In the Boss's Arms. Barbara Hannay

of triumph as he hit on a better idea. ‘Can you take time to do some shopping today?’

      ‘Well, yes. What would you like me to get you?’

      When Liam told her what he wanted and where he wanted it sent, Rita’s eyebrows lifted high, but then, like a well-trained PA, she lowered them again just as quickly. ‘I can do that in my lunch break,’ she said.

      ‘Take as long as you need,’ Liam told her and then he grabbed his suit jacket from its peg near the door and shrugged it on as he went out to greet Mr Toh.

      Alice had never been so glad to reach the end of the working week.

      Friday afternoon. She could scurry home and hide.

      She could be pathetic and lonely and no one would notice.

      Keeping up appearances in the office, pretending a nonchalance she didn’t feel, had nearly killed her, but now she could stop pretending that she didn’t care what Liam was doing in Sydney, who he was with, or that he hadn’t contacted her. She’d suffered two weeks of sleepless nights and stressful days—no wonder she felt tired, weepy and sick in the stomach whenever she thought about food.

      As she parked her car in the garage, she wondered if she should try to drag herself out somewhere tonight, to a movie perhaps. If she really exhausted herself she might sleep at last. She should make an effort to do something.

      She grabbed her briefcase from the passenger seat, locked the car and went to check the mailbox. Two envelopes with windows. Nothing personal, just bills. Terrific.

      She was halfway up the path to her front door when a van pulled up, a courier express-delivery van, and the driver was looking directly at her.

      Intensely curious, she waited and watched him get out, extract a largish parcel from the back of the van and begin to walk towards her.

      ‘I have a delivery for—’ he squinted to read the name on the address ‘—Alice Madigan.’

      ‘That’s me,’ she said and she realised she was trembling. How silly, but she’d seen a Sydney postmark.

      Her heart kept up a wild kind of skipping as she signed for the parcel, thanked the delivery man and carried the box into the house. She set it on the kitchen counter and found a sharp knife to cut through the tape, and she seemed to take ages to undo the packaging and the masses of bubble wrap, but at last the contents were revealed.

      A beautiful glass bowl. It was gorgeous. A wave of shimmering ocean-green was magically suspended within curved, clear glass. Holding it up to the light, she was overawed by its beauty and craftsmanship. It had to have been terribly expensive.

      A little card inside explained that the glass was hand-blown by artisans from Murano, which she knew was a famous island off the coast of Venice. She searched for a signature, turned the card over and found a message carefully printed in black ink. Missing you like crazy.

      Oh, wow.

      She felt a wave of giddiness, or was that happiness? Carefully she set the bowl on the counter.

      Liam.

      Liam was missing her.

      How fantastic. But how confusing, too. How could he take the time to go shopping for a gift when he didn’t have time to phone her?

      No. She wasn’t going to over-analyse this. Liam was thinking of her and he’d sent her a beautiful gift. Just because he’d been gone for…

      Feeling a sudden need to count the days, she looked up at the calendar on her kitchen wall and then she frowned.

      No.

      She must be mistaken. Leaning closer, she studied the dates more carefully, flipped back to the red dot marked on the previous month and counted forward again.

      That was odd. Her period had been due three days ago. She’d been so distracted she hadn’t noticed. But she must have miscalculated. Perhaps she’d marked the wrong day last month. She was never late. She knew that for sure. She’d spent years watching and waiting and her body was like clockwork. Never once had she been more than a day late.

      She was quite confident that her period was on its way. She had all the usual premenstrual symptoms. In fact, she’d been more tired and tender and stressedout than ever this week.

      She looked again at the bowl—so beautiful and vivid, as if a living piece of ocean had been captured and imprisoned in glass.

      How silly she’d been to fuss about Liam’s absence. No doubt the stress had thrown her hormones out of whack. Now she could calm down.

      What she needed was an early night. She would wake up in the morning and her period would arrive and her life would carry on in its usual, predictable rhythm.

      Chapter Eight

      THE woman in the chemist shop smiled at Alice. ‘This is our most popular brand. It comes with instructions. One blue line means a negative result, two lines positive. And you get two testing kits.’

      ‘Two?’ Alice repeated with a gulp.

      ‘Some people like to double-check.’

      ‘Yes. Right. Thanks, I’ll take it.’

      Clutching the packet to her chest, Alice hurried outside and almost jumped into her car. Then she opened the packet, took out the box and sat for several minutes staring at the printed words: Pregnancy Test.

      She couldn’t believe this was happening to her. Her period couldn’t really be five days overdue.

      Except…she’d checked the calendar and her diary a thousand times this weekend. And every time she’d arrived at the same answer. So here she was on Sunday night, so unable to bear the suspense any longer that she’d rushed out to find a 24-hour pharmacy.

      She felt a bit silly really, testing when she knew the kit was going to show one blue line, a negative result. She couldn’t be pregnant. It simply wasn’t possible. Todd had been desperate for a son and they’d tried for almost two years with no luck.

      His doctor had run tests on him that proved without a doubt that it was her fault. She shuddered now just remembering Todd’s anger and the ghastly names he’d called her. He’d made her feel so useless, so unfeminine and unlovable; her self-esteem had hit rock bottom.

      By the time he’d finished abusing her, she’d accepted the blame, of course. Why wouldn’t it be her fault? She’d let him down in every other way.

      She realised now that she should have doublechecked Todd’s assertion with fertility tests of her own, but at the time she hadn’t been able to face going through painful medical procedures just to confirm something she already knew.

      Besides, what was the point? Almost immediately, Todd had turned to other women.

      Setting the box carefully on the seat beside her, she started the car and drove home through the quiet suburban traffic. It was raining. Tyres swished through puddles and headlights slanted across shiny roads. Even though she knew it was pointless, she couldn’t suppress a tiny kernel of crazy excitement. But it felt so unreal. This couldn’t be an ordinary Sunday night, with families at home watching television and wishing the weekend could last a little longer.

      By the time she reached home she was a bundle of nerves, but it was time to put an end to the awful tension that had made a nightmare of her weekend. With the test over and done with she could go to work tomorrow confident that at least one potential problem had been overruled.

      OK.

      She set the testing stick on the bathroom bench, sat on the edge of the bath tub and closed her eyes while she counted the minutes.

      All weekend she’d felt as if she were teetering on a knife edge, on the brink of toppling into someone else’s life, some weird other dimension, like Alice falling into Wonderland. Very soon now and her own life would rock back into place.

      Once