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counting them.
    “And my sister and me,” she finished, touching the coffee
container with two young girls peering out of their window, arms around each
other.
    “No prince,” he remarked. “No maiden in the tower, either.”
    “Yeah. Well. I’ve kind of given up on the prince thing.”
    He looked at her searchingly. “Time for you to tell me about
that.”
    “Right.” She pulled the manila folder from where she’d
stashed it on top of the fridge and sat down at the table, waved him to a
chair, her tension, briefly dispelled, returning in full force.  She considered
moving to the more comfortable lounge, then dismissed the idea. It was
disconcerting enough being in here with him, oddly intimate. She needed to keep
this as businesslike as possible.
    “You say you told me. But you didn’t,” he said. “I think
you’d better start at the beginning, and explain.” His face was closed again,
the brief moment of softness over.
    She rested a palm on the closed folder. Spoke through a
throat that tightened as she remembered. “You were going to ring me, if you
recall. I waited. And waited. I couldn’t believe it. I thought something had
happened. Then I saw a story online, about the team. And I realized that something had happened. And what it was turned out to be pretty simple. You left,
and you forgot me.”
    Nic shifted in his seat. “I was going to,” he said lamely.
“But there was so much to do, at first. And then time had gone by, and I felt
bad, didn’t know what to say. Then . . .” He shrugged helplessly. “I got caught
up. And when I did think about it, I told myself you’d moved on, too.”
    Emma laughed, feeling the bitterness rise in her, a familiar
tide. “Yeah. I moved on, all right. At least, my body did.”
    “But why didn’t you get in touch?” he asked in exasperation.
“Once you knew you were pregnant? And how the hell did it happen, anyway? You
told me you were on the Pill, or I’d’ve been more careful.”
    “I forgot a couple,” she admitted, flushing. “I wasn’t too
good at that kind of thing back then. And with everything that happened that
week . . . I forgot, all right? I thought it wouldn’t matter. Wishful thinking,
it turned out.”
    “Anyway. When it did happen, once I knew, I tried to tell
you. Over and over.” She opened the folder at last and handed him a small stack
of paper. The top sheet, he saw, was a copy of an email, addressed to the Bath
team’s publicist, asking the woman to have Nic get in touch with her urgently
“on a personal matter.”
    “Please tell him it’s important, or I wouldn’t be contacting
him,” he read. “Because of what happened in Fiji.”
    He looked up at her. “She didn’t answer?”
    “Look at the next sheet,” Emma told him.
    “Unfortunately, I can’t help you with this,” he read. “I’m
sure you can see that the players have the right to their privacy, and if they
choose not to share their personal contact information with others, that is
their decision to make.”
    “She never even told me,” Nic protested.
    “So I sent a letter,” Emma went on, ignoring him. She nodded
to the stack he held. “You can read it.”
    He shifted the papers, found a covering note to the same woman,
asking her to forward the enclosed letter. It was dated, he saw, two months
after he’d left for England.
     
    Nic,
    I’ve figured out that our time together didn’t matter to
you after all. I guess you were just talking. But I need you to know that I’m
pregnant. And I could really use your help. Please write to me, or email me, or
something.
    Emma
     
    Her contact information was all there, he saw. He looked up
at her again. “I never saw this.”
    Emma looked at him searchingly. “I don’t know if that’s true
or not,” she said slowly. “I don’t know what to believe. I rang, after that.
Several times. Left messages. When I finally got that woman to talk to me, she
told me she was sorry, but she couldn’t help me. I