Jane the Virgin meets Bridget Jones's Baby in an outrageously funny and entertaining novel about a woman ready to go to any lengths to have a baby, even if that means using the frozen embryos she made with her ex ... who has inconveniently gone missing.
These embryos were made in a grand gesture of panicked love. The love is gone. But the panic is real.
When Daisy is hit with early perimenopause, her plans to start a family suddenly come with a deadline. Since she's single and competing for her dream job as a TV weather presenter, the timing isn't ideal. It's a good thing she already has embryos on ice.
Their origins are ... complicated. She and her ex made them after Xavier's cancer diagnosis - before Xavier's miraculous recovery, when he'd dumped Daisy for his oncology nurse, Erik.
Giving Daisy his blessing to use the embryos is the least Xavier can do. Except Xavier says no. And then he goes missing.
The date for the embryo transfer is fast approaching. Xavier will turn up eventually, right? So Daisy goes ahead. She just can't tell her sister, or Xavier's grieving parents, and definitely not Xavier's brother, Max, her teenage crush, who turns up wanting to talk. If the procedure works, she'll figure the rest out later.
But Daisy isn't the only person telling white lies, and things are about to get more complicated than Daisy could have ever imagined.
A novel about the unforgiving nature of biological clocks, the impossible battle between career and motherhood, the messiness of adult relationships and how quickly a few little white lies can spiral out of control.
THIS IS AN UNEDITED SAMPLE
Peri-peri-menopause isn’t a mere pothole of inconvenience. It’s a slap in the face, mocking the fact that your own ovaries and uterus don’t see any value in doing their thing anymore. They’re closing up for shop for good, because you’re not worth waiting around for. They’re breaking their lease early, not caring about the ramifications.
When life throws something like that at you, if you’re a woman, and you’re a Virgo, and you’re someone who likes to be in control—like me—you deal with it in the simplest way possible: you use the frozen embryos from your previous relationship gone sour. Embryos made during a grand gesture of panicked love. Sure, the love isn’t there anymore, but the panic is real, albeit of a different nature. My thirty-three-year-old uterus is retiring. Time to get moving. The logic is there if you swipe away the awkwardness.
I just didn’t count on my ex being such a pain in the arse.
Day -5
I did not drown my ex. I did not try to drown my ex. My frenzied brain grips on to that statement as I’m led through the Cairns Police Station by a Detective Poodman. We pass a small boardroom, the comforting scent of hot chocolate wafting over to us from somebody’s nearby desk, and I want to tell him this respectable room will do just fine; I’m not dangerous, I’m a professional journalist-slash-meteorologist, for Pete’s sake. I’m as friendly as they come. But Detective Poodman keeps on walking, and so must I, like a puppy dog, following.
Chin high, I stay close to his heels, heart bouncing like I’ve just downed a gallon of coffee. Wait till the Channel 3 heavies hear of this, one of their team members dragged into a police station for doing their job. My producer Bree is no doubt calling them. They’re probably sorting out a lawyer right now, just in case.
My toes curl. Except I kind of don’t want a lawyer, because then I would have to explain everything, and some things are best kept private. For reputation purposes. (Yes, I do share a lot on my Instagram feed, but that’s different, that’s what I choose to share. This morning’s misadventure definitely isn’t public fodder.) I swallow a lump that feels like an orange.
Oh, dear mother of God. Stop mucking about and just show your face, Xavier.
‘Can I have a glass of water, please?’ I should have swigged some from my bag before they confiscated it. I’m parched after a morning out at sea on the Reef Recovery Dive, all that fresh air laced with salt. My insides are fizzing with the pH levels that have jumped aboard my body—like pirates, plundering my organs. Or maybe it’s stress. ‘Tap water, even? I’m not fussy.’
‘It’s coming,’ Poodman grumbles.
I smile at the back of his loafers, sucking in the stifling office air then regretting it. ‘Great!’
My head remains locked into that low position. There might be cameras in the hallway and making eye contact with them would be as good as putting my hand up and shouting, ‘I did it.’
Then my stomach twists. Water coming means someone else is joining us. I study Poodman’s steady shuffle, not approving of the pace. I need to get back to my hotel to help prepare tomorrow morning’s weather report. One year ago, my job description at Channel 3’s Let’s Rise morning show extended from environmental reporter to basically writing the weather reports for others to present. Because the other weather presenters haven’t studied meteorology like I have. Apparently, they don’t have time. Yet they get to present the weather. Any HR mismanagement in that equation?
Poodman leads us into a sorry little room with one table and three chairs, not even a lone window. I swallow, aggravating my dry throat, and ignore the little black video camera tucked high in the corner. I can’t help but inspect my appearance in the two-way mirror. Acting normal will hopefully help my case, and that is what any thirty-three-year-old woman in need of a shower would do. I’m overheating like a plum on a hot tin roof and don’t fancy the smell weeping out of every pore. One of those taunting ice buckets over my head right would come in handy right now.
I inspect my khaki shorts and black T-shirt combination, the smatter of dark freckles wrinkling around my nose. Not the best I’ve looked, but it’s been a long morning with a 4am call time. I tousle my honey-blonde fringe till the strands puff loose and yank my salty locks up into a ponytail before they stick to my neck like a glued-down toupee.
Poodman plonks himself down, gesturing for me to take the plastic chair opposite. He then spends way too long positioning his small blue notebook and black pen just right on the table, watching me through bushy eyebrows. Making me uncomfortable. Like it will make me say I’ve done things I have not.
It. Will. Not.
I’m too fidgety to sit and I should really take the lead, show Poodman I’m not at all worried about the situation, that this is all just a silly misunderstanding. I put on my breezy, public smile.
‘You know, there’s actually not much to tell—’
‘Sit down, Miss Wilding.’
I graciously sit myself down opposite him and then shoot right back up, my butt cheek screaming out in pain, cursing the crack in the plastic chair that has cruelly attacked mine.
‘Sorry, but that killed.’
I shouldn’t have said the ‘k’ word, but I meet Poodman’s gaze directly, showing no sign of fear. Though at least it’s an opener to address the elephant in the room.
Should I go for it? Should I?
Easy does it. ‘Just so you know, Xavier isn’t really missing. Please, can we organise another chair? And I’ll get you up to speed.’
Poodman’s eyebrows bounce to the top of his head.
I yank the chair upwards to give him a better view of the jagged crack. ‘Please? It’s a safety hazard.’
A block of tangerine flashes by the doorway. Someone is eavesdropping.
‘Janine?’ Poodman waits for the rest of Janine to appear, including her blushing face. A woman in her early thirties dressed in a summer top and jeans. Janine throws me a quick smile.
A fan?
I grin and point at her. ‘Love that top. That colour. Looks great on you.’
Janine inspects her tangerine button-up blouse with pride.
‘Did you get it here in Cairns?’ If it’s a recent purchase, there might be time for a shop before I jet back to Sydney tomorrow. I adore destination shopping.
Janine opens her mouth to answer, but Poodman is already throwing the cracked chair into her arms.
‘Another one, if you don’t mind?’
Janine obediently takes the chair and leaves, only to be replaced by a young man with a surfie mop of snowy hair. He’s carrying water. I note his shoes. Nike cross-trainers, black with white trim. Not bad. He checks out my white and fluoro orange Adidas runners, last year’s special edition, with extra thick soles. We share a nod. My runners performed great this morning against the white deck on the dive boat, amplified by the glamorous backdrop of the sunrise.
Until Xavier arrived and everything went tits up.
Poodman gestures for the guy to join us. ‘Our new trainee,’ he says. ‘He’s going to listen in.’
The young man plonks a jug and three glasses down with a nervous thud.
‘Hi Daisy, love your stories, Detective Dave … id. David.’ He goes to shake my hand, then changes his mind and yanks it back, eyes darting sideways to see if his boss saw his rookie move.
I try not to smile. I’ve been presenting the weekly environmental report on Channel 3 for five years now. Viewers love my stories because I always end on a positive note. Take the seaweed farmers around the world—they are singlehandedly zapping carbon dioxide levels from the air every minute of every day. And now they’re feeding some of those seaweeds to cows to lower methane levels—genius. Change from the ground up. If only we could invest in their intelligent ventures instead of trying to set up shop on Mars.
Viewers Insta message me all the time with story ideas: ancient tree lopping (by councils, I might add); weird changes in plants and pets; self-built underground bunkers; nifty solar bikes; city wall gardens; clever compost management; algae appearing where it shouldn’t; sharks appearing where they shouldn’t. Calling out the things in this world that aren’t right and why, and highlighting what is working. Spreading the word, sharing the love. People power. It’s real.
Poodman shakes his head. ‘Just pour the water.’
David clears his throat as he pours three waters, hand shaking. ‘We’ve sent the others home … well, back to their hotel. You’re the last witness left.’
‘Witness?’ I hug myself. ‘Oh, thank God. For a moment there I thought I was a suspect.’
David sits, pulling a notebook from his pocket. ‘Oh, yes—sorry, I meant suspect.’ His eyes widen like a Pixar character’s over the mix-up. He twists his lips while he writes ‘suspect’ in capital letters on his clean, white page then circles it twice, sending my panic into overtime.
Poodman’s glare burns holes in my pupils. ‘Janine seems to have gotten lost, so let’s get started on what happened. This interview is being recorded. Today is Thursday, 9 May, the time is 11.26am.’ He asks me to state my name and reconfirms I don’t want a lawyer.
I lean in towards the recorder so that this next bit is absolutely clear. ‘That’s correct. I’m not guilty.’
Poodman sighs. ‘Rightio then, Miss Wilding. No gloss, just the truth please.’
That is when I start to panic. As in sweat and fidget and not breathe very well.
‘So, what happened?’
David keeps on writing. What on earth he’s scribbling down at this stage, I have no idea. I try to calm my ragged nerves with longer breaths. This is just like any other unscripted interview. Think on your feet, Daisy. Keep it brief, focussed.
I level my shoulders. ‘Well, everything’s happening right now for the Great Barrier Reef. From a big-picture level. The poor thing has received a walloping for decades.’
Perhaps they remember the Bleach Brigade, who made headlines ten years ago at Parliament House in Canberra? David’s probably too young. That’s where my case should begin, when I first started shining a light on the Great Barrier Reef. When I first rose to fame, so to speak. The media gave us our name. Five of us from the student paper in our first year of university bleached our hair and bleached down there, though of course we wore white bikinis and stuffed curly white wigs in our bikini bottoms for effect—I wasn’t going to be showing anybody my punani, some of those politicians were old enough to be grandfathers! But, they got the picture. We attended a parliamentary sitting to drive home the horrifying bleaching that was threatening the reef. I’m the one who stood up to the Prime Minister and told him the facts. It wasn’t planned, my speech—we had signs that said it all: STOP THE BLEACHING—but something just took me over when all attention diverted our way. I was never going to have an audience like that again to state my case against global warming. To call out the injustice. It worked—we made front-page news, which boosted more investment and targeted protection programs. People power. They can google it later.
They can google it later.
‘That’s why we’re up here, Channel 3, shooting a piece for the Reef Conservation Society. The others on board were invited “influencers”.’ My fingers wriggle like bunny ears. I don’t mean to scoff when I say the word like it’s reductive, but c’mon. Just because you’ve got thousands of followers online doesn’t mean they’re hanging out for your next post. Half the numbers are usually bots.
David has his hand in the air, like a school kid. ‘I follow some of the influencers on the dive. Not you though.’ He frowns. ‘I don’t think?’ His hand shoots for his pocket, until he realises now is not the time to check his feed.
I snort. ‘I’m an investigative journalist. Not an influencer.’ I don’t know where my Insta follower numbers sit, it’s irrelevant. Follow me, don’t follow me, I really don’t mind. I turned off the number of visible likes a long time ago. But if you do follow me, great. I see you and I thank you.
‘Can we please focus here?’ Poodman wipes the sweat from his brow. ‘Look, we know why you were all out there. We’ve already interviewed the dive company. But I don’t care about your doomsday stories, just get to what happened underwater.’
I hug my hand to my chest, offended. ‘It’s not doomsday! The reef is literally dying. Did you know if we stay right off it now and turn down global temps by a degree or two, we can still only save thirty per cent of it from turning into football fields of bleached rubble?’
David shakes his head, eyes tearing up. His generation gets it.
Janine returns with a new chair, wheeling it in, a swivelling black material beauty with glistening arms, and I’m glad for the interruption.
‘Wonderful, thanks, Janine,’ I say. The topic of the reef was getting nowhere fast, just like in real life. I sit down and I can’t help myself—I attempt a swivel to show Janine how grateful I am for her delivery. Janine squeezes her lips tight, trying not to grin, I’m sure, and walks out, missing Poodman’s glare. I like her a lot.
Poodman thrusts out a leg and slams the door shut. ‘Did you know your ex was going to be on the dive this morning?’
I’m impressed he knows the details of my past relationships. Maybe Poodman follows me on Insta?
My head is shaking. ‘Absolutely not. Xavier doesn’t work for Channel 3, but our videographer came down with gastro yesterday.’ I whisper conspiratorially, ‘Too many oysters doused in beers the night before.’ Then I sigh with annoyance. ‘Xavier was our freelancer replacement. I mean, what are the chances?’
Poodman leans back into his seat. ‘I’ll say. A missing ex. What a coincidence.’
I nod thoughtfully. It was true. Seeing Xavier on the boat this morning was a shock to my system. We haven’t crossed paths since our break-up three years ago, I’ve made sure of that—and so has he. Xavier and I? We repel like polar opposites, like cold fronts and heat waves, like rain on an oil spill. Except for a few nasty texts back and forth, which were very necessary.
My hand is up. ‘But let’s remember, Xavier isn’t really missing, that’s just what he wants everyone to think. For a couple of hours.’ I roll my eyes. ‘Just to annoy me. He’s always been a practical joker. Anything for a squirm and a laugh at someone else’s expense.’
Xaver and I grew up on the same street in Coogee. We were friends, as in we used to all hang out, the neighbourhood gang. He was the joker of the pack, always hiding things: keys, bikes, guinea pigs. Pretending he was moving to boarding school every second month. Sneaking slugs in sneakers, chocolate cake in underpants. All mostly innocent fun.
Unlike this move.
‘What were you fighting about on deck?’ Poodman says. My cheeks warm. ‘Oh, nothing really. Just ticking off the shots we needed underneath. A bit of early footage with the GoPro. Checking our sound levels.’ A few other things. Suddenly I’m suspicious. ‘Why—what have the influencers told you?’ Bree, my producer, wouldn’t have blabbed. Influencers, though, they’ll mine anyone’s business for a click. Maybe one of them caught my kick on camera? They were all given the latest GoPros in nifty, floating, waterproof containers to capture their content, a gift, a treat. Call it a cross-promo, so long as we highlight the brand in our stories. I force a swallow. GoPros are pretty good at … action shots.
What a treat.
Poodman smirks. ‘It was Janine, actually, who filled me in. You know they’re still his frozen embryos even if you kill him off, right?’
Janine is most definitely a fan. Though phrases like that really irk me. You know they’re still his frozen embryos even if you kill him off, right? Everyone has an opinion on everything these days without knowing the hard facts. Social media is to blame. Never before has there been a platform that propels the everyday punter to expert status from sheer volume of comments alone. Comments and opinions can be, quite frankly, a crock of shit. Then the rubbish is shared, then shared again, and then suddenly the pot is being emptied out on some current affairs program without any fact-checking whatsoever. It’s farcical.
Detective David with his L plates is scribbling away and I frown at him.
‘Don’t write that down.’
He stares at me while his hand keeps moving. Smart-arse. I cross my arms in retaliation and prod the dull grey carpet under my sneakers, a faint smell of chemical cleaner leaching into my nostrils, then pinch my right hand between the thumb and forefinger, a little technique I’d learnt to help me focus on the here and now by creating mild pain. ‘Acute mindfulness’, the therapist had called it.
Poodman leans forward. ‘So, how did you do it?’
With my teeth clenched, I match his lean angle for angle, holding his gaze and trying to keep my voice level. ‘I told Xavier he could be involved if he wanted to. Him and Erik. Kids can have three parents, right? Or one main parent and support. Parents live separately all the time.’ I lift my chin. ‘And it’s not like I want financial support or anything, I am entirely independent and very proud of that fact. I am perfectly capable of bringing up a child on my own.’
My limbs lengthen with pride. Independence is one of my things, my brand, I suppose you could call it, ever since Xavier and I split. I don’t need a partner to make me whole. It’s not a feminist thing, I just hate being let down. I’ve even coined the phrase ‘conscious self-coupling’ (yes, inspired by Gwynnie and Chris’s ‘conscious uncoupling’). I caught the Instagram eyes of a few celebrities in Australia and overseas whose vibe it also was at some point in their lives. Kylie Minogue. Halle Berry. Jennifer Anniston. Fran Drescher. Success on our own terms. Marriage not necessary. I am a proud, single woman who doesn’t need anybody but herself for happiness. It isn’t just a female empowerment thing—I have a lot of male fans too. Openly Single. It’s a growing movement.
‘I mean, the embryos are technically mine, but I’m not that cruel. I can share.’
Poodman bursts out laughing. ‘How can they be “technically” yours, Miss Wilding? It takes two to tango, last I heard.’
The phrase catches in his throat and his cheeks blush. David’s hand has frozen mid-sentence. I move on fast to avoid us all having to think about Poodman tangoing naked with someone.
‘Well, Janine will have told you why we made them, I assume. The day before his treatment.’ I lock onto Poodman’s eyes. ‘Testicular cancer.’
I hear the shuffle below the table: Poodman’s thighs checking his own boys are still there and fighting fit. Even David wiggles slightly. They all do it, every time.
‘Xavier signed the embryos over in case he died. He was so adamant he was going to die. I mean, the stats aren’t that bad. It was all a little melodramatic, but …’
It was horrific, it truly was, and I’m not trying to make fun of the situation. Cancer sucks. I take a breath, threatening tears tickling my nose. I don’t like the guy now, he’s responsible for blowing my heart into pieces, but back then, I loved him. He was it. We were it. We both knew something was up after he’d found the painless lump. He’d held my hand so tight in the doctor’s surgery and I’d tried not to panic, because whatever it was, we would deal with it together. That’s what people who are in love do, they stand by each other through good times and bad. And this was definitely in the bad category.
The C word at thirty-one. Nobody deserves cancer ever, but especially not under fifty and definitely not under forty. Some people immediately transform into fighting mode, survival mode. Xavier went into last wishes mode. He started making a list of all the things he wanted to do before he died.
- Create embryos with me, so our love could live on.
2. Give his older brother his collectable Star Wars figurines, which they’d fought over when they were little.
3. Learn the piano (I went out and bought him a little keyboard with headphones for the hospital).
4. Write a life memoir (which didn’t really go anywhere, he lost interest after a week).
There’s that lodged orange again, tight in my throat. I try to meditate it down, ignoring my stinging eyes. I want to click my fingers and disappear out of here, back home to Bondi. No more Cairns please, not after this morning. No more jokes. Please just come back, Xavier.
