The Roadside
The lay-by sat half-hidden off the rural A-road like a place people used only when they did not want witnesses. Wet weeds bent in the wind. Oil shone black on the cracked asphalt. Rain moved through the headlights in pale silver sheets.
Hannah Whitmore was on her knees beside the Range Rover before she fully understood how she had ended up there.
One minute she had been in the front passenger seat, breath short, trying to count through another contraction. The next, Oliver had stopped the car so hard her shoulder hit the window, and he was outside, yanking her taupe holdall from the boot.
He dropped it beside her with a dull thud.
“Oliver, please,” Hannah said. “I need the hospital now.”
Her fingers clung to his sleeve and the edge of the open door. Rain ran down her cardigan and over the back of her hand. She could not tell what was water and what was sweat anymore.
Oliver bent toward her just enough to make his cruelty intimate.
“You are not getting back in my car.”
He pulled free. Hannah nearly lost her balance.
She looked past him through the rear window. Margaret Whitmore sat straight-backed in her cream coat, hands folded, her face set in cold disapproval. Beside her, Poppy Whitmore kept her phone on her lap and stared downward as if the screen had suddenly become more important than the woman outside.
“This is your child too,” Hannah whispered. Her voice sounded torn open. “Please.”
Oliver got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
For a second the SUV idled, cabin light glowing amber over three motionless faces. Then the tires hissed through the water and the vehicle pulled away.
Hannah stood in the white wash of the departing beams, one hand under her stomach, one hand pressed to her mouth.
The red taillights grew smaller, then vanished into the black road.
Silence rushed back in their place.
Only the wind remained. The rain. Her shallow breathing. The small noise of her holdall tipping onto one side in the weeds.
A pain seized her lower back so sharply that she had to grip the door of nothing, air where the car had been. She bent over and tried not to panic. The baby needed her voice steady. That was what the midwife had told her.
“It’s all right,” she whispered to her belly, even though nothing was all right. “Stay with me. Just stay with me.”
May you like
She took one step toward the roadside verge and another contraction hit harder than the first.
That was when blue lights appeared through the fog.
