Read Online Eggshell Days by Rebecca Gregson - Free Book Online Page A

when to change tack. “But you’re obviously doing something right.”
    Emmy nodded, accepting the compliment. She thought she was one of the lucky ones too. Single parenthood was what she would choose. It meant the accolade belonged entirely to her. Maya was her achievement. Her only achievement, maybe, but still all hers.
    Niall shrugged. “I can’t help it.”
    â€œCan’t help what?”
    â€œBeing so proud of her.”
    You have no idea what hearing something like that does to me, Emmy thought. “Don’t help it, then. You know how much you mean to her.”
    â€œI do now. She’s already given me my pass to enter her room whenever I like.” He produced a credit-card-sized piece of board with his name and a password on it. “No one else is going to have one, apparently. Not even you.”
    One of Maya’s early paintings flashed up in Emmy’s mind. My Family , it was called. Niall was in it, along with the goldfish and the hamster, and it had been on the fridge door for years. Emmy liked him playing Dad, but only because he knew things. For a start, he knew he was playing, and secondly he also knew the point at which she would do the Lioness thing and swipe him with her paw.
    â€œNot that I’m going to be allowed to use it much,” he said, putting the pass back in his pocket. “Not at weekends, anyway.”
    â€œWhat? Kat? She’s not still got a thing about her, has she?”
    â€œDon’t be too hard on her, Em. She’s just trying to find her feet. She’s really keen to make this work, not just between her and me, but here.”
    â€œOr is she just putting up with us lot as a means of getting you?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, getting me?”
    â€œKeeping you, then.”
    â€œI’m not going anywhere.”
    â€œGood. Don’t.”
    â€œI won’t. I don’t help, though. I told her the reason I wasn’t up for a kid just now was because I felt I already had one.”
    â€œShe wants a baby?” Emmy’s heart thumped a little.
    â€œNot really. Only when she’s pissed.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous.”
    â€œIs it?”
    â€œWell, you tell me.”
    â€œYou’re a bad girl sometimes, Emmy,” Niall said, shaking his head at her. “Most of the time you’re irresistibly lovely, but every now and again you’re rotten to the core.”
    â€œSorry. Anyway, you told her you already had one?”
    â€œI told her I felt I did. It’s true, you know it is. Maya feels like mine, even if she isn’t.”
    â€œShe certainly behaves as if she’s yours sometimes.”
    â€œSwears like a trooper, smokes herself half to death.”
    â€œAll that.”
    There was a long pause, which Emmy wanted to go on for even longer. It happened sometimes, their past coming to illuminate their present, and when it did her world was a better place. She had tried to be clear about it to Sita once, but she’d ended up being about as clear as pastis and water. What everyone except Kat did seem able to understand was that, even though Niall wasn’t Maya’s father, she engendered in him something so like paternal love that he might as well have been. Even Jay and Asha had got as far as that.
    â€œSo Kat knows everything about us, does she? I mean, like everything?”
    â€œShe knows I was there at Maya’s birth. That’ll do.”
    It was the closest they had ever got to referring to the termination. Everything else before and after was permissible, but the abortion and the maelstrom of emotion that swirled around it were not. They went near it at their peril.
    â€œDid you ever put Toby right?” Niall asked suddenly.
    â€œNope.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œGood you said good.”
    Toby Hart had only met Niall O’Connor once, when his postnatal niece had brought him to Cornwall on a trip to introduce her baby daughter.