Bloody Mary by Ricki Thomas

call for a nurse.
    “Hello Sophie, is everything alright?” Nurse Messaoud entered, wiping the toast crumbs from her chubby fingers onto her uniform.
    “I know this sounds silly, but is there a possibility I could still be pregnant?”
    The nurse reached for the notes at the end of the bed and flicked through, answering in her lilting Jamaican accent. “According to your notes, my love, you had a heavy bleed, and when the scanner was passed across your belly, they found no trace of pregnancy.”
    Sophie, unaccustomed in life and work to appearing anything but sane, knew she could be on the brink of losing her credibility. “I want another scan.”
     
    The process had involved much huffing and puffing, and, if it hadn’t been for their professionalism, Sophie was sure the medical team involved would have been rolling their eyes and patronising her. But her tenacity had succeeded, and she was lying on the trolley in the gynaecology department with a sonographer squeezing a cold jelly-like gel onto her abdomen. She began to move the scanner slowly over the area. She was thorough, but eventually she stopped and wiped the gel away. “I can’t see anything in the womb.”
    On top of the empty grieving, Sophie felt like an idiot for even considering believing that woman and her false hope, and she slowly sat, mindful of her healing ribs, with her head dropped in embarrassment. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.” Her voice was pitiful.
    The sonographer took Sophie’s notes and perused them briefly. “It says you had only just found you were pregnant when the accident happened. Do you have a rough idea of how far gone you would have been?”
    “It would have been about four, maybe five, weeks. I don’t have regular periods so it’s impossible to pinpoint it.”
    “Look, I’m going to try one more thing, Mrs Delaney. I want you to go and empty your bladder, then wait outside and I’ll call you.”
    Ten minutes later Sophie was back on the trolley, shocked at the degradation of the internal ultrasound, but the humiliation was worth it when she heard the words she’d not expected. “There it is!” The sonographer moved the screen so that Sophie could see her fingers detailing the outline she was describing. “That, you see, between there and there. That’s a pregnancy sac, and it appears to be intact. I can’t tell this early the exact gestation date, but I can tell you that either the bleed didn’t disrupt the pregnancy, or you were carrying fraternal twins and only lost one. Congratulations, Mrs Delaney, you’re going to be a mum.”
     

Chapter 6
Lucky for Some?
     
    I had no idea what had happened when I visited Sophie in hospital, I don’t think I’ve ever behaved so irrationally, and when Beryl told me at her next session that she was going to be a grandmother after all, it frightened me. Was it all a big coincidence, or could there be some truth in the tarot cards. I’d spouted all that rubbish about auras, I mean, I know I advertise myself as seeing them, to be consulted on them, but I make it all up, just saying what the client wants to hear. When I saw Sophie, I saw no colours, but the words came out as if I did. I just didn’t know what to think.
    For the first time in thirty years, I had dug out the only photo of Anna and Andrew that I possessed. I’d framed it and displayed it beside the kettle in the kitchen. I had to, I had to remember why I was trying to hurt this family, and this was the only way: a visual reminder. But the horror of that day stayed with me, and when Hodgekinson, Neville and Barton rang me to say that Sophie was returning to work and did I still want to see her, I said no. It was the same story with the divorce, I told them I didn’t want to go through with it any more.
    Likewise, even though I had read both Sophie’s diary and address book from cover to cover, any thoughts of using the details to my advantage were hastily quelled. I still did the ‘readings’ for