A Stormy Spring by C. C. MacKenzie

not going anywhere until you and I have had a talk ...’
    The knock on the door brought a swift end to the discussion. She tried to assimilate why on earth he was so angry? What had she done? Was it because she’d been annoyed with him in her email and turned off her phone?
    A blonde woman in her late forties, slim and attractive, entered the room.
    ‘Hello, Lucas.’
    Lucas smiled and Becca’s breath caught in her throat.
    How could she have forgotten how potent that smile was?
    ‘Becca, this is Dr. Marchford.’
    An hour later, Becca decided she was living in a weird parallel universe.
    The world she now inhabited couldn’t possibly be real. But it was. And now she’d need to account to Lucas for her actions. Explain to him why she hadn’t taken the morning after pill and why she was pregnant with his child. They’d forgotten to use protection once but as the doctor explained as if she was talking to a simpleton, once was more than enough.
    She’d gone to the trouble to go to the chemist and taken the box home, sat on her couch with a glass of water and not taken the pill. Why? Deep down Becca knew exactly why. She’d played Russian roulette with her future and had lost. And now she must face the consequences.
    According to the doctor her blood-pressure was dangerously high, which explained the continual underlying headache. Rest was prescribed which meant no work and she’d need to avoid stress. Oh, God.
    Clutching the note with the number she was to ring for an appointment with a consultant obstetrician, despair washed over Becca. She couldn’t go into hospital again with the memories and the smell.
    Closing her eyes, she curled up into the foetal position. Fat tears pooled and spilled from her eyes, seeping into the pillow.
    Intellectually, Becca knew that painful, agonising emotions do not go away if you refuse to deal with them. They multiply, breed and eventually consume a person.
    But grief is a trap.
    It isolates a person leaving them vulnerable. Abrasive words and acts of unkindness were too difficult for her to accept or to cope with these days. And grief was a room with no doors or windows, with no way out. A person needed to deal with it or stay trapped in eternal despair.
    They say there are five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
    Becca needed to be honest with herself and admit she’d never moved on to acceptance. But pain, soul deep, battled every logical thought. Even now she refused to acknowledge all she’d lost. The dark anger that threatened to devour her roared into her psyche. Utter fury with God, with life, with fate, attempted now to consume her.
    Where was the darkness?
    She wanted the numbness, the feeling of floating above life and its petty issues. No Justin, no Lucas, no pregnancy - just nothingness.
    She wanted it back.
    Someone listened, because she dropped like a stone into sleep and into the black embrace of oblivion.
    To a place where hell and horror reigned.
    Becca glanced at the time on the kitchen clock, again.
    Two hours late. Where was Rick? Probably got his nose stuck in some system glitch. Smiling, she dialled his cell phone. It rang repeatedly before going to voicemail.
    The baby kicked and she rubbed loving fingers in big circles on her swollen belly.
    Even the sprout was concerned. ‘We’re going to give your daddy a piece of our mind when he gets home,’ she told her daughter. Lily, they’d named her after her mother’s favourite flower.
    Humming a tune to a routine she was working on, she turned down the oven.
    Rick never managed to get anywhere on time. That was the trouble with being married to a nerd and technological wizard; you needed to think creatively when it came to meals.
    The man, she decided, would be late for his own funeral.
    The doorbell rang and she padded on bare feet down the hallway. He’d probably forgotten his keys, again. What was he like?
    She opened the door and smiled. ‘Honestly, Rick, what are