Three-And-A-Half Heartbeats Read Free Page B

as he sketched plans for remodelling projects in Holland Park and kitchen extensions on the better side of Wandsworth. It fascinated and exasperated him how many meetings were necessary to discuss minutiae such as the position of a mirror or the particular finish on a bathroom tap. He was fed up with dealing with women who had too much time on their hands and too much money with which to indulge their whims. It therefore made perfect sense for him to stay at home. Grace earned more than he did and if Chloe was with him, they would never have to worry about her well-being.
    It had worked well on both counts: Grace’s earnings were more than enough to cover their outgoings and Tom was a devoted and patient father. With Mrs Roper coming in twice a week to clean, and Grace’s parents on speed dial for any minor emergency, he was free to be the perfect parent. He was now pushing for a second baby, confident that he could cope just as easily with two, once Grace had dispatched said infant and tootled off back to work. It was becoming a bone of contention, with Tom harassing her, pointing out cute pictures in magazines and going on about how much Chloe would love a sibling, how lonely it must be to be an only child, how his brother, Jack, had been the one thing that had kept him sane during his crazy childhood. Grace couldn’t counter his arguments but found it hard to explain how difficult it was to leave one child behind every day; leaving two would be unbearable. That she sometimes felt deeply resentful as she jumped up to her alarm at 5 a.m. each morning, and begrudgingly watched as Chloe instinctively ran to Daddy for all her immediate needs, was rarely mentioned. She was lucky, really. She had it all.
    Tom loved her deeply and with a certainty that sometimes bordered on complacency; he looked at their friends and knew that none of them shared what he and Grace had. They were perfectly matched intellectually and though their physical desire for each other was no longer all-consuming, it was still very present, just a little less passionate. It was as though they had a secret world that existed behind their bedroom door, known only to the two of them. No matter what kind of challenge the day presented, the promise and comfort their intimacy brought made everything okay.
    Grace had never been physically confident and Tom’s relationships, of which there had been many, had all been short-lived. When he met Grace, it was as if he could finally shake off the outer persona that impressed his peers. She was the first person in his life to love him unconditionally because of how he was and not who he was. In fact, the bullish antics and sarcastic humour that garnered the respect of his mates were the very aspects that Grace liked the least and it was with an almost perceptible relief that Tom allowed his softer, more human side to be exposed.
    People would tell Tom he was lucky. He knew it wasn’t luck but fate that had steered his soulmate into his path. He had been warned that things would ‘change’ when the baby arrived and he inferred from the long sighs, the sucking of teeth and consolatory pats on the back from his contemporaries who were already parents that those changes were not necessarily for the good. They had been wrong, all of them. The arrival of Chloe was not just a good thing, it was a wonderful thing, and it had been the making of them as a couple. She was the creeping vine that bound them even closer together, covering their ordinariness with something entirely beautiful.
    From the moment of Chloe’s conception he had loved her, or at least the idea of her, and the reality had proved even better. He relished every aspect of being a dad. He saw being a father as a gift and an opportunity to take all that he had learnt about parenting from his own childhood and do it differently. In return, Chloe adored her daddy. She knew that he would never let her down, never be too tired or otherwise occupied to give her