He doesn’t …

Don’t think about it, she ordered herself sharply.

But it was useless, because she knew that on some level she hadn’t thought about anything else since last night, even in spite of everything that had happened. It had added to the nightmarish quality of the past few hours.

He doesn’t love me as much as he loved Colleen. He has doubts. He looks at me and thinks of her and sees that it’s “not the same.” He will never love another woman the way he loved Colleen.

She examined her feelings, slowly and tentatively, as if she was lifting a piece of clothing to examine a gunshot wound.

Did it hurt?

Yes, quite a lot.

She thought about Saskia’s matter-of-fact acceptance that Patrick would always love Colleen best, and she understood something with simple, startling clarity: I don’t love Patrick as much as Saskia does.

Saskia hadn’t cared if she loved him more than he loved her, whereas Ellen did care. If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.

What she really wanted was to be adored. She was having a baby. She deserved to be adored.

Well, that was just infantile, wasn’t it?

Women had babies all the time without the support of an adoring partner. She had a loving partner. That should be enough! She was lucky! Her own mother had given birth without a man.

Ellen was lucky. She had more than her fair share of love. In fact, perhaps that was the problem. She’d been spoiled with far too much adoration.

She would forget about what Patrick had said about Colleen. She would never think about it or tell a friend, and she would certainly never mention it to him.

Yes, it might be difficult, but it was the right thing to do.

There was a polite toot of a horn from the car behind her, and she realized that the traffic light she’d been waiting at had turned green while she was sitting there feeling virtuous. She lifted her hand in apology and put her foot on the accelerator.

Lucky, she reminded herself.

“So you’re going to need a lot of support over the next couple of months,” finished up my doctor. He seemed very young, with flushed, baby-smooth cheeks. I must be getting old.

I remember when Mum was in the hospital she couldn’t get over the youth of her doctors. “I get the giggles,” she told me. “They sound so serious, but they just look like kids playing dress-up!” she whispered to me.

The kids knew what they were talking about, though. She’ll probably make it through Christmas, one of them told me. But not much longer.

I wasn’t there when she died. I had to go home because Jack was starting school. Funny that I thought it was “home.”

My doctor confirmed what Ellen had already told me. Fractured pelvis. Broken ankle. They were scheduling me for surgery the next day. I was going to be on bed rest for the next six weeks.

I wondered how long Jack’s arm would take to heal.

“I don’t have any family,” I told him. I don’t know why I said that. Perhaps I thought he could prescribe me one.

“Well, you’re going to need to rely on your friends,” he said. “I noticed you had a visitor earlier. She seemed like a close friend, very concerned about you.”

He was talking about Ellen.

“Mmmm,” I said. “I don’t think she’ll actually be visiting again.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, as I say, you’re going to need support, so you might want to call in some favors. Don’t worry. People love to help in a crisis. It makes them feel good. You know, useful. You’ll be surprised at how your friends will step up.”

“I’m sure I will be,” I said.

I couldn’t tell him that there was no one to step up, that I didn’t have that ordinary social framework, that there was just me, that there was no one I could possibly ask for help. This man had no idea that people like me existed: people who look and sound well educated and normal on the outside but are actually as lonely and crazy as a homeless bum.

Then I remembered that the difference between me and a homeless person is that I have money. I’ll pay someone to be supportive, I thought. There must be some sort of a service for people like me.

“You’ll get through this,” said the doctor.

I tried to smile politely, but my facial muscles rebelled as if it was an unfamiliar move, as if I’d never smiled before.

The doctor pressed the morphine clicker into my hand and patted my shoulder. “Give yourself some pain relief. Enjoy it while it lasts. We’ll be weaning you off soon enough.”

I pressed the red button.

Jack was sound asleep when Ellen got home. He was lying in his bed curled up on his side, looking tiny and pale, the arm in the cast over the blanket.

“The doctor prescribed him some strong painkillers,” said Patrick quietly, as they stood together in his bedroom looking down at him. He pulled the quilt up and let his hand rest briefly on Jack’s forehead. “He’ll probably sleep for hours.”

As they walked down the stairs together, Ellen felt Patrick’s fury rise steadily like a boiling kettle. They went into the living room and he began pacing back and forth, talking nonstop. He hadn’t yet asked where Ellen had been. He wanted to tell her about how he’d already phoned the police and they’d told him to come in to make a full report and begin the process of taking out a restraining order against Saskia, how Jack’s injuries could have been so much worse, how he thought Jack was dead when he saw him lying at the bottom of the stairs, and did she think that too, and that he should have taken the restraining order out so much sooner and he’d never forgive himself for that, never.

“I’ve been trying to work out how she got in,” he said finally.

“I don’t know,” said Ellen tiredly. While Patrick had been talking, she had lain down on her grandfather’s leather couch and put her forearm over her eyes. Patrick had offered her a cup of tea when she first got home, but so far it hadn’t materialized. “I moved the key after the last time.”

“What?” said Patrick.

Ellen realized her mistake too late. She opened her eyes. Patrick had stopped pacing and was standing frozen in the middle of the room. “What ‘last time’?”

She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. She was desperately trying to find the right balance between honesty and enraging him further. She gave up.