Delaney Pierson.
Shit.
“Cora—”
She shoves my chest and scrambles off of me, lurchingto her feet, tipping wildly. My heart leaps into my throat as I envision her falling, her head cracking against the marble tub. I jump to my feet, reaching to steady her. She stumbles away toward the sink.
“It’s not what you think. It’s work.” I don’t know what the hell it is. Delaney has my number, but we text or do voice memos. Everyone does. Did someone die?
Someone better have died.
She glares down at the phone in her hand.
“It’s just work.” Please God don’t let her answer it. How long is it going to ring?
She raises her gaze to me. “What am Ijustagain? Just a breeder? No, no, I know—just convenient, right? Conveniently broke. Conveniently alone in a new city. Why didn’t you just ask me to be your surrogate?” A bitter laugh bubbles from her mouth, and my ball sack shrivels. “I was so lonely I would’ve probably said yes. What a joke that is, right?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, Adrian. You’re not going to start lying to me now, are you?”
The phone finally stops ringing. I exhale. “Listen, can we just start over?” I take a beat and lower my voice. “Let’s just lower the temperature, okay?”
“Start over?” She laughs, sharp and raw, and my chest aches. “You don’t get it. Youbroke it. You can’t go back. There’s no do-over. Now I know that you aren’t who I thought you were. I know what we had wasn’t real. You can’t re-delude yourself.”
The phone starts ringing again.
My hands are raised in the air like she’s got a gun. I hate this. It’s undignified.
My chest hurts so fucking bad.
“Cora,” I say, a note of warning in my voice.
“I loved you. I know I shouldn’t have, because I didn’t know you, and you don’t know me, and people can’treallylove each other if they’re basically strangers, but I don’t care about should and shouldn’t—Idid.” She pounds her chest with her empty hand. “I felt ithere. And now it’s empty, and ithurts. I wish you’d taken my leg. Or my eyes.”
Her lip quivers. I can’t swallow or open my throat to speak. My body screams at me to grab her, that I’m going to lose, she’s slipping away, but my hands curl into impotent fists at my side.
I don’t recognize the feeling until it’s pulsing in my ears. I’m scared.
“It’sgone. There’s no getting it back. I see you for what you are now.” She sniffles and hikes her chin. “And you’re a piece of shit.”
The ground shifts. I need to stop this, but there are no handholds. No brakes. No floor under my feet. “Cora,” I rasp.
She reaches out and drops my phone in the toilet.Plop.
Pain drains from her blue eyes until they blaze with ice. “You know, Adrian,I’vewrecked a home before, too. I could do it again. If you know what’s good for you, stay the hell away from me.”
She stalks out of the bathroom, and by the time I fish out my phone and scrub a layer of skin off my hand under the hottest water, she’s disappeared into Pearl’s room and closed the door.
I could go after her, throw her over my shoulder and carry her back to our room. She’d be careful not to wake the girls. She wouldn’t want to scare them.
She can’t walk away like that.
She can’t expect me to let her. I can’t breathe.
I’m about to do it when Winnie lets out a short, perturbed cry. She stares over at me with foggy eyes,scrunches her nose, and decides it’s not worth waking all the way up. Her eyes drift shut again like the world’s slowest garage door.
My chest twists. She’s beautiful. So is Pearl. Perfect replicas of their mother.
