Free Babies in Waiting by Rosie fiore

produce and an air ticket to Andorra to auction.
    When I got back to the office, it was a ghost town. Everyone was out for lunch. Even Angela had wandered out into the watery winter sunshine to stalk another one of her co-workers. I sat down at my desk. I was really hungry – I had only had a couple of bites of the cheese sandwich. I couldn’t face going out again to get something, so I rootled through my desk drawers and found a box of slightly stale cereal bars, left over from a week when I’d tried to break my afternoon-Twix habit by eating something healthier. It had failed when I’d read the ingredients and calorie count on the cereal-bar box and realised I was getting more sugar and fat in the healthy bar than in the good old-fashioned choccie. I was eating for two now, I reasoned, and munched my way through three of the chewy granola monstrosities. They made me horribly thirsty, so I went to the vending machine in the office kitchen and got myself a Diet Coke. I gulped half of it walking back to my desk, then a thought struck me. Hadn’t I read somewhere that caffeine was bad for unborn babies? And surely a meal of cereal barswasn’t what was required to sustain a tiny, growing embryo. I typed in the URL for the baby website immediately, planning to look for an article on nutrition for pregnant women.
    A notification popped up: ‘You have twenty-seven replies to your post’. Twenty-seven? How could that be?
    I clicked on the link and there they were. Twenty-seven personal messages expressing joy and excitement at my pregnancy. All of them were full of love and encouragement from a group of women I had never met or even spoken to. Some of them were quite poetic (if a bit greeting-card-ish): ‘Congratulations . . . you’re about to embark on an amazing journey’. Some verged on the illiterate: ‘OMG that’s grate!’, and almost every one contained a rather confusing collection of brackets: ‘(((((((()))))))))’. It took me till message twelve to work out that it meant sending a hug, and I only worked that out because Lucy_19 wrote ‘((((((((((HUGS)))))))))’.
    Well, then I did cry. This bunch of complete strangers had been kinder, more understanding and more excited for me than my own husband. It was too ironic for words. I typed an incoherent thank you, then went to the bathroom to wash my face and fix my make-up. It took a while to mop up the tears . . . they just seemed to keep coming . . . but eventually I managed to splash my face with cold water and reapply eye make-up and lipstick. I felt better and worse at the same time. Better, because someone had said that what was happening to me was something miraculous and worth celebrating. Worse, because it was totally the wrong someone.
    Somehow, I made it to the end of the work day. It was an odd feeling . . . I’d never not wanted to go home before. I’d always been eager to leave and get back to our little house and see James. I dragged my heels polishing and rewriting a short and very simple press release, packing up my things, visiting the loo one last time. By the time I got in the lift, it was twenty minutes later than I would usually have left.
    When I got downstairs, I was about to turn left and head for the Tube when I spotted James sitting on the wall opposite our office front door. He was holding the most enormous bunch of flowers.
    He stood up and walked hesitantly towards me. ‘I was an idiot, Toni. I’m sorry. I never thought I’d be the kind of bloke who had to buy flowers to say sorry for being an idiot. But I am. Will you take the flowers? And my apology? Please?’
    What could you say to that? I took the flowers, and slotted into my place, tucked under his right arm, and we walked to the Tube together.
    Once we got back home, he was Mr Caring. He made me sit on the sofa and brought me a cup of tea. Then he sat on the coffee table and held both of my hands.
    ‘What can I do?’
    ‘What do you mean, what can you do?’
    ‘I’ll