One. Two. Three.

I am Poppy, drumming a three-part rhythm through my mind, a mind I cast back to this morning, laying across my sofa with my head in B's lap and my fingers wrapped around her wrist. My tshirt smells of decay, from the horrible house, but faintly of washing powder, and I smile as she always smells of washing powder.

One. Papa don't preach, but I've made up my mind, and I......'m keeping my baby... One. Carry my baby to full term, and make do and mend. Cut my hours at work to flexible working or job-share, which means only working one day and one night out of 8, for the princely sum of 13k a year, and attempt to support a child on that.

Two. Two being the most viable option, and the one I trembled as I told B about, and that is to carry my baby to full term, and then hand her over to the state for adoption. There are, and I know this as a child who was brought up in a home full of fostered and adopted children, lots of families out there desperate for children who cannot have them, and could give a far better life than I could dream about from my studio flat on my paltry income and my sleepless nights.

Three. Three is not even an option, as I clip on my new maternity bra and take another vitamin pill. Three is the unspeakable, the cold and clinical, the horrors revisited from losing baby Grace two years ago. The maternity wear found weeks later in a washing basket and sobbed, distraught over. The untaken pregnancy supplements hurled across the kitchen in anger, the smiling hospital staff I wanted to throttle for not having the answers to all my wailed and tortured "why"s. I cannot lose this baby. B held me to her breast, my head in her lap, and I could not meet her eye as she told me she would stand by me whatever I chose to do. I was ashamed of my infidelities, of my insecurities, ashamed of my shame.

She held me, and I could not cry, for I was and am numb. Closing out, shutting down, denying, tapping out my rhythm on all available surfaces and beating it like a war cry into my mind. One. Two. Three. One. Two. Three. Onetwothreeonetwothreeone... Two.... Three.