Free The Shadow Year by Hannah Richell Page B

moments in the hospital. Placental abruption, they’d called it, caused by the fall. She had come round in the hospital and been told that she had to deliver her baby then and there. ‘It’s too soon,’ she’d cried. ‘I can’t do it.’ But she’d had to – for their baby.
    Lila sniffs and takes the tissue Tom is offering her and blows her nose. ‘She had your eyes,’ she says, with a sob.
    ‘And your blond hair.’
    ‘Her fingernails . . .’
    Tom nods, remembering. ‘. . . perfect.’
    Everything had been perfect: fingernails, toes, eyelashes; everything except their daughter’s tiny lungs, still too weak to breathe on their own. The doctors had done their best . . . had reassured them that she stood a good chance. She was in the best place, with the most-experienced staff and the necessary equipment. Their baby had lain in the neonatal unit for three days and Lila hadn’t left her side. She’d stroked her tiny, curled fingers through the hole in the incubator and willed her to live – begged her to hold on. She’d offered up every prayer she could think of, had plea-bargained for her daughter’s safe-keeping but then complications had set in – pneumonia – and they’d been told her life hung in the balance. Two days after that the medical staff had switched off her life support and finally they’d been allowed to hold her. Tom had wrapped the body of their daughter in the soft knitted blanket Lila had bought for the nursery in a flurry of excitement only a week earlier and they’d held her then. She had been so pale and so terribly still, their beautiful, five-day-old baby girl. Milly, they’d called her.
    Tom pulls her close. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Lila can’t look at him but he reaches for her chin and tilts her face towards him, forcing her to look at him through her tears. ‘Say it. Go on. “It wasn’t my fault.”’
    She eyes him for a moment then shakes her head.
    Tom smooths a loose strand of hair from her face, strokes her cheek, leans in and kisses her. Feel something , she wills herself. Feel it . She kisses him back, presses her cold lips against his warm ones.
    ‘We can try again,’ he says. ‘When you’re ready.’
    She nods and lets him kiss her again, lets his hands burrow beneath her coat, up under her T-shirt where he gently caresses the faded bruises on her ribcage, no longer purple but a ghastly yellow, trying not to flinch as his fingers graze the empty hollow of her belly.
    This is us, she thinks. This is what we do. This is what we’ve always been about: closeness, intimacy. She leans into him a little more. Feel it .
    Then his hands are moving up towards her breasts and he is pressing against her. She can feel his need and she gives in to it for just a moment. Feel something .
    He is pulling her closer now, his mouth covering hers, his breath hot on her skin, but it isn’t going to work. She can’t forget . . . and she can’t go back. In this moment she doesn’t know how to live with her pain; it overwhelms all other feeling and sensation. Before she even really knows what she is doing, she has pushed him off. She stands and brushes angrily at her jeans. ‘God, Tom, why does it always have to be about sex with you?’
    He looks up at her, the hurt and confusion evident in his eyes. ‘I . . . I . . . I thought you—’
    ‘No,’ she says, ‘you didn’t think. That’s the problem.’ And she turns and walks away from him, back towards the shadows of the cottage.
    There doesn’t seem to be much point staying any longer, so they pack up their things and return to the car in silence. The rain has stopped, but the drive home is still torturous, the atmosphere in the car claustrophobic with despair and disappointment. Lila can barely exchange more than a couple of words with Tom all the way back to London. She just sits in the passenger seat, gazing at the mottled sky as it turns slowly from grey to orange to dusky pink. Red sky at night, shepherds