All She Ever Wanted

Chapter 1: Lisa
February 21, 9.15am. Message to Megan: I read having warm feet and eating blueberry jam can boost your chances of falling pregnant. Is that good enough reason to start having breakfast in bed?
From my office window, you could make out the tops of the heads of people wandering past the shops on the street below. When work calls were boring, or I needed to pretend to be deep in thought about something important, I would stare out and try to imagine where they were going. That guy ducking into the florist and running out again moments later had almost definitely forgotten someone’s birthday. That woman overburdened with piles of veges from the organic grocer was probably a novice cook trying to impress a potential date.
Lately, there had been a stream of women pushing extremely posh strollers past the building every time I so much as flicked a glance out the window. It was as if every mother within a 10km radius of my office in south London had scheduled a catch-up on my doorstep. That was what people always said, though, right? Whether you desperately wanted to fall pregnant, or were desperately worried that you might be, you started to see babies everywhere.
And I very much wanted to be pregnant.
I turned away from the window, brushing my hands on my Gucci shift dress – a gift to myself after I’d fallen in love with it on a celebrity in a recent magazine photo shoot. It didn’t look quite as perfect on me, but I wasn’t dwelling on that.
A leg was sticking out from under my desk. It was clad in dark blue jeans at least two sizes too big for it, and a trainer that might once have been white but which had been scuffed to a smoky grey.
The foot wiggled a bit like my dog’s when she was mid-dream, flat on her back in the sunny spot in the corner of my office on a summer afternoon. As it was, she was at the other side of the desk, snuffling the head to which the foot belonged. There was a loud slurp. The man under the desk sat up, his forehead colliding with the metal bar running the width of the desk. The impact rattled the photo frame on my desk that contained a gorgeous photo of me and my partner, Marcelo, on holiday in Mexico.
“Ow.”
He emerged, rubbing his head.
I grimaced. “Sorry. Did Bella put you off?”
He shook his head. “It’s fine. Don’t get free kisses included in most parts of this building.”
He blushed as I raised an eyebrow. “Did you get it sorted?”
He nodded. “Think you should be up and running now. Just a cable knocked loose.” He shot a pointed look at Bella.
I shot him half a smile, already looking over his shoulder to the glass door of my office, where my assistant, Sam, was peering in. “Thanks. Mike, right?”
He gathered a pad from my desk. “Mark. No worries.”
Sam pushed past him as he shuffled out, and slithered into the chair across the desk from me. Firing Bella a warning look as he pulled the door shut behind him, Mark raised a hand in a tentative wave through the glass.
Sam was jiggling a sneaker-clad foot in the way I had come to know meant he had a *very bad thing* to tell me. “Got a minute?” His brow was furrowed and he tapped urgently on the knee of his distressed grey skinny jeans, using his other hand to push up his chunky black-rimmed glasses. “We’ve got a problem.”
I pushed a pile of paper from the middle of my desk to the corner, clearing a space between us.