walk down the aisle in a bin bag.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said, throwing up my best three-fingered salute. ‘Brownie Guide promise.’
‘I’m going to ask Erin to be a bridesmaid, but I wanted to ask you first,’ she said as we looked left and then sprinted across the street. Who had time to walk to a crossing when it was freezing out? No New Yorkers I knew. ‘That way I could always draft her in if you said no.’
‘Why would I say no?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Because it’s me,’ she replied, smiling sweetly. ‘Planning my wedding. In New York.’
The reality of what I’d just agreed to hit me like a ton of pastel-pink sugared almonds. In the next nine months, I was having a baby and a bridezilla and all bets were off when it came to which one would be the most stressful. I’d spent all afternoon looking at photos of episiotomies, and in that moment I wasn’t entirely certain I wouldn’t choose one of those over an afternoon of wedding dress shopping with the world’s most demanding woman.
What did an enormously pregnant woman wear to a wedding? Did they make maternity bridesmaids’ dresses? Maybe one with those little flaps that let you pop your boobs out for a feed. If they didn’t make them, they were missing a trick. I wondered if Jenny would be mad if I gave birth the week before the wedding. Or the week of the wedding. Or, please god no, at the wedding. I refused to let my baby come into the world surrounded by doves: everyone knows they’re nothing but albino pigeons with good PR.
‘Now,’ Jenny said. ‘What did you want to tell me?’
I looked at her shining face and sparkling ring and shook my head. I couldn’t do it. I was going to be pregnant for nine months, Jenny could only be newly engaged for a matter of days. Even though I wanted to tell her more than anything, my news could wait at least twenty-four more hours.
‘Um, there’s a new Beyoncé song coming out,’ I replied, crossing my fingers inside the pocket of my parka. ‘Yeah, it’s supposed to be amazing.’
‘All hail Queen Bey,’ Jenny said, touching her fingertips to her lips and then blowing a kiss to New York City. ‘Maybe she heard about my engagement and wanted to celebrate.’
‘Maybe she did,’ I agreed, snuggling into my insufficiently padded jacket. If I died of pneumonia before she made it down the aisle, I wouldn’t be maid of anything. ‘Maybe you could have her play at the wedding?’
Her eyes lit up with worrying inspiration and I sent Mason a silent prayer as we made our way through the winding streets of Manhattan’s West Village.
‘That’s weird.’
I pulled out my phone to check the time as we arrived at Erin’s. She hated early guests, it was a pet peeve she claimed stemmed from all her years working in PR where no one likes Johnny Right On Time. Personally, I deeply appreciated the first person to arrive at the party – it meant I wasn’t going to be sat there on my tod, re-enacting my surprise nineteenth birthday party when Louisa told everyone the wrong time and the surprise was that no one showed up.
‘What’s weird?’ Jenny asked, fluffing out her curls on Erin’s doorstep.
‘I’ve got fourteen missed calls from Erin but no voicemails.’ I looked up in panic. ‘Is this an SVU thing? What if she’s being burgled right now and she’s trying to tell us?’
‘Or what if she’s butt-dialling you?’ Jenny suggested, dampening my enthusiasm for home invasion with wide, warning eyes. ‘Or her kid has her phone?’
‘Also possible,’ I conceded. ‘But still, why isn’t she answering the door?’
‘Because you haven’t knocked?’ She reached across me and belted the big, brass door-knocker against the stately wooden door. ‘Seriously, Angie baby, I worry about you. Please stop watching so much Law & Order.’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ I muttered.
It was a promise I could not keep.
‘Before you come in, you have to swear you’re going to be calm.’ Erin opened the door with a truly fearful look on her face. ‘Swear it.’
‘Is someone there?’ I hissed, grabbing Jenny’s arm. ‘Blink if you want me to call the police.’
‘Someone is here,’ she replied, stepping to the side and letting us into the house. With great reservations, I followed Jenny inside. ‘But I think we’ll need an ambulance before the police get involved.’
‘Congratulations, Jenny,’ my friend muttered as she tossed her jacket on the foot of the stairs. ‘That’s a beautiful ring, Jenny. You’re going to make a beautiful bride, Jenny.’
Sadie Nixon, Jenny’s roommate, sort-of-supermodel and definite pain in the arse, stood in the middle of Erin’s sitting room, holding an enormous bottle of Perrier-Jouët champagne in one hand and a samurai sword in the other.
‘Oh god,’ I whispered, trying to pull Jenny and Erin back into the hallway. ‘She’s finally lost the plot. She’s going to kill us all!’
‘Guess what?’ Sadie screeched at the top of her high-pitched voice. She didn’t wait for us to guess. ‘I’m getting married!’
She sliced the top off the bottle of champagne, sending a shower of golden liquid shooting through the air to drench Jenny from head to toe.
Exactly seventeen minutes passed between La Lopez excusing herself to use Erin’s guest bathroom and the sound of her high heels clicking down the staircase. I sat on the sofa, tuning in and out of Sadie’s story and mentally listing all the potential murder weapons in Erin’s apartment. Depending on how creative Jenny was feeling, this place could practically be the set of a Saw movie.
‘Jennifer!’ Sadie jumped up from her spot on the couch and hurled herself at her roommate. ‘You were gone so long I thought you’d fallen in.’
Were Jenny not my best friend, I would have taken a photo. Her hair was tied up in a bun, soaking from her impromptu shampoo and her face was very much lacking the smile I’d seen when I met her earlier in the evening.
‘Look at my ring!’ Sadie thrust her left hand under Jenny’s nose, waiting for a reaction. ‘Look at it!’
‘Can I see?’ I asked, throwing Jenny a life raft. Sadie immediately dropped Jenny like a hot rock and bolted across the room, skidding across the polished floor in a perfect baseball slide to show off her canary yellow diamond.
‘Look,’ she said, waving it right under my nose. ‘Isn’t is gorgeous?’
She really didn’t need to bring it that close. I could have seen this ring from my apartment back in Brooklyn; it was so big it was obscene.
‘Now, forgive me for being dense,’ I nodded to confirm its utter humungousness, ‘but I didn’t actually know you were seeing anyone.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to recall the last time I’d seen Sadie in person. Sure, I had to walk past her impossibly peachy bum every morning on my way to work (it was displayed on billboards all over the city and a fine backside it was too) but it was months since I’d actually been in the same room as her. And from the look on Jenny’s face, it was just as long since she’d had any real one-on-one time with her glamorous roommate.
Jenny sat silently on the edge of an armchair across the room, her left hand jammed right up into her right armpit. Erin hovered anxiously, a fresh bottle of champagne in one hand and a massive roll of kitchen towel in the other. It had taken the two of us almost the same amount of time Jenny was upstairs to soak the spilled champs out of her carpet.
‘OK, so, it has been kind of a whirlwind.’ Sadie flushed. Her usually blonde hair was dyed a light, golden red and she was wearing a deep scarlet lipstick that set it off perfectly. ‘I’m sure Jenny told you, I’ve been in Georgia, filming a TV show.’
Jenny had not told me.
‘Being real for a moment, I’m getting older and modelling is a young girl’s game,’ she sighed. I tried to remember exactly how old she was, but Jenny assured me Sadie personally updated her Wikipedia page every year to make sure she would never officially be a day over twenty-five. ‘And I wanted a more long-term plan, something realistic to fall back on. My mom was always worried when I was younger because modelling is so fleeting and she always wanted me to go back to school, so I sat myself down and I thought, what’s a really solid, reliable career for me?’
‘And you chose acting?’ I asked. Across the room, with her eyes closed, Jenny nodded.
‘Yeah!’ Sadie laughed. She crossed her insanely long legs and sighed. ‘It wasn’t easy right away, it took me two whole weeks to find a job.’
‘Wow,’ I replied with one eye on my best friend. It was like watching the dial on a nuclear reactor in a James Bond movie. Any second now, she could blow. ‘You were so dedicated.’
‘It’s just a CW show,’ she said, pulling on the ends of her strawberry blonde hair. ‘And they made me colour my hair which sucked because it’s so hard to get blonde right, I mean, look at yours, you know?’
I ran my tongue over my teeth and looked away.
‘But it was worth it. On the first day, I met Teddy.’ She pressed her hands against her heart and swooned backwards onto the wet-through carpet. ‘And now we’re engaged!’
‘And who’s Teddy?’ I asked politely.
‘Teddy Myers?’ she replied, shooting upright and looking at me as though I was demented. ‘He’s the lead in Were? My show?’
I looked back at her blankly.
‘I can’t believe you don’t know him,’ she tutted, pulling a brand-new, bedazzled iPhone out of the pocket of her skintight jeans. ‘I thought you watched all the TV.’
‘So did I,’ I muttered before a photo of a tall, tanned, generically handsome man in next to no clothes was pushed into my face. ‘Oh, that Teddy!’
‘I knew you’d know him,’ she purred, gazing longingly at the screen.
Who? Erin mouthed across the room.
I replied with a tiny shrug. I had no idea who this man was. In the past, Sadie had only ever dated athletes. She had three requirements for men who wanted to get into her Victoria’s Secret Fantasy Bra: they had to be taller than she was, make more money than she did, and they had to make that money playing with balls bigger than the ones in their pants. She’d gone out with baseball players, football players, and basketball players. No snooker players that I knew of, but then I’d only been friends with her for a few years. To the best of my knowledge, this was her first actor. And her first engagement ring.
‘We were filming last weekend and we were staying in his cabin outside of Atlanta …’ She looked over at Jenny and smiled beatifically. ‘He has a cabin.’
‘Sweet,’ Jenny replied.
‘And he gets down on one knee and pulls out this ridiculous ring and I know it’s super soon, but what was I supposed to say?’ She flashed her hand in my face again. ‘Look at the damn thing!’
‘I think Jenny has some news as well,’ Erin said, putting down the kitchen towel but keeping the champagne, for toasting purposes or to use as a weapon, I wasn’t sure. ‘Jenny?’
Sadie looked across the room with bright eyes and a damp butt.
‘Mason and I got engaged,’ she said sulkily.
‘What?’ Sadie shrieked, running across the room on her knees. It was quite an impressive feat – she really was much more limber than I expected her to be. ‘Jenny, this is so beyond!’
She wrenched Jenny’s hand out from under her arm and immediately began oohing and ahhing at the ring.
‘Let me get a selfie,’ she insisted, her ever-present phone already in her hand. ‘Bridal besties!’
‘No, it’s OK,’ Jenny protested, pulling away.
Sadie considered Jenny’s visage for a moment, then nodded in agreement.
‘Yeah, maybe just our rings,’ she agreed, waving her hand in front of her face. ‘This isn’t a good look for you.’
Jenny patiently held out her left hand, her gorgeous ring twinkling under the flash of Sadie’s phone before disappearing next to Sadie’s canary yellow monstrosity.
‘This is going to be so amazingly, perfectly, incredible,’ Sadie said as Erin handed out glasses of champagne. ‘I’m so happy.’
I took my glass and suddenly panicked. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t drink this? And dear god, did I want to. While the others were preoccupied, I quickly dumped three-quarters of the glass into a potted plant at my side.
‘We can plan our weddings together! Although, I was going to call you and let you know, I’m officially moving out. Teddy has a loft in Bushwick and I’m moving in with him. Actually, I’ve moved; I took all my stuff over this afternoon.’
‘You’ve moved out?’ Jenny asked, looking slightly shocked. Even though Sadie travelled constantly and routinely made noises about moving in with her boyfriends, she never actually took her stuff and left. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yes, seriously.’ Sadie waggled her ring at her former roommate. ‘I’m engaged now, Jenny. I live with my fiancé.’
Jenny breathed out slowly.
‘You’re not moving in with Mason?’ Sadie asked, chugging her champagne as though it was pop.
‘Eventually,’ Jenny replied, flicking non-existent dust off her shoulder defensively. ‘I’m practically moved in already, I’m there all the time.’
‘Yeah, I guess. Wow, can you believe this is happening for us at the same time?’ She sighed happily before nodding over at me. ‘You know what this means, Ange? You’re going to have to have a baby just to keep up!’
‘Ha!’ I barked wildly, really leaning into the laugh and waving my almost empty champagne glass around for all to see. ‘A baby! Can you imagine?’
Sadie turned up her tiny nose.
‘Nah, not really,’ Sadie replied before turning her attention back to Jenny. ‘Oh, Jenny! What if we had a double wedding?’
Jenny spluttered into her champagne flute in reply and chugged the rest of the glass.
‘I can’t imagine anything more exciting than sharing my big day with one of my best friends,’ Sadie declared, holding her glass out for a top-up while Jenny’s face went from grey to green to white. ‘Or maybe that would be too weird. You’re probably not planning anything as big as us. Teddy has pretty much invited all of Hollywood, our budget is a little out of control. That’s probably not what you’re going for, right?’
Jenny responded with silence, an angry vein throbbing in her temple.
‘Whatever,’ Sadie sighed happily. ‘I just know we’re going to have the weddings of the century.’
And just like that, a monster was born.
It was late by the time I arrived home. Once Sadie started talking, it was almost impossible to get her to stop. We went over everything, from wedding dress designers to Teddy’s leaked sex tapes. It was a little disconcerting, meeting my friend’s intended via videos of him getting a hand shandy from one of his former co-stars but Sadie didn’t seem to mind. Par for the course in showbiz these days, Erin assured me. You were no one until your sex life had been splashed all over the internet. All the while, Jenny had remained suspiciously silent. Her bridal magazines stayed in her handbag and her dreams of getting married in Maui remained between us. Before I left, I suggested meeting after work the following night for a bridesmaid bonanza do-over, sans Sadie, and she hadn’t taken much convincing. She hadn’t mentioned actual murder but I still had a horrible feeling I had somehow volunteered to be her accomplice.
Too exhausted to walk all the way to the subway station, I hopped in a cab right outside Erin’s townhouse, surreptitiously taking a photo of the driving licence details and sending it to myself, just in case. Jenny was right, I had to stop watching so much SVU when Alex was out of town.
Kicking off my heels the second I walked through the door, I knew immediately that someone had been in the house. I grabbed one of the shoes from the floor, brandishing it above my head as I proceeded slowly into the living room, quickly flipping on every light switch in the apartment as I went. By the time I reached the kitchen, my heart was thumping so loudly I was worried it might deafen the baby. Turning on the overhead kitchen light, I realized the washing machine was gone. The rubble, the hole and messed-up floor remained but the Hotpoint missile and Vi’s Lululemon leggings had disappeared. On the kitchen top there was a piece of lilac notepaper, neatly folded in half and weighed down with a cellophane-wrapped cookie.
I opened the cookie and took a bite, belatedly hoping it wasn’t poisoned.
Dear Angela, we managed to get our builder in early – YAS! He’s coming back tomorrow am to start on the ceiling, we still have the spare key to your place in case he needs access while you’re at work so don’t worry! xoxo L & V
Looking around the one washing machine kitchen as I swallowed, the room seemed so oddly empty.
PS Enjoy the cookie, it’s vegan, gluten and sugar free.
I took another nibble. They had to be lying – it was delicious.
Obviously, the builder had already been in the apartment. Had they given him the keys or had they let him in? It was pitch-black and completely silent inside the Hello Hole so my neighbours were either out or in bed.
‘You’re being paranoid,’ I said, my voice breaking the stillness of the apartment. ‘So what if the builder has keys? Jenny has keys, that’s far more dangerous.’
The water in our tap always took too long to run cold. I turned on the faucet and grabbed a glass from the sink, rinsing off a new layer of dust and debris, presumably a super-fun result of the washing machine removal. Gulping down the first glass, I poured another and walked back into the living room, tossing my handbag onto the settee. Turning on the television was an automatic reaction, but as I flipped through my tenth channel, I realized nothing was going to take my mind off the matters of the day.
My skirt felt tight, although that probably had more to do with the food in my belly than anything else, and I rolled onto my side to unzip and wriggle free of it without standing. It was a skill I was altogether too proud of.
‘You’re so lucky to have me as your mum,’ I said, patting my stomach and staring at the waistband of my black tights. It was still genuinely incomprehensible that there could be a living thing in there but that was the same thing I said when Alex told me a mouse had been living in the bathroom drawer for at least a month and I hadn’t noticed and it had turned out he was right about that. There was a baby, in my belly, right that second. I just couldn’t process it. Too big, too impossible.
Speaking of Alex, he still hadn’t called back. This was what happened when you tried to be a cool wife who sent her husband off travelling without you: you ended up alone and pregnant, a million miles from your partner while a nameless, faceless builder ran around the city just waiting for you to fall asleep so he could break in, tie you up and re-enact the scariest bits from Silence of the Lambs.
‘It puts the lotion on its skin,’ I lisped to myself as I stared up at the patterns on our ceiling. A lot of New York apartments had old tin ceilings with patterns pressed in. It had been painted over so many times, the geometric designs had been almost entirely smoothed away. I always wondered about the other people who had stared up at the ceiling, what their stories might be, where they were now … whether or not they were waiting for a murderous contractor to sneak in.
‘Do you want to watch Moana?’ I asked my stomach, turning on the DVD player. ‘It’s really good, totally appropriate for someone your age.’
The bump did not respond but I decided to take its silence as tacit approval.
‘I wish I could talk to your dad,’ I told it as the DVD whirred into life. ‘He doesn’t actually know he’s your dad yet, but he is, and he’s great, you’re going to love him.’
I bit into the witchcraft cookie and chewed thoughtfully. It was nice to have someone to talk to, even if no one else knew it was a someone just yet. Only me. This was all mine.
‘He’s very clever, your dad, so that’s handy,’ I said. ‘And he’s very practical. He always knows what to do when something breaks or stops working. I just order another one from Amazon, but nine times out of ten, he can fix it. And he went to school here, which means he’ll be able to help you with your homework because I’m useless at maths and I don’t know anything about American history. I am good at other things, though.’
But what? Bagging a bargain at Bloomingdale’s wasn’t going to help a baby for at least fourteen years, and that was only if it turned out to be gay or a girl. I’d heard there were straight men who liked shopping, but I’d never met one in the wild.
‘I’m good at reading maps and I know the names of loads of YouTubers.’
There, that was something Alex didn’t know and it was true – I didn’t want to start our relationship off with a bunch of lies. Mostly because I wasn’t absolutely certain the baby couldn’t read my mind. I knew it didn’t strictly have a mind of its own yet and was more of a teeny tiny frogspawn than a person but still, it was in there, we were connected. I wasn’t going to go around telling my unborn frogspawn that I was a super genius only for it to pop out and discover I couldn’t even beat my dad on Candy Crush.
‘They probably won’t have Candy Crush by the time you’re old enough to play it.’ I patted my stomach, not sure who I was trying to reassure. Me or my baby.
Oh.
My baby.
A loud noise outside the front window crashed through my sentimental moment. Leaping off the sofa, my skirt fell to the floor, pooling around my feet and for the want of a better weapon, I grabbed a Jimmy Choo. High heels had served me well in the past and I wasn’t above using one to batter a burglar now. I peeked out the window to find a big ginger cat rootling around in a pizza box. He looked up and me and miaowed loudly.
‘Apologies,’ I said, waving a conciliatory shoe in his direction. Closing the blinds, I returned to my spot on the sofa, keeping the stiletto close by.
‘Your dad might call,’ I told my nano-bump. ‘We should stay up in case he does, just for a bit. And to make sure whatever random builder has my spare key isn’t a serial killer.’
It didn’t reply but it didn’t complain either.
‘We’re going to get on just fine,’ I said. Patting my stomach, I pulled a blanket up over my chin and settled in for my first night alone with my baby, one hand on my stomach, the other on my shoe.
You really couldn’t be too careful these days.