CHAPTER 3: THE BABY LIE

"Your mother just toasted a baby I don't have, Ansel."

Nerys said it into the cloakroom, and the coats seemed to lean in and listen. She didn't care who heard. She had held a smile for two full minutes in front of two hundred people, and she was finished smiling for the night.

"Nerys, please, keep it down," Ansel said, pushing the door shut behind him with his heel.

"Keep it down?" She spun round, and her bouquet dropped a few petals on the carpet. "She had a microphone, Ansel. I think we're past keeping it down."

It was still playing in her head like a video she couldn't pause. Rhian standing at table one with her glass in the air and her face shining. To Ansel and Nerys, and to the little one on the way! Half a second of nothing. Then Bronwen, her own mother, bursting into tears and pressing a napkin to her mouth. Then the clapping. A man at the bar had shouted "About time!" and some of the guests had cheered. Nerys had sat there with her mouth stuck in a grin, counting under her breath, and when she reached a hundred and twenty she'd said "toilet" to nobody and run.

Ansel held up both hands. "I can explain."

"Go on, then," Nerys said.

"Okay. So." He wet his lips. "Technically, I never said when."

"Don't," she said.

"I'm only saying I never gave a date—"

"Ansel." She pointed the bouquet at him like a weapon. "What did you tell them?"

He glanced at Della and Alden, who had gone still by the far rail. Then he looked back at her, and his shoulders dropped.

"Six weeks ago," he said. "I told both of them we were trying."

The music thumped on through the wall, cheerful and stupid.

"Trying," Nerys repeated slowly. "Trying what?"

"To have a baby," he said.

"We have never tried to have a baby," she said.

"I know that," he said.

"We haven't even talked about trying," she said.

"I know, Nerys, I was there." His voice jumped, and he dragged it back down. "They wouldn't stop. Every phone call, every Sunday. So I said we were trying, and they went quiet. First quiet I'd had in months."

"You made me a liar on my wedding day," she said.

"That isn't what I—"

"Two hundred people clapped for something that isn't happening!" She heard her own voice crack and left it. "My mum was crying, Ansel. Happy crying. She hugged a waiter."

"I didn't know Mama would say it out loud," he said.

"Of course she'd say it out loud. She's your mother!" she said.

"And what was I meant to do?" He stepped closer, and she saw his hands shaking. "I told her once that we'd wait. Just once. She cried for a week, Nerys. A week. Every call, she was crying down the phone at me."

Nerys blinked. For one second, she saw him on the other end of that phone, sitting in a car or a corridor, listening to his mother sob. The thought softened something in her. She stamped it flat again. "That's not an answer. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was going to," he said.

"When?" she asked.

"After the wedding," he said.

"After the wedding." She turned a half-circle, looking for something to throw, and found only coats. "You were going to tell me after the speeches, were you? Over the cake?"

"I wanted today to be nice!" he said.

"Then you should have lied to me instead of to them!" she said.

It was a ridiculous thing to say, and she knew it as it left her mouth. Ansel's face flickered. In the silence, she let herself think the thing she'd been holding down since the toast, the thing she would never say aloud.

When Rhian said it, the first feeling wasn't horror. It was relief. A small, shameful loosening in her chest, quick as a hiccup. Someone said it. I don't have to. She had been dreading the Sunday lunch where she'd finally say not yet and watch two women's faces fall. Ansel had gone and done the dreading for her, and for two whole seconds she had sat in that ballroom feeling grateful, before the horror caught up.

That was why she was shouting. Half of it, anyway.

"Okay," Alden said. "Okay. Hey."

He had stepped between them without seeming to move, one hand up toward Nerys, the other toward Ansel, palms open. His smile was stiff, but it was the smile he wore at parties and funerals and everything in between.

"Both of you, breathe," he said. "Nobody's died. Nobody's pregnant. We can sort this."

"It isn't yours to sort," Nerys said.

"No." He nodded at her, too fast, agreeing before she'd finished. "No, you're right. I just don't think the shouting's helping."

"Everyone keeps telling me what isn't helping."

Her eyes slid past him and landed on Della.

Della hadn't said a word since Nerys came in. She stood by the coats with her arms wrapped round her own ribs, the white dress pooled around her feet, looking at the floor. Her eyes were puffy. The skin under them was pink, and a streak of mascara had dried at the corner of one lid. Della, who once sat through a whole funeral dry-eyed because she'd promised herself.

That's not the toast, Nerys thought. That's something else.

She opened her mouth to ask. Alden shifted his weight, and Della's eyes flicked to him and away again, quick and quiet, and the question died in Nerys's throat. Whatever it was, it belonged to Della. Nerys had her own fire to put out.

"I want you to say sorry," she told Ansel. "A real one."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Properly," she said.

"I'm sorry I lied to my mother and your mother and put you in that position." He swallowed. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you first. I should have. I just wanted one week where nobody was crying at me."

It was the apology she'd have wanted from anyone else. It also had a small but tucked inside it, like a pea under a mattress. She could hear the but. She could hear him not saying it.

"I need to think," she said.

"Take as long as you want," he said.

"I wasn't asking you, " she said.

Ansel gave her a crooked, tired smile, the one she'd fallen for. She hated that it still worked a little. She turned to put her bouquet down on the shelf by the door, and her elbow caught his phone, which he'd dropped there when he came in. It slid an inch.

It buzzed.

The screen lit up bright white against the dark wood, and the preview slid across before she could look away.

Congratulations Ansel Rhys! Seren from Year 11. Call me?

She read it twice. Seren. Year 11. The name meant nothing to her. The exclamation mark looked like it was shouting in a girl's voice.

Ansel crossed the room and reached for the phone. He looked down. For a second, nothing happened to his face.

Then he smiled.

It wasn't the crooked one, or the apology one, or the one he'd worn at the altar. It was wide and unguarded and young, and it was the first real smile she had seen on him all night.

He flipped the phone face down on the shelf, and he kept smiling at the wood.