She put her hands over her stomach and suddenly, like a message from the future, felt an exquisitely painful, hot, tingling rush envelop her br**sts. It was a revelation that her body could experience such new sensations.

“Hi, in there.” This time she spoke out loud. “That sort of hurts. But that’s OK, I don’t mind. You just rest up. Keep growing.”

There was that blinding feeling of joy again. A baby. For heaven’s sake, she was having a baby with a man who adored her. None of the rest of it mattered.

Chapter 19

Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.

—The classic conscious auto-suggestion created by the

famous French psychologist and pharmacist (the “father

of auto hypnosis”), Émile Coué (1857–1926)

Did you sleep OK last night, Jack?” asked Ellen.

It was a Tuesday morning a couple of weeks after the dinner with Julia and Madeline, and she and Patrick and Jack were eating breakfast. Patrick was reading the paper, and Jack was being uncharacteristically quiet. He was normally bouncing about at breakfast time, as if he’d banked up a whole lot of thoughts through the night and they all had to come spilling out as he ate his cornflakes, but today he was dully banging his spoon against the side of his bowl, and Ellen noticed shadows under his eyes. They looked especially wrong on his smooth little boy face.

“I had a really big long dream,” said Jack. “It went on and on for, like, the whole night. It was like a movie that went on forever.”

“Huh,” said Patrick without looking up from his newspaper. “Eat your breakfast.”

“What was the movie in your dream about?” asked Ellen.

“Armageddon,” said Jack.

Patrick put his paper down and raised an eyebrow at Ellen. “Do you even know what that means?” he asked Jack

“Yeah, of course,” said Jack. He looks pale, thought Ellen. “It means the end of the world. I’ve been looking it up on the Internet.”

“I’m sure you picked up lots of sensible stuff there,” sighed Patrick.

“Yeah,” said Jack obliviously. “It’s coming, you know. Armageddon.”

“Well, it’s not,” said Patrick.

“How do you know?” said Jack. “You said just the other day that you don’t know everything.”

Patrick briskly folded up his newspaper. “I know this.”

“In my dream everyone I know died,” said Jack. “It was pretty scary.” He stood up and took his half-eaten bowl of cereal over to the sink. “I’ll have to tell Ethan about the dream. We’ve got an Armageddon Club.”

Patrick shook his head. “I was in a spy club when I was at school. Can’t you change your club to a spy club?”

Jack looked at his father like he was deranged. “No, Dad, I really could not do that.” He sounded like he was about thirty: a stressed-out business executive who could not possibly take on another project, as much as he’d like to help out.

He left the room, the weight of the world on his narrow little shoulders.

“So, Armageddon, eh? That’s a cheerful topic of conversation for breakfast, isn’t it,” said Patrick, as they listened to Jack clumping up the stairs to his room.

He took his own plate to the sink and smiled at her. “Are you excited?”

They were going for Ellen’s first ultrasound.

“Yes,” said Ellen. “I can’t wait to see it. At the moment this baby just feels like some sort of horrendous stomach bug. I want proof that there’s an actual baby making me feel so sick.”

She thought, Please don’t say anything about Colleen’s lack of nausea or Colleen’s first ultrasound.

Patrick went to speak and Ellen interrupted him hurriedly, afraid she might scream if the word “Colleen” came out of his mouth.

“So you remember it’s at eleven o’clock? You’ll meet me there? At the ultrasound place?”

“That’s what I was about to say,” said Patrick. “We can go together. After I drop Jack off at school, I’m going to come back here and finally move those boxes. When I woke up this morning, I thought, What’s the point of working for myself if I can’t take a few hours off when I need it? And you’ve put up with those boxes for long enough.”

Before Ellen had a chance to answer, Jack called from upstairs. “Da-aaad!”

“Better go see what Mr. Armageddon wants,” said Patrick. He paused and frowned. “I wonder if the club was his idea. What would make a kid develop an interest in Armageddon? What do you think? Isn’t it a bit—”

“Da-adddd!” The first time Jack had shrieked like this Ellen had gone skidding down the hallway, her heart pounding, assuming he was lying in a pool of his own blood. Now she knew better. He’d probably lost a sock.

“I’m coming!” roared back Patrick, and he went clumping up the stairs in exactly the same way as his son, except possibly even louder.

Ellen put down her spoon and contemplated her porridge and her conscience.

He was taking the morning off work to move the boxes.

She felt herself smile: a satisfied, creamy, catlike smile. Oh, she was good. She was damned good. Every day, in every way, she was making him better and better.

The smile vanished almost immediately. Oh my goodness, it was a wonder she wasn’t waggling her fingertips together while tossing her head back and cackling fiendishly! She was a witch! A manipulative, unethical—

But actually, that was all bluster. She didn’t really feel any of that. Deep down she felt nothing but cool, crisp satisfaction for a job well done.

The only guilt she felt was over her lack of guilt.

It hadn’t been planned; at least as far as she knew. She’d had no conscious intention of hypnotizing Patrick into moving the boxes. Patrick had been upset again about the client who wasn’t paying his bill. “He doesn’t return my calls or answer my e-mails,” Patrick had ranted as they lay together in bed the previous night. “He ignores me, like I’m the one in the wrong. He treats me like I’m stalking him, like I’m Saskia!”

“Do you want me to do a relaxation?” Ellen had asked. After the night before the proposal she’d stopped offering, and they’d been so distracted by so many things: the pregnancy, meeting her father, Patrick and Jack moving into the house.