The Baby Group by Rowan Coleman

sympathetically at her.
    â€˜If I had a seat I’d offer it to you, love,’ he said with a shrug.
    Jess smiled back at him and held on tight, bracing her legs as the bus lurched forward and swayed her and Jacob dangerously off balance.
    It was only a few stops, she told herself. Hardly anything really. It would have been easier to walk it, except that after visiting Meg she just felt so utterly tired with the effort of talking and smiling that she thought she’d get the bus home. Now she wished she hadn’t. The experience was hurting her from the inside out.
    Somehow before when she used to commute to her job in human resources in the West End, back before Jacob had been born, the hardness of the people around her just rolled off her like raindrops off glass. She never noticed the implicit unkindness and disrespect that everyone showed to everyone else. She supposed she had been just as bad, locked so tightly in her own little bubble that she barely noticed the other humans around her. But since Jacob had arrived in her life all her outer protective shell had been peeled painfully away and suddenly she was vulnerable to every ounce of cruelty or indifference, no matter how slight. And the fact that these people on the bus would not offer her and her baby a seat almost brought her to tears. Jess knew that they were just ordinary people on an ordinary London bus. People who probably worked hard all day for their families and went home in the evening looking forward to kissing their own children goodnight. She understood that. But if these people could be so hard and unfeeling, then what about the next terrorist to get on the next underground train or bus? Or what about Iran? Iran was developing nuclear weapons. North Korea already had them.
    All at once the world had become a terrifying place to live in, with danger lurking in every shadow. Worst of all Jess felt as if she was barely equipped to be a mother, let alone to protect her child from the horrifyingly violent and unfeeling world into which she had brought him.
    She wanted to be able to just love and enjoy him like his father did. She wanted her relationship with Jacob to be that perfect and that simple, but every single moment of their time together was interwoven with fear. Even when she was laughing, just as she had at Meg’s earlier that morning, she felt as if it was merely a fragile front to cover up the truth. No one there knew that her stomach was knotted in a constant contraction of anxiety brought about by an unshakable conviction that somehow, somewhere, something would go terribly wrong.
    It had started at conception. Jess had longed to be pregnant again but feared it too, because it filled her with the promise of hope and loss in equal parts. She had been pregnant twice before. The first baby had been lost before the end of the first trimester. It had broken her heart, but eventually she had been able to accept it. But the second, her little girl, was stillborn nearly six months into the pregnancy.
    Even now Jess could not bear to think of that grey morning in the delivery suite, with the rain rushing against the window and the faded frieze of bunny rabbits painted around the ceiling. It was the knowing that made it unbearable, the knowledge that every contraction that wracked her body wasn’t bringing a new life into the world. Knowing that she was delivering a dead baby, a little girl who had somehow died in the womb. In her womb.
    Between the waves of physical pain Jess could hear the cries of other children somewhere on the ward. She would always remember the laughter and joy of a family ringing off the walls in the corridor outside, and wanting to scream for them to shut up. But all she could do was to stay as quiet as she could with Lee at her side, holding her hand, telling her she was so brave and how much he loved her, brushing away his tears between reassurances.
    What Jess found almost unbearable was that the baby had died