Conviction(34)

I was beyond upset, I was devastated. I knew that I had polycystic ovaries, but unlike some women, I had very few symptoms other than irregular periods. I had gained a serious amount of weight and become anxious and depressed after Conner left me, but I’ve always put that down more to the split than my condition. I’d managed to get my weight back under control with exercise, a reasonably healthy diet and a lot of encouragement from my husband and mother. The period irregularity had been brought under control by going on the pill. My only real concern was that since I had stopped taking it, almost a year ago now, I’d only had four periods.

After a stressful couple of weeks waiting on my results, all my tests came through from my doctor, and they were actually better than I’d been expecting. My bloods were all good, hormone levels fine and the ultrasound showed that I only had a couple of very small cysts and they were both on the same ovary. My other ovary was perfectly healthy and as far as she was concerned, there was no reason why I couldn’t conceive naturally. She told me to go away, keep practising and to come back in six months if I still wasn’t pregnant.

I’d researched online and was secretly charting my temperature and worked out that based on the very heavy period I’d had in May, my next most fertile few days would be in the middle of June, so I booked Marcus and I a weekend away in York, just for two nights. We would leave Friday and head back on Sunday so he couldn’t complain about having to take time off from work. I planned on doing nothing but having sex with my husband. I’d booked us into the honeymoon suite of a four-hundred-year-old hotel, inside the city’s walls. Four poster bed, claw-footed slipper bath, the works.

The court case Marcus was working on was due to wind up on the Tuesday, with a verdict delivered by Thursday at the latest. I’d booked the Friday as well as the weekend off of work and was really looking forward to it.

Marcus and I had been averaging sex, less than once a week for the best part of a year, sometimes only once a fortnight and right now, it had been eight whole weeks. This wasn’t unusual when he worked on a big case so I wasn’t too worried and I planned on making up for it on our weekend away.

Sophie had just come back from a week in Greece with her brother, who’d arrived back in the country after three months’ work in Australia. Today was her first day back at the salon but she only had two clients booked in so she’d gotten the apprentice to put a conditioning treatment on her hair, then wash and blow dry it into big bouncy curls. Now that was done, she was bored and hanging around the reception area, going through our bookings.

I finished with my client, let the receptionist take her money and waved her goodbye.

“I see you’ve already booked the weekend of the twenty-first off?” she asks with a smile. I raise my eyebrows in surprise. I hadn’t told Sophie about my plans for a dirty weekend away yet as I hadn’t seen her.

“What d’ya mean? Yeah, I’ve booked it off, I’m going away that weekend. I’ve booked the Friday off too.” Her face falls.

“You’re going away? Shit, where you going?”

“I’ve booked a dirty weekend away in York with Marcus.”

Her face screws up. “Ewww. TMI, Neen, TMI.”

“Well, you asked.”

“Yeah, sadly, I did.”

She looks over my face for a few seconds. “How are things?”

I shrug my shoulders. I have no idea, how things are. Lonely and sexless mainly.

“I want the truth. How are things really, Neen?”

I let out a long sigh. She’s my best friend, if I can’t tell her then I really am alone in this world. I motion with my head, saying, “Office.”

We make our way to our office at the back of the salon, where we have a pair of leather sofas and a large coffee table. We have the usual office furniture too, but we have the sofas so we can escape and relax for five minutes on busy days. The staff have their own break room, but this is somewhere for just Soph and me to retreat to. We have a coffee machine, a microwave and a fridge so we’re pretty much self-contained.

Sophie goes straight to the fridge and pours us both a large glass of wine.

“Come on then Matthews, spill. What’s your prick of a husband done now?”

I roll my eyes as I take a sip of my wine and sit back into the sofa. “He actually hasn’t done anything.”

“So why’d you hesitate when I asked you how things were?”

I let out a long breath and pick at an imaginary piece of fluff on my black trousers. My eyes sting as I fight the tears. Sophie was only away a week and it’s suddenly hitting me how much I missed her.

It’s Thursday. Marcus hasn’t been home until after I’ve gone to bed for over two weeks, and we haven’t had sex for fifty-six days. Apart from my clients and the people that I work with, I’d barely spoken a word to anyone for almost eight days.

“I missed you,” I tell her. Sophie’s face lights up with a real, genuine smile that shines in her eyes.

“I missed you too baby chick. I wish you’d have come with us.”

“How’s Josh?”

“He’s great. Really busy, but great. We clubbed all night and lounged around the pool all day. He asked how you were doing.”

I smiled as I thought of Josh. We used to be really close, but he was too close to Conner and it was just too painful to be around him, so I distanced myself. Then he’d moved to London to work so I didn’t see him about too often. Since he’d set up his own business, I’d hardly seen him at all. He was always travelling around the world, organising functions and events, or just enjoying life.