I tossed her a roll of paper towels from under the sink. "What's the deal here? What are we working with? Stomach flu? Another case of listeria in the office? What?"
Shannon pressed her palms to her eyelids and sighed. "Fetus," she murmured.
I blinked at her, convinced that I'd misheard. "Excuse me?"
"Fetus," she repeated. "I'm pregnant."
She patted her belly, and I realized she was wearing leggings, a belted tunic, and riding boots—not her usual office attire.
"I thought Andy and I had the same stomach bug, but then it turned out she had food poisoning. Will dragged me to the doctor last week, and surprise!"
"Were you…" I struggled to find the right word. Shan and I used to talk abouteverything, but our worlds were different now. This territory was murky. "Were you trying?"
She shook her head, her eyes still closed. "Nope. And before you ask, yes, I was on the pill. My husband isveryproud of himself for accomplishing that feat."
My surge of jealousy was not small, and I felt like an asshole for it. But I wanted me and Tiel to be making a similar announcement right now, and not because we were checking off boxes or needed a new activity to entertain ourselves. We wanted to give our kids the kind of unrelenting love and acceptance that was missing from our childhoods, and build a family over the wreckages of our own.
"Will things ever be good with us again?" Shannon asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.
"What?" I asked, confused. "I'm sorry, I was—"
"I know," she interrupted. "You were somewhere else, and I was working on not vomiting, and it hit me that I'm having a baby, and we're sitting here, together, but we can't even talk. We don't talk anymore. Not really." She rolled up her sleeves and loosened her collar. "I know we both needed to grow, and that required space and distance. I get that, but sometimes I think we grew so far apart that we don't know each other anymore. I'm closer with your wife than I am with you, and even though I love her, I don't see that much of her. I'm a little heartbroken about this state of affairs right now."
She wasn't wrong. "Okay," I said. "We're not avoiding you. Things have been…busy."
"It's funny how that's your excuse now," Shannon said. "We used to work seventy, eighty hour weeks and still managed to talk every day. We're notbusy, Sam. This operation is finally under control, and we don't spend every waking minute working to keep the wheels on anymore. It's not about being busy. You shut me out a long time ago, and even though you think you've reopened that door, you haven't. We're strangers, and I fucking hate it."
"You want to talk? Let's talk. Maybe we should start with your sudden marriage, or youryears-longsecret relationship with Will? Yeah, let's talk about that. Tell me how I shut you out with that one."
"How aboutyoursudden marriage? Or how about the time when you spent three fucking months in the wilderness, and didn't once call, text, or drop a damn postcard in the mail?"
"You eloped to get back at me?" I asked.
"No, you dickhead, we eloped because we wanted to," she said. "Not everything is about you."
"And there you go," I said, gesturing toward her. "Going to Maine had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me dealing with my shit. Could I have done a better job of staying in touch? Yes. Did I need to disconnect from everything?Hellyes."
She scrubbed her hands over her face with a sigh. "I don't want it to be like this," she whispered. "We need to get out of survival mode. We've been running as fast and as far as possible, and we've been running so long that we don't even realize we're still doing it. We don't have to run away anymore."
"That's why I needed to leave, Shan," I said. "I couldn't do itandbe here."
"It felt like I failed," she said. "It felt like I let you go over the edge while I did nothing to stop it, and every damn day I wondered whether you were still alive. I knew it had to be bad for you to leave like that, and all I could think was that you'd gone into the woods to kill yourself and I couldn't do a fucking thing to stop it."
Shannon balled up the paper towels she was holding and tossed them across the room.
"Then, when you came back, you went to Tiel." She held up her hands before I could object. "I love your wife, Sam.Love her. But you went to her first, and you've been holding us at a distance since. It's like you still aren't sure whether you want us around, and I don't want it to be like that. I want us—all of us—to be okay."
She ended that statement by puking and gagging for several unpleasant minutes where I considered the possibility that I was also a sympathetic vomiter. When she finally dropped back to the floor and thunked her head against the wall, I handed her another wad of paper towels.
"I think we're getting there," I said. "We're on our way to okay."
"I really hope so, Sam, because this kid," she started, her hand on her belly, "needs a big, noisy, messy, crazy family."
Nodding, I asked, "When are you going to share this news with the rest of the tribe?"
"Soon," she said. "It's not like I can keep it to myself much longer. I woke up yesterday morning and nothing fit. I meannothing. I feel like an overstuffed sausage in these leggings." She held up her palms and shrugged. "But this was quite the shock, and we needed a minute to digest, just the two of us."
"Tiel and I…we've been trying," I said.
