The Timeline

26.

June 28th, 2015:

Claire's stomach had started to show.

Which was logical, she reasoned, since she was about to enter her fifth month of pregnancy. The stomach hadn't grown that much, but if she looked at herself in the mirror while she was naked, she would notice the roundness of her lower belly, shaped like a tiny growing balloon. When she dressed, specifically in black or using tight-fitting shirts the texture would adhere to her skin and enhance the tiny baby bump.

It made her feel a bit giddy, whenever she looked at it and paid it much attention. So, it's real and it's happening, she would think to herself, despite knowing that she had known exactly what she had been agreed to, the moment she had decided to keep the baby. Except that now it felt very real. But still, Claire was still sure of her choice, while also knowing that it would be regarded as absolutely bonkers by anyone else in her life.

The month of June had been - so far - the best of her year. Deep inside of herself, Claire knew that something had broken, that she would've never gone back to being who she had been before everything happened, because she had simply lost that person (or maybe she had grown, going so abruptly to her adulthood self that she hadn't had the proper time to undergo all the other transformations that accompanied the mind's one).

During the last month, however, Claire had felt the closest she would ever feel to what she had used to be.

For starters, she had never studied that hard in her entire life. Not even at the end of her first year at university had she studied that much and that long during the day. She had so much to catch up on, since she had lost so much time at university, not attending several modules and lectures both due to her time spent with Robert and the time she had spent in isolation after everything had unfurled with him.

She had done her best, and still, she hadn't been able to catch up on everything. She had stayed behind. That made her feel like a failure, although her teachers had been extremely gentle with her, seeing how much the entire first half of the year hadn't been exactly easy on Claire, how much she had been affected by it. The good news was that she had been able to pass half of her exams with decent marks. The bad news was that she would've had to retake certain modules when the following school year would've approached.

She would've, consequently, finished university a little bit later than everyone else she knew, and that made her feel like a bit of a failure.

That was when all of her friends - meaning all of her friends, both the Core Four and her university friends - had hosted a small intervention on her, where they had sat her down and made her notice just how many things she was doing and how many things she had accomplished during those past two years since she had moved to London.

Claire had passed her first year at university; she had started recording audiobooks, being paid to do so, and had finished a whole series of 8 books; she was in talks to start recording another book series of harlequin novels; since her resume had grown in such a short period of time, more people had contacted her, not only for books but also to voice and dub small videos on the internet, and they also paid her to do all of that; she had done the commercials with Simon & How, who were already actively looking for other things she could've done during the summer months and in the fall, since she had been so dutiful with her three commercials; she was also pregnant - although Claire didn't think that added much to what she was doing in the professional aspect of her life, since she didn't plan to sell the baby or anything like that.

When it was put right in front of her like that, Claire had to admit that, despite all the stupid things she had done that year, she had also managed to do some good things. The thing was that going on with her life day by day, Claire didn't exactly notice the progress of things really steadily, for she lived through them and didn't get to step back to look at them from a different point of view, see the whole picture. That was why sometimes Claire needed someone to ground her and tell her that she was doing good, that she was on the right path. That was also the reason she had loved her weekly chats with Harry, once upon a time, because then she had been the one to recount everything she did, and she would get to see how much she had done with her life.