Page 119 of This Woman Forever

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” John breathes, eyeing my new book.

“No one can say I’m not committed, eh?” I fan the pages, grinning.

He laughs at the irony, a deep, baritone laugh with absolutely no humor. John remembers as well as I do the moment I learned Lauren was pregnant. Dread. I obviously wouldn’t have changed having Rosie for the world. But... had she not been born, she would never have been taken. And I wouldn’t have become a shell of a man. I shake my head and those thoughts away. Or I try to. I would have been a shell. Rosie saved me from myself for a while. Until I let her down. I’ve been letting her down ever since too. I wince and feel at my chest.

“I suppose I should be congratulating you,” John mumbles, sounding surprisingly genuine.

“Go on then.”

“What?”

“Congratulate me.” I smile mildly. “Uncle John.”

“Moron.”

“I prefer motherfucker.”

“And have you thought about how to tell Sarah?”

“Kill the buzz, why don’t you.” I flick through the book, reading a few things here and there. Will she do something stupid again?

“I’m just asking.”

“She doesn’t need to know.” I pluck a highlighter out of the pen pot and drag it across a few things I absolutely should remember. One being information on pregnant women flying. Bollocks. That’s taken a honeymoon in the sun off the table.

“She definitely should know,” John says. “You can’t let her find that out from someone else.”

I drop the pen and my head back. “It’s none of her business.” Suddenly parched, I get up and grab a bottle of water from the fridge, waiting for John to come back at me.

“I called the security company again. They aren’t committing to an engineer visit to replace the camera,” he says, pivoting the conversation completely. His way of agreeing to disagree. Fine by me.

“Convenient.”

“Should I push or relent?”

“It’s just the one camera still out?” I ask.

“Around the side by the garages.”

It’s a small mercy. At least it’s not an internal one. “When’s the new system being installed again?”

“Friday.”

“Fuck them.”

“Okay. You should cancel the direct debit.”

“Have Sa—” Fuck my life. “I’ll call the bank.” Surely I don’t need a million numbers and passwords to simply cancel a direct debit. “Could they show up to remove the equipment?”

“They’ll be trespassing. Besides, the equipment is paid for. They can’t remove it. It’s the servicing agreement that’s ongoing.” John waves the contract that Sarah found when she was here on Sunday. “They’re not fulfilling their end of the deal by actually servicing or replacing so we stop paying.”

“Okay, good.”

John puts his shades back on, looking across more paperwork. “I was looking for the site plans.”

“What for?”

“The Manor. To check the boundaries.”