‘Hypothetically?’
He nodded. ‘We didn’t discuss it before, but I think we should now.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late?’
He shook his head. ‘Now’s the perfect time,’ he said. ‘So, hypothetically, if you’d decided to go with option one, what would you have planned to do when the baby was born?’
Worryingly and interestingly enough, she didn’t even have to think about it all that hard. ‘I’d have gone back to work,’ she said, her heart beating fast and her head swimming for a second at what that might mean. ‘Possibly hired a nanny. Maybe roped in my dad. He’s been banging on about grandchildren long enough, and he’s about to retire so presumably he’d have been prepared to step up to the plate. And Mum would have helped too, I’m sure. Hypothetically speaking, of course,’ she added hastily, because it was a scenario she could now envisage all too clearly but one that could never happen because Marcus didn’t want it to.
He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles, staring straight ahead. ‘And where would I have figured in all this?’
‘You wouldn’t have figured at all. Unless you’d wanted to. Which you wouldn’t have because you don’t even want a baby.’
‘Don’t I?’
Her heart squeezed but she ignored it. ‘No.’
‘Assume I do. For the hypothesis.’
Why was he doing this? she wondered, feeling uncharacteristically flustered. Was he making sure she’d thought through everything before going ahead? Or was it something else?
‘OK, fine,’ she said, her brain too frazzled to be able to work it through, ‘but I don’t see it would make any difference, because how could you help?’
‘I could look after the baby when you go back to work.’
She stared at him in surprise. ‘You?’
‘Why not? My time is my own at the moment so it would make perfect sense.’
‘What about your projects?’
‘I can work on them from home.’
‘You’d do that?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t quite know what to make of that. ‘Have you ever changed a nappy?’
He arched an eyebrow. ‘Have you?’
‘Well, no,’ she conceded. ‘But what about when the baby’s six weeks old or something and has been crying non-stop all night and you realise just what you’ve taken on? Would you still want to stick around then?’ And if he didn’t, what would that mean for her career?
‘Of course. Once I start something I don’t give up.’
Except when it came to relationships, she thought, but before she could say anything, he added, ‘And there’s no way I’d give up on my child.’
‘But wouldn’t you mind?’
‘What about?’
‘About what other people might think if you stayed at home looking after a baby while I went back to work, for a start.’
‘I don’t give a crap what other people think.’
Which was admirable, but now it struck her that somewhere along the line this conversation had become less theoretical and more real so she steeled herself and said, ‘But what does any of this matter? It’s all totally irrelevant. Hypothetical.’
‘Right.’ He drew his legs back, sat bolt upright and swivelled so he was facing her, his jaw tight and his eyes practically burning into hers. ‘But what if it wasn’t?’