Nobody's baby

Chapter 1: The Bathroom Window

The window was smaller than it had looked from the inside.

I had one heel on the ledge, my bridesmaid dress bunched in my fist, and my hip wedged so tightly into the frame that I was seriously starting to consider dying here. Thirty-five years old, half out of a bathroom window at the Ashford Grand Hotel, while two hundred people on the other side of the wall did the Cha Cha Slide.

It'll be a funny story at your funeral, I told myself. Everyone will laugh. Nobody will cry. Perfect.

Someone knocked on the door.

"Marn? You in there?"

My stomach dropped. Priya. The bride. My best friend of nineteen years, and the reason I was wearing a dress the colour of a bruised peach.

"Just a minute!" I called, in a voice so bright it hurt my own ears.

"You've been in there twenty minutes."

"Stomach thing!"

"Do you want me to get someone?"

"No! God, no. I'm fine. Go dance. Be married!"

A pause. Then, softer: "I saw your face when Leah made the announcement."

I closed my eyes.

Leah. Bridesmaid number three. Twenty-six, glowing like a table lamp, one hand resting on a stomach that didn't even show yet. She'd tapped her champagne flute with a fork and told the entire room, tears in her eyes, that she and her husband were expecting in March. Everyone had screamed. Everyone had hugged her.

I'd hugged her too. I'd smiled so hard my molars ached. And then I'd walked, very calmly, to the bathroom, locked the door, and looked at myself under those flattering, terrible lights.

Thirty-five. No ring. No man. No baby. A phone with three dating apps I'd deleted last month and quietly redownloaded on Tuesday.

"Marnie," Priya said through the door. "Please talk to me."

"I love you," I said, "and I'm going to climb out this window now."

"You're going to what?"

I shoved.

Something in the dress ripped. My hip popped free. For one clean, weightless second I was airborne, and then the world caught me the only way it knew how: by dropping me flat on my back in a hydrangea bush.

All the air left my lungs. Above me, a sky the colour of dishwater. Inside, the DJ was telling everyone to slide to the left.

"You know," said a voice above me, "there's a door."

I didn't need to look. I'd have known that voice in a coma.

Jonah Reed stood over me with one hand in his pocket and a cigarette in the other, the one he'd sworn to me in January he'd quit. Same navy suit he'd worn to every wedding for six years. Same loosened tie. Six foot two of quiet, sawdust-scented patience, looking down at me like a man who had seen me do stupider things and loved me through every one.

"There was a queue for the door," I wheezed.

"Right."

"A long queue."

"Mm-hm." He crouched. Held out his hand. "Anything broken?"

"Just my dignity."

"That went years ago."

I laughed. It came out wrong, half a sob, and I clapped a hand over my mouth to stop it. Jonah's face changed. He didn't say a word. He just dropped the cigarette, ground it out under his shoe, and sat down in the grass beside me, right there in his good trousers.