Her phone buzzes almost immediately: Error: invalid number. Message Not Delivered.
"What'd he say?" Jake asks curiously.
"Nothing," she replies with barely concealed disappointment. "The message didn't go through. He must not get texts."
Jake snorts. "It's 2013, Rose. My eighty year old grandmother texts. And Facebooks. Did he give you a fake number?"
"No, because the night I went over to his hotel I called him first, and he answered. But he did also say he wasn't from around here, and it was a London phone number he gave me. Maybe he just gave me his room number instead of his mobile," she muses.
Jake purses his lips, but says nothing.
"What?" she asks.
"Nothing," he replies, too quickly.
"What?" she says again, narrowing her eyes at him.
"You said you got the impression he didn't want to be contacted again. Maybe he was married," Jake suggests reluctantly.
"He said he was recently divorced, actually. His wife had cheated on him. He seemed real bitter about it, so I didn't ask any questions."
"Sounds to me like your handsome detective wasn't quite over his ex."
"Perhaps not. But then again, neither am I," she admits.
"You could always look him up on Facebook," Jake offers.
"Yeah, but what'd be the point? If he wanted to keep in touch with me, he would've given me his real number," she says, chewing on her fingernails dejectedly. "I was obviously just a rebound. S'okay, it's not the end of the world. At least the sex was good."
"I'm sorry boys suck," Jake says, putting his arm around her shoulders in consolation.
"Eh, who knows? Maybe it's for the best," she shrugs. "I've got enough baggage for two people already, I don't need a man with several tons of it himself. I've had quite enough of that babysitting Jimmy for as long as I did. I need a bloke who will take care of me for a change."
Jake nods emphatically in agreement. "Don't we all?"
Just out of curiosity, she Googles him when they get home from the launderette. Turns out, he's not the Worst Cop in Britain after all.
His ex-wife is.
The first result that pops up is an article in the Broadchurch Echo, Britain's Worst Cop Vindicated. She reads the whole sordid tale from start to finish, about how Hardy's wife had lost vital evidence in a child murder case in Sandbrook when it was stolen from her car while she was at a hotel with her lover. Not wanting their teenaged daughter to know about her mother's infidelity, Hardy had shouldered the blame and been crucified in the media for it. Now, he'd evidently cracked a different child murder case in a little coastal town called Broadchurch, but was being relieved of duty for personal reasons.
"No wonder he's so bitter," she mutters to herself.
Two weeks later…
"According to WebMD, you're pregnant," Shareen says without looking up from her laptop. "That, or you have food poisoning and PMS. Or possibly pancreatic cancer."
"I'm not pregnant," Rose insists, even as she hangs her head over the toilet, fighting yet another of the sudden waves of nausea that have been overtaking her for the last week. "I can't be pregnant, I'm on the pill."
"I hate to break it to you, doll, but women get pregnant on the pill all the time. Nothing is 100% effective, except for abstinence. And that's boring. Although probably not as boring as having a kid, come to think of it."
"I'm not pregnant. I take my pill everyday like clockwork. I never miss a dose, and I always take it at the same time. I've only had sex once in the last six months, for Pete's sake! It's got to be food poisoning."
"Food poisoning that causes frequent urination, backaches, and sore boobs?" Shareen says doubtfully. "And for the record, once is all it takes."
"You think I don't know that?" Rose says, glowering.
"I'm just saying. Look at my cousin Heather. She got pregnant the night she lost her virginity."
"Heather doesn't have a baby."
"No, she doesn't," Shareen says meaningfully.
"So I have food poisoning and PMS. Life is rarely convenient, these things happen," Rose says, though it sounds weak even to her own ears.
Shareen gets up and goes to the bathroom medicine cabinet. She takes a small box off the shelf and sets it on the sink. "Well, there's one way to settle this. Take a pregnancy test."
"Why do you have a pregnancy test?" Rose asks, leaning back on her haunches.
Her friend rolls her eyes. "Because I'm easy. I keep them around, just in case. You get a discount when you buy more than one at a time."
Rose picks up the box, and looks doubtfully at the picture of the smiling woman on the front of it. "She looks way too happy for something as stressful as a pregnancy test."
"It's only stressful if you don't want to be pregnant," Shareen says, crossing her arms. "Do you?"
"I've never given much thought to it, really. Jimmy had no interest in kids, so neither did I," she answers. "Christ...what if I am pregnant, Shareen? Off a bloody one night stand, no less. My mother will kill me."
"Take the test," her friend repeats firmly.
"Okay, okay, fine," Rose acquiesces, her stomach reeling as she gets to her feet. She hikes her skirt up, and sits on the toilet. "Do you mind?"
"Sorry," Shareen says sheepishly, turning her back.
She's so nervous that she can't go at first, and the silence in the bathroom is deafening until her bladder finally loosens up. She gets pee on her hand, curses, adjusts the test stick and tries again. When she's sure she's hit it at least once, she sets the test on the sink and waits, her knees pressed together. "How long does it take?"
"About two minutes."
She counts the seconds down in her head, and it's the longest 120 seconds of her life. She reaches for the test, but her hand falters. "I can't do it. You look."
"Okay, but no shooting the messenger," Shareen says, picking up the test. She peers down at the results window and squints.
"Well? What does it say?" Rose asks, and her heart is beating in her chest like a caged bird.
"Uh...yeah, it's um...it's not food poisoning," her friend says, setting the test down on the sink.
Rose grabs it up, wanting to believe that Shareen had read it wrong. Incredulously, she looks at the test window. "It's just two goddamn smiley faces. That's not clear at all! What is this, Schrödinger's pregnancy test?"
"Who?" Shareen asks, confused. "Anyway, I don't know what a Humdinger is, but you're definitely pregnant, Rose. That's why there's two smiley faces. False negatives sometimes happen, but false positives rarely do."
"It's not Humdinger, it's Schr-you know what, forget it," Rose says weakly. "I mean, false positives are rare, but rare doesn't mean impossible."
"And denial ain't just a river in Egypt."
"Well...shit," she says, slumping against the side of the sink.