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.
We stayed like that for a moment. The hydrangea crackled under my spine.
"Leah's pregnant," I said.
"I heard."
"Everyone's pregnant, Jonah. My cousin, Priya's sister, that girl from the pub quiz. It's like a virus, and I'm the only one who didn't catch it."
"That's not how it works."
"I know how it works!" My voice cracked. "I'm thirty-five. I have a mortgage, a good job, and a very strong opinion about sourdough, and I have never been in a relationship that lasted longer than fourteen months. Do you know how many men have said I'm just not ready to me? Do you want me to count?"
"Marn."
"Six. Six men. Six speeches. And every single one of them was ready two years later, with someone else, and I found out on Instagram."
Jonah said nothing. His jaw was working. I'd noticed that about him over the years, how he went quiet when something mattered, and how I only ever understood how much days later.
"I saw a doctor last week," I said.
That got his attention. "What doctor?"
"The fertility one. Just a consult. Just to know." I stared up at the sky. "She said I'm fine. Everything's fine. But she said if I was thinking about it, I shouldn't wait. She said it very nicely, in this very calm voice, like she was telling me the shop closes at five."
"You didn't tell me."
"I didn't tell anyone."
"You tell me everything."
"Not this." I turned my head and looked at him. "I couldn't say it out loud. It felt like admitting I'd given up."
"On what?"
"On someone choosing me."
The silence that followed had weight. Inside, the music shifted into something slow. A love song, obviously. Someone in there was about to cry.
Jonah stood. For a second I thought he was leaving, that I'd said too much and he was going to do the polite, decent thing and go find a drink. Instead he held out both hands, and when I took them, he pulled me up so easily my feet barely touched the ground.
"Come on," he said.
"Where?"
"Anywhere that isn't here."
His truck was parked round the back beside the bins, a rust-speckled Ford with sawdust ground into the floor mats and a St. Christopher medal swinging from the mirror. I climbed in wearing one shoe. He didn't comment. He just started the engine, cranked the heater because I was shaking, and drove.
Neither of us spoke for ten minutes. Streetlights slid across the dashboard. I watched his hands on the wheel, big, scarred, careful hands, a fresh nick across one knuckle. A chisel, he'd said. I'd told him to wear gloves. He'd told me gloves were for people who were afraid of wood.
I loved those hands. The thought arrived so plainly it startled me. Not loved loved. Loved the way you love a coat you've owned for years and never think about until the weather turns.
"Can I tell you something stupid?" I said.
"Always."
"I don't even want the husband." It came out in a rush. "That's the part I can't explain. Everyone thinks I'm sad because I'm alone. I'm not. I like my flat. I like my bed. I like my stupid sourdough. What I can't stand is that I want a kid, Jonah. I want someone small to teach how to whistle. I want to be somebody's first phone call. And every time I say it out loud, people look at me like I've announced I want to fly."
"That's not stupid."
"It is if I have to wait for a man to give me permission."
His grip shifted on the wheel. "Nobody has to give you permission."
"Tell that to the universe."
"You could do it alone. Donor, clinic. Loads of women do."
"I know." I pressed my forehead against the cold window. "I looked at the profiles. Lasted four minutes. It felt like ordering a stranger from a catalogue. Blue eyes, six foot, plays guitar. All I could think was, what if my kid asks about him one day? What do I say? That I picked his father off a list because he liked hiking?"
"So what do you want?"
I almost laughed. Twelve years, and nobody had ever asked me that so simply.
I thought of Leah's glowing face. I thought of the six speeches. I thought of Jonah sitting down in wet grass in his best trousers without a word, and how easy that had been. How it always was.
My mouth opened before my brain could stop it.
"Have a baby with me."
The truck didn't swerve, but it slowed. Jonah pulled onto the gravel shoulder of a dark country road, put it in park, and turned off the engine. The heater ticked down into silence.
"Say that again."
"I was joking," I said quickly. "I wasn't joking. I don't know. I had two glasses of prosecco and fell out of a window." The words were tripping over each other now. "It's just that you're the best person I know. You're kind, and you're steady, and you'd be a proper dad. And I'd be a good mum, I know I would. We wouldn't be in love, so nobody could get their heart broken. We'd just be two people who'd be good at it. No romance, no sex, just a clinic and a plan. Like a business partnership. A really, really soft business partnership."
I ran out of breath.
Jonah sat there in the dark, staring through the windscreen. I couldn't read his profile. A muscle ticked at the corner of his mouth.
Long seconds passed. My face began to burn. Oh God. You've ruined it. Twelve years, gone in one prosecco-soaked sentence in a truck.
"Jonah, forget I-"
"Yes."
I blinked. "Yes?"
"Yes." He turned to look at me. In the dashboard glow his eyes were darker than usual, and something moved in them that I couldn't name, something raw and startled, like a man who'd been handed the thing he wanted most and was afraid to breathe on it. "Yeah. Okay. Yes."
"You don't want to think about it?"
"No."
"You don't want to take a week? Talk to your mum? Consider the extremely serious implications of-"
"Marnie." His voice was quiet. "I said yes."
It was too fast. Some small, sensible part of me knew it, a little alarm going off at the back of my mind. But the prosecco was still warm in my blood, and the night was cold, and the man beside me had never once let me down, so I ignored it.
"We'd need rules," I said.
"Obviously."
"Proper ones. Written down."
"I'll find a pen."
"No feelings," I said. "That's the big one. No complications. If either of us meets someone, we step back and reassess. Clinic only. Separate bedrooms."
Something flickered across his face and was gone. "Separate bedrooms," he agreed.
"And we don't tell anyone until we're sure."
"Not even Priya?"
"Especially not Priya. She'd make a spreadsheet."
That earned me a real smile, slow and crooked and warm. My chest did something odd and fluttery, and I filed it firmly under leftover adrenaline.
"So we're doing this," I said.
"We're doing this."
"You're sure."
"Marn." He reached across the console and, very gently, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. It was a small thing. He'd done it a hundred times, and I'd never noticed. Tonight my skin remembered it a full second after his fingers had gone. "I've never been surer of anything in my life."
We sat there in the dark, two friends on the side of a road, shaking hands on the most reckless idea either of us had ever had. His palm was warm and rough against mine. Neither of us let go quite as fast as a handshake requires.
I told myself it meant nothing.
At 2:14 a.m., in my flat, still in the ruined dress, I was brushing my teeth when my phone lit up on the bathroom shelf.
Jonah: Home safe?
Me: Yes. Thank you for tonight. For all of it.
Three dots appeared. Vanished. Appeared again. I stood there with the toothbrush hanging out of my mouth, heart oddly loud.
Jonah: I've wanted to say something for a long time.
My stomach flipped.
Me: What?
The dots blinked. Stopped. Blinked again.
Jonah: Never mind. Get some sleep. Big week ahead, Mum.
I smiled at the word Mum, and it warmed a part of me I hadn't realised was cold. I typed goodnight, sent it, and switched off the light.
But I lay awake for a long time afterwards, staring at the ceiling, replaying it.
I've wanted to say something for a long time.
What had he wanted to say?
And why, God help me, did I suddenly need to know so badly?