Chapter 23

Millie

Four weeks later

Christmas Day

“Heyy…” I said, coming in the back door to Mum and Dad’s with bags of groceries and presents.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re here.” Mum was all a flutter again. She rushed over and kissed my cheek. “I need you in the kitchen. Your father was supposed to help devein the prawns last night, but he ended up having one too many beers with the neighbours. I’ve got coleslaw and potato salad to make. Did you get the mayonnaise?”

“Yes, Mum…” I sighed.

She looked up and frowned, as if seeing me for the first time.

“You look pale and you’ve got big bags around your eyes.” She started reaching up to put her hand against my forehead, but I just jerked away.

“Um… thanks?”

“You look terrible.”

Christmas Day preparation was instantly forgotten when she thought her baby was sick.

“Thanks again.” I forced myself to smile before dumping the bags on the kitchen table. Suddenly they were so damn heavy. “I’m just run down. I had a UTI, and the doc warned me I might get diarrhoea from the antibiotics, but damn…” My stomach rumbled ominously. “I’ve had a stomach bug that won’t go away. I’m hungry, but when I try to eat something, I either want to yack or I’m rushing to the loo.”

“Did you try some probiotics?”

She bustled over to the pantry, looking through all the lotions and potions she kept in stock for just this kind of thing.

“Yes, Mum, the ones you always recommend. They helped a bit and things settled down, but then I started getting sick again.”

“You need to see a doctor,” she said.

“Tried to, but everyone’s booked out. I’ve got an appointment after the new year?—”

“Oh, that’s too long to wait,” Mum insisted, then grabbed her keys. “I’ll take you to hospital.”

“For a stomach bug?” I plucked the keys from her grip and dumped them back into the bowl she kept her stuff in. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. It’s probably just my period.”

“Hello, love!”

Dad came walking in with a smile, coming over to give me a kiss.

“Millie’s been sick,” Mum told him.

“Gave it a bit of a nudge last night, did ya?” He cackled as he pulled back.

“She’s been sick for weeks and she can’t get into a doctor—” Mum’s voice was rising in octaves by the second.

“And is probably just premenstrual as fuck.” My hands went to my stomach. “I’m all bloated and my feet have swollen up like two sizes. My boobs?—”

Dad watched me grab my bust and then beat a hasty retreat.

“Sounds like this is a talk you need to have with your mother. The boys are outside. I’ll send Jamie in to get the meat from you.”

“You’d never think he’d spent most of his life with someone that had a uterus.” Mum shook her head slowly as he walked out the door to the pool area. “So, it’s just PMT?”

“PM blah.” I wrinkled my nose. “It couldn’t be perimenopause or something, could it?”

“At your age?” Mum scoffed at that, but as she moved towards the kitchen, she settled, going back to slicing vegetables for the salads.

“I dunno, this is like the worst premenstrual bullshit ever.”

I walked towards the fridge, pulling out a massive bowl of raw prawns. They tasted really nice when cooked, but I hated this part. The beady little eyes, the crunchy heads, and worst of all, deveining. I mean, pulling out the intestinal tract of crustaceans didn’t exactly fill me with the Christmas spirit, but this was somehow worse. The glisten of their cold flesh and the smell… Gag. Of course my bloody brothers were outside cooking meat or some bullshit.

“Like, I think I’m gonna ask one of the boys to do the prawns,” I told Mum.

She dismissed that idea with a wave of her hand.

“They’ll just mess it up.”

“They scale and fillet fish fine, Mum.” I set the bowl down on the bench and pulled out the small knife we used for this process. “Maybe I can turn chops and sausages on the barbeque this Christmas or?—”

“Hey!”

The door slid open and Jamie came walking in with a tray full of barbequed fruit. Dad loved to use a bit of brown sugar and caramelise it. My mouth watered as I spied pineapple and peaches and… Oh, nah, my mouth kept on filling, now with bile. I swallowed hard and then poured myself a glass of water, downing that quickly to ensure the nausea passed.

“You’re here!” Jamie came and gave me a hug. “I haven’t seen you in ages. You still down to come to the housewarming?”

“A party commemorating you shacking up with my brothers?” I bumped her with my hip. “Damn straight. I’ll bring enough booze to drown a horse.”

“Speaking of which…” Mum went to the fridge and then produced a bottle of champagne with a flourish, along with three glasses that already had a sliced strawberry in them. “How about a little Christmas champers?”

Jamie and I shared a look. Neither of us especially liked champagne, but we drank it for Mum’s sake.

“Shit, you OK?” Jamie looked me up and down. “You look a little pale and kinda?—”

“Fat?” I slapped my hand down on my stomach. “I’m so bloated.”

“Should start taking those evening primrose capsules I gave you,” Mum observed sagely, before handing me a drink. “Well, cheers.” Her smile was everything right then, beaming bright. “To having all my family under one roof.”

“To finally having a sister to share the shitty job of deveining prawns with.”

I gave Jamie a nudge with my elbow and she shoved me right back, the two of us devolving into cartoonish squabbling until Mum stepped in. My champagne glass was set down undrunk as the Christmas lunch prep got real.

“Now, if you two girls focus on the prawns,” Mum said as I pulled another small knife out of the drawer and handed it to Jamie, “I’ll finish the salads, then your father can slice up the ham.”

“And what are the boys doing…?” I shot my best friend a look. “You’re about to see how it is. We women slave in the kitchen.” I grabbed a prawn in one hand, the knife in the other. “While they…”

I had a whole arse rant there, ready to spew out, but when I looked down at the prawn, my mouth went dry. My bile rose again in response to what I saw and felt. The prawn was jelly like, dead and clammy in my hand, my grip on the knife slipping as sweat covered my palm. It stared up at me with those eyes as I tried to force myself to move. I felt just as clammy the longer I looked at it.

“Mills?”

Jamie’s face swum into view, but I couldn’t answer her. I dropped the prawn and the knife with a clatter and then ran down the hall to the bathroom.

What in the freaking OCD?

I was pouring lime-scented liquid soap over my hands, the citrus drowning out the stink of seafood, and yet I couldn’t scrub fast enough. Bubbles formed in a wild lather before I washed it away. More soap, more, to get the stink, the slime, the everything off me as Mum and Jamie came bursting in.

“Sorry, Mum.” Why the hell was I sounding so sooky? My voice cracked on the words, but I forged on. “I’m gonna get one of the boys to do the prawns. I can’t, I just can’t.”

I’d said something to that effect when I was a kid. Perfectly happy to eat the bloody things, I’d baulked at the process of preparing them. Right now I expected the same lecture from Mum, but instead she moved closer, staring at my reflection as she rubbed my shoulder.

“It’s OK, love.”

Oh fuck, that had me blinking my eyes even faster, because apparently I was well and truly on the hormonal rollercoaster from hell. If I didn’t get a period soon, I’d bloody cut a bitch, just to release the tension. I finally dried my hands off, standing with them pressed against the bathroom bench, sucking in one breath, then another, as they drew closer.

“Shit, you really are sick,” Jamie said. “Maybe you should lie down? You look pale as milk.”

“God, don’t talk about milk…” I groaned.

There was nothing, literally nothing I hated more than nausea. It hung around making you feel completely miserable until you got better.

“Maybe I should just stick my finger down my throat,” I groaned. “If I force myself to spew, then I should be better.”

Except that hadn’t worked thus far, had it?

“Or you could do this.”

Mum started rummaging through the bathroom cabinet, and I expected her to pull out a bottle of antacids, not this. My expression of shock was a perfect match for Jamie’s as we stared at the serene woman on the box. She had a hand on a stomach so swollen a test would’ve been redundant at this point.

“I’m not bloody pregnant, Mum.” She asked me that every time I was sick, tired, looking drawn, or my period was late when I was a teenager, so much so it’d become a family joke. Mum wasn’t laughing now. Instead, she stared at me with all the wisdom of a mother and that stopped me cold. “I’m not.”

I could’ve said that a lot more confidently, my momentary waver forcing Mum’s eyebrow to raise.

“I’m on the pill. I take it like clockwork.” I fished out my phone. “I even have a notification set every day at the same time.” My calendar alerts danced before her as I waved it in her face. “I never, ever forget. I remember what you told…”

Shit.

“What?” Jamie looked at me then Mum. “You remember what?”

Mum was a nurse back in the day, though she’d given it up gladly when she had us. Dad made more than enough to keep her in the style she had become accustomed to, and he liked coming home to a spotless house and a warm meal. But that medical knowledge meant all of us kids had a very scientific introduction to human reproduction. There were no fannies or doodles in our house. The boys had penises and I had a vagina.

And a uterus.

I knew what the fallopian tubes did and that my womb would shed its lining in dramatic fashion every month I wasn’t pregnant.

Pregnant.

My mind stuttered on that word. That wasn’t me. I had no job, no boyfriend, and was barely keeping my house plants alive right now, so I couldn’t be…

“Antibiotics,” Mum said without further explanation, forcing Jamie to ask for one. “They can interfere with the efficacy of the pill. You’re supposed to use condoms until your next period.”

Fuck.

I had not done that. In a night of pure recklessness, I’d let three guys, whose sexual history I did not know, jizz unprotected inside me. Then, it was hot and sexy and I was having a girl’s gone wild moment, but now…

“Oh shit, no…”

I snatched the box up and stared at the instructions, not really able to read them as tears actually blurred my vision.

You fucking idiot.

I told myself that over and over as I pulled away from them, walking into the adjoining toilet and doing what was needed to take the test.

“Heather!” Dad called from deeper inside the house. “Heather?”

We didn’t reply, huddling around a stick I’d just peed on instead.

“Not pregnant, not pregnant, not pregnant,” I chanted under my breath, Jamie taking up the refrain.

“Whatever the result, you know we’re here to support you,” Mum said. “Whatever you decide. If you want a termination, I’ll talk to some people I know, find out where the best place to go is, or if you want to…”

“Two lines…” Jamie barely breathed that out before looking at me. “That’s good, right?”

“Depends.” My voice was little more than a toad’s croak. “How do you feel about becoming an auntie?”

“Auntie?” Jamie blinked, obviously just as dumbstruck as me, but Mum rushed forward.

“You…?”

Now she was bloody crying and trying really hard not to, which was setting me off again. I let out a helpless sob because I didn’t know what the hell I was feeling. Mother? I was going to become a mother? Some small person would look at me and expect me to know how everything worked, just like I did my mum? The idea was so ridiculous it took my breath away, and yet…

I wanted to.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Raised on stories about how Dad spied Mum behind the bar at a pub, then it was love at first sight, I always expected it to be the same for me. Half the reason why I was so caught up in Noah at school was because I thought he was the one. The one who’d take one look at me and know I was the one he wanted to marry. He’d sweep me off my feet, just like Dad did Mum, not letting anything get in the way of being with me.

But I never got that.

Were there fuckboys back in the 90s? I never asked Mum, but there were now. Pretty sure she never got ghosted either. Not catfished, nor love bombed, or guys pretending they were in an open relationship, when really they were fucking around on their wives. Mum had made it seem so simple, but in reality, it wasn’t.

My hand slid down and came to rest on my stomach.

I supported a woman’s right to choose, but going to my doctor and asking for a termination? That felt wrong for me. Right now, there was just a tiny cluster of cells in my womb, and yet I felt strangely protective of them.

My independence was legendary in my family. Being prepared to do everything myself was the only way I could keep up with my brothers. In some ways, it was a good thing, making me tough, resilient.

Because I’d need it if I was going to be a single mother.

“Yeah.” I nodded sharply, unable to stop. “I think I’m ready to become a mum.”