Set Me Free Read Free Page A

submissiveness?”
    â€œIt’s not submissiveness. You don’t understand.”
    â€œWhat do you mean? I don’t understand what?”
    â€œI want him to decide for himself, Anna!” I snapped. “I need him to see for himself that he should come to the scan. Not because I shout at him, or you do, or because it’s the decent thing to do. I need him to want to be there.”
    Anna sighed. “I see what you mean.” A pause. “But he still needs a kick up his backside.”
    â€œI know.” I looked out to the rain soaking my sister’s garden, bouncing on Marco’s slide and drenching abandoned toys.
    It was all so different from the way I’d imagined my first pregnancy would be. In my mind, I’d have had two perfect children before I was thirty and Ash would adore them both. We’d have the ideal family. Back then, twenty-five and newly married, I was still to learn that you didn’t order a family from a catalogue, picture-perfect and ready-made. The reality was something else entirely.
    My reality has been years of infertility, a million tests, a difficult journey to become adoptive parents. And then Lara arrived, and that was when, all of a sudden, reality was better than my dream, better than any ad-worthy family and perfect babies. Because after the years I’d spent trying to create a child that would not materialise, we’d found Lara, and Lara had found us. A child who needed a family and a family who needed a child. She came to us like a blessing. How could I ever wish for anything to be different? We’d chosen each other, and having Lara was, with all its difficulties and challenges, perfect.
    I would have loved to adopt again, but Ash didn’t want any more children. He simply said he was happy with his little family, that he didn’t need anything else. And I went along with it without regrets or recriminations, because Lara filled me up. There would be no more trying to get pregnant, and no more long and convoluted adoption journeys. Just us: Lara, Ash and me.
    And then, the two pink lines. Followed by another six tests, each with two perfect lines shining nearly fuchsia in their little windows.
    My sister squeezed my hand. “Listen. If Ash doesn’t come to the scan, I’ll be there. You know that, don’t you?”
    I forced a smile. “Yes. Thank you.”
    â€œI don’t know how long I can keep my mouth shut, though.”
    â€œThat makes two of us.”
    Ash had to cancel some all-important meeting, but he came.
    I was strangely calm as they spread a blob of slimy jelly on me and put the cold hand of the ultrasound arm on my stomach. And there it was, tiny and alien-like, with a huge head and minuscule arms and legs. A little fish swimming inside me. A human being growing inside me.
    It was hard to believe, and still it was true.
    I couldn’t speak. I just stared at the screen and I couldn’t stop smiling. I had to stop myself from reaching out and laying my fingers on the screen, in a strange impulse to feel those little hands. I turned towards Ash, and what I saw astonished me. He was smiling too. He was entranced, gazing at the screen.
    He had sort of . . . thawed. I couldn’t believe it as he began bantering with the sonographer, asking for three copies of the scan, to give his parents and my mum. He kept smiling as we walked out, clutching our baby’s very first photograph.
    â€œSo. What do you think? Boy or girl?” he asked, squeezing my hand.
    â€œI don’t know. I don’t even have a hunch. Really, I have no idea.”
    â€œI think it’s another girl. A sister for Lara.”
    â€œMaybe. Who knows.”
    â€œAre you okay?” he asked as we were about to get into the car.
    I slipped into the passenger’s seat. “I think so.”
    Was I okay? I felt a bit wobbly. All of a sudden, before I realised what was happening, I burst into