15April
I’m Ainsley Hartley, sixteen and, for a moment, carrying a secret that felt like a ticking timebomb. Harry Clarke, the lad Id been seeing for a year in our secondary school in York, had become the father of a child we both loved to imagine. The moment we realised I was pregnant, terror froze us; we kept it from our parents, hoping the news would simply disappear.
When my mother, Mrs. Thompson, eventually found out, her face turned scarlet with fury. Our family was the sort of pictureperfect one that the neighbours talked about over the garden fence I was the only daughter, top of my class, and both Harry and I were expected to march straight on to Oxford or Cambridge and land respectable careers. A baby, in her eyes, would shatter that tidy plan.
Because we were still undereighteen, the decision fell to our parents. My mother forced me into an abortion before the legal limit. The procedure went smoothly, and the clinic doors closed behind me with a strange mix of relief and emptiness.
Life, as it always does, slipped back into routine. Harry and I kept meeting after school, finished our Alevels, enrolled at university, and, a year later, said our vows in a modest church near the River Ouse. My parents, now more accepting, didnt interfere.
Then, two years into marriage, the news came: we were expecting again. Joy swelled in us like a tide. But at six months, I began to bleed heavily. My son was born tiny, barely a pound and a half, and three hours after his first cry he was gone.
The doctors could not halt the hemorrhage. They had to remove my uterus to save my life. I will never bear children again. My mother visited the ward, eyes brimming with regret, apologising for the choice she had made years before. Her words did nothing to ease the ache.
The past cannot be rewound, nor its mistakes mended. I am now a woman who will never be a mother, and the thought of whether Harry and I can keep our marriage together feels like staring into a foggy window. Children are supposed to be the heart of a normal family, yet here I am, emptyhanded and trying to find a new rhythm in the silence.
