Wildflower Hill
what about me?”
    “Molly is my wife. It’s not that easy to—”
    “Oh, God. Oh, God.” Beattie reeled away from him, all her instincts urging her to run.
    But he caught her, pulled her close, covered her tear-stained face with kisses. “I love you, I love you. But here’s the truth. Molly will never grant me a divorce.”
    “What shall I do?” Beattie sobbed. “I’ve already lost my job. I can’t even look after myself, let alone a babe.”
    “I’ll help if I can,” Henry said. “Please be calm, and keep your voice quiet, my dear. Please be calm. You must tell me: does anybody else know?”
    “Cora,” she confessed.
    “Has she told Teddy?”
    Beattie shook her head.
    Henry drew a deep breath. “Here’s what will happen. We will go upstairs and fetch your coat, and we will tell everyone that you’re unwell and heading home. Then you must stay away from the club a little while.”
    “But—”
    “I just need some time. To organize things,” he said. “You do trust me, don’t you?”
    A vast emptiness opened up inside her. She
didn’t
trust him. Of course she didn’t. It was the reason she had taken so long to tell him, after all. Agony to realize it.
    “Will you do as I say?” he asked.
    What choice did she have? She nodded but couldn’t find her voice to say yes.
    Two weeks passed, and still no word from Henry. Each day, she fell further and further into the well of hopelessness. Every morning, she dressed and left the flat, so that Ma and Pa wouldn’t know she no longer had a job. Of course they would find out, when Ma went through her handbag looking for money and found none. Daily, she walked until her feet were swollen and invariably found herself at Glasgow Green. Everywhere new life was unfolding. The tight green shoots on the bitch and lime trees; the wildflowers bursting into color along the banks of the Clyde; the proud geese with their trains of clumsy-footed chicks. Inside her, too. Her child gently twitched against her belly, which grew manifestly and inescapably rounder.
    But as well as new life, she saw other things on her walks through Glasgow, images that haunted her. Ragged women without homes, dirty children begging for coins or food, a grubby collection of old blankets in a back alley, waiting for its owner to come home to sleep in it. Her imagination, once given over to dreaming about dresses and successes, trod those back alleys without her permission. She saw herself and her child, she saw winter’s cold grasp approaching like a shadow. She saw a bleak, hungry future.
    She returned home each day at dusk. Pa still on his typewriter, Ma easing her shoes off her tired feet after a day at the laundry where she worked and saying nothing to Pa with herlips, although her eyes silently begged him to find real work. Beattie withdrew and they didn’t notice.
    Cora didn’t call on her, either, to see how she was. She was surprised by how sad that made her. Had Beattie’s friendship been so peripheral to Cora? Cora had not once, since the day Beattie had confessed she was pregnant, asked her how she was or if she, Cora, could help. It was as though she had forgotten Beattie’s predicament. Just as quickly, now, it seemed she had forgotten Beattie, too.
    Beattie waited. She waited for Henry. She waited for her parents to notice she had no job. She waited for her belly to grow large enough that her dresses no longer hid it. She waited for the consequences to come.
    And then, one morning, they did.
    Beattie was in the bathroom, stepping out of the bath with its chipped enamel and rusty taps. Her mother walked in.
    It was deliberate, of course. The suspicions must have been prickling her, and she knew Beattie was in there. The bolt on the bathroom door hadn’t worked for months, but all the residents who used the bathroom had grown used to leaving their slippers just outside the door, a signal that the room was in use.
    Beattie gasped, reaching for a towel. Naked, there was no
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