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into the living room, bathing the chrome and glass with a pearly sheen even as the horizon pinkened with the promise of a new day. Zoe dressed quickly and, with one last bittersweet glance towards the bedroom, she left.
    Three weeks later Zoe had done her best to forget that incredible night with Aaron Bryant, although she couldn’t keep herself from surreptitiously scanning the headlines of the tabloids and gossip magazines for a glimpse of his name. She saw a photograph of him at a movie premier with a gorgeous B-list actress and felt something inside her tighten, twist. Surely not jealousy? she asked herself. It would be incredibly, criminally stupid to be jealous. Aaron Bryant meant nothing to her, and she obviously meant nothing to him. Their one night, fantastic as it had been, was over.
    Resolutely she went to work at The Daisy Café, a funky, independent coffee shop in Greenwich Village where she worked part-time as a barista. She went to the community centre where she worked afternoons as an art therapist, and tried to keep away from the tabloids.
    One afternoon in early September she was working at the café when the smell of the coffee beans nearly made her lose her breakfast.
    ‘I must be coming down with something,’ she told Violet, her co-worker, a young woman of nineteen who had multiple piercings and hair dyed like her name. ‘The smell of coffee is making me sick.’
    Violet raised her eyebrows. ‘If I don’t know better, I’dthink you were pregnant.’ Zoe just stared at her, all the blood draining from her face, and Violet pursed her lips. ‘Uh-oh.’
    As soon as her shift ended Zoe bought a pregnancy test, telling herself she was being ridiculous. Aaron had used protection, after all. She probably just had some kind of stomach flu, but just to be safe…
    She took the test in the tiny bathroom of her studio apartment, sitting on the edge of the tub while she watched two pink lines blaze across the little screen.
    Pregnant.
    She sat there, the test in hand, utterly in shock and completely numb. Yet as that blankness wore off she probed the emotion underneath like a sore tooth or a fresh scar and realised, to her surprise, it wasn’t dismay or fear that she felt. It was almost…excitement. Happiness.
    She shook her head, incredulous at her own emotions. A
baby
. The baby of a man she barely knew, didn’t even like. And yet…a baby. A child, her child, already nestled inside her, starting to grow. She pressed one hand against her still-flat tummy in a kind of dazed incredulity.
    She wanted this baby. Despite all the challenges and difficulties of being a single mother on a small salary, she wanted to have this child. She was thirty-one years old, and a happy-ever-after wasn’t likely to be in her future. This was her chance to be a mother, a chance to find her own kind of happiness. And, even though the baby was no more than the size of a bean, it was
there
. And she wanted to nurture that tiny life, that part of her.
    Over the next few days she wished she had someone to talk to, but none of her friends were remotely interested in pregnancy or babies, and ever since Millie had lost her husband and young daughter three years ago Zoe hadn’t felt like she could burden her with her problems—and certainly not this. Children were still a no-go area for Millie.
    There was, Zoe knew, at least one person she needed to talk to. Aaron, no matter how hands-off he intended to be—and, frankly, she hoped that was considerable—still needed to know he was going to be a father. Zoe didn’t relish that conversation, but it didn’t appear to be one she was going to have any time soon, for every time she called Bryant Enterprises and asked for Aaron she was put off by a prissy-sounding secretary.
    She left message after message with her name and number, but a week went by of her calling every day and he never phoned back. Annoyed, she considered not telling him at all, but she knew she could never keep such