I sit in our booth and stare at the table knowing it wasn’t alittledecision.
But I contemplate which is worse—telling him I got pregnant without his permission and dealing with the consequences, or lying about it then him getting his memory back and being pissed at me.
Butwouldhe be pissed if that happened? I’m just not sure. I’m not sure about any of it.
“Ava?”
Trevor is standing behind the counter.
“I’m starting to get concerned. The way you reacted when I asked about the loan… And now you’re down here sitting in a booth, stalling. It’s clear something has you tied up in knots. You can tell me. Did we get into debt?” His face falls into a guilty expression. “Was it me? Did I do something?”
When I don’t answer, he comes around the counter and slips onto the bench next to me. Not across from me, as he would have before last Friday. He takes my hand, another thing he wouldn’t have done a mere week ago. Yet here he is, comforting me, thinking the worst of himself.
“Ava, remember what we promised the other night? That we wouldn’t keep things from each other?”
I nod as a truckload of guilt assaults me from head to toe.
“Then what is it? It’s okay to tell me, I can take it.”
I close my eyes and swallow what feels like shards of glass, making a split-second decision to come clean about everything. Because if I want this to work—reallywork—whether or not he gets his memory back, we need to be truthful. Work as a team. Go forward together without any secrets between us.
“It wasn’t you, it was me.”
He squeezes my hand. “It’s okay, Ava.” His eyes rake over my face, examining every feature from my forehead to my chin. Then his gaze sweeps across my chest. “Did you um… have some work done? Plastic surgery or something?”
Why am I so scared to tell him the news that should be the greatest revelation of our lives?
Probably because this new version of him has never, not once, expressed an interest in children. In fact, I overheard him talking with his father that he was relieved we didn’t have kids. Maybe this Trevor, the one who doesn’t remember our history and how desperately we wanted to start a family, will be the opposite of excited.
I take a breath, reminding myself that to him, this is a brand new relationship, and why would he mention kids. To him, it would be too soon to bring it up when we’re still testing the waters with each other.
But the past few days have been wonderful. We’re somehow finding our way back to each other. Maybe the baby will speed up the process. Make us the family we’d always dreamed of.
“Ava, you’re kind of freaking me the fuck out here. Are you sick? Was that for cancer treatment? What aren’t you telling me?”
I shake my head and stare blankly at the table. “I’m not sick. And, no, I didn’t get anything ‘done.’ But it was me who took out the loan.” I close my eyes, not wanting to see his expression when I say it. “You’re aware of how we tried IVF early last year.”
“Yes.”
“Well, what you don’t know is that we ended up with a lot more viable embryos than normal. After the failed attempt, there were still quite a few left. But we couldn’t afford more embryo transfers as we’d drained our savings for the one round of IVF.”
He gives my hand a squeeze. “Yeah, those can be super expensive. But if we had savings to cover it, what were all those other payments for?”
I look up at him. His eyes are soft and warm and so, so blue. I pretend I’m looking into the eyes of the old Trevor, because those eyes wouldn’t be judgmental or accusing. “We, um… didn’t want to destroy the embryos, so we paid for cold storage. We’d tried for so many years to get pregnant. You got tested. I got tested. We were told we both had issues and that itcouldhappen, but our chances were low. They said IVF was our best option. We agreed to one round, and if that failed, we were going to look into sperm donation and adoption once you got back home.”
“You still haven’t gotten to the point. None of this is adding up. Storing embryos would not cost anywhere near the amount of the loan.”
“You need to understand how devastated I was when the IVF didn’t work. I blamed myself. I thought I had failed you. Failed us. And I couldn’t bear the thought of all those embryos going to waste. So…” I inhale a shaky breath and hope what I tell him will not have him pulling away. “So I used them.”
He doesn’t respond right away. But his hand doesn’t move either.
“You used them,” he repeats slowly, as if trying to absorb the words. “Meaning you did more embryo transfers. I suppose that makes sense. I’m sure a lot of people go into debt trying to have kids.”
He’s still not getting it.Any of it.
“I was hoping to surprise you, Trevor. I knew it was a risk, but it was one I thought was worth taking. You were going to come home and have this amazing job. And six thousand dollars, or even four times that, wouldn’t be a hardship anymore. And we’d be expecting the baby we’d always wanted, so you wouldn’t be mad at me.”
“Okay, wow. So what you’re saying is I didn’t know you’d done it.”
