“You don’t have to say,” Lina assured her. “You don’t owe anyone, anything.”
“It’s fine. I’m about three and a half months.”
There was a chorus of ‘ohs’ and ‘aws’ accompanied by confused expressions. That was typically out of the danger zone for most pregnancies.
Her sisters and mom knew the tip of the iceberg of her fertility issues, but the rest of the table was totally in the dark. “I have some pre-existing health conditions that make things alittle…complicated, so it’s not exactly straightforward. So, yeah, that’s it. We can talk about something else now.”
There was about a ten-second silence before the conversation picked back up at a low hum. It was obvious people were doing their best at faking talking points.
As the conversation migrated to local news and the upcoming holiday events, Poppy did her best to stay invisible, to blend into the background noise of clattering silverware and refilled gravy boats. But her mother’s energy never wavered. She could feel it, pulsing to her left, building with the pressure of unsaid things, just as she could feel AJ’s from across the table. She was doing her best to ignore both.
When the conversation turned to a new movie that was going to be filming in town, her mom placed her hand on her forearm as she leaned closer to her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, whisper-quiet but loaded.
Poppy stared at the hand, then at her mother’s face, and found herself tongue-tied. There were a hundred answers, all of them jagged, none of them safe for holiday consumption.
“Let’s talk about it later.”
Her mother persisted, voice honeyed but laced with steel. “I want to be there for you. You don’t need to go through things alone, Poppy. Not ever.”
Poppy felt the familiar clench in her stomach, equal parts love and resentment, memory and reflex.
She hadn’t told her mom she was pregnant because she didn’t feel safe with her. Not deep down. Since her dad died, things had been different, but before then, her mom chose him. She always chose him.
AJ had never put much stock in the traditions of Thanksgiving, especially not at someone else’s dining room table, wedged between strangers and people who only pretended not to be. Still, he understood the power of ritual, the pull of the group meal, and how food and communal proximity could, at least in theory, knit people together. He’d read more than one social psych article on the topic. But as he sat in Liam and Frankie’s home, surrounded by flickering candlelight and the overlapping buzz of three simultaneous conversations, all AJ could think about was the way Poppy had not spared him a glance, and he was directly in front of her.
She also hadn’t spoken to him since they’d walked in. Not once. Not when he’d passed her the gravy, or when her phone buzzed, prompting every woman under forty at the table to reach for their own in Pavlovian expectation, and it fell to the floor, and he handed it to her.
He’d tried, after the initial news bomb, to catch her eye and offer the soft landing of support—his version of it, at least—by reaching across the table. She’d flinched, just a half a second’s hesitation, before she withdrew her hand and pretended to adjust her knife. He wasn’t sure if anyone else had noticed. But he had.
After finding out her plan to tell her family at Thanksgiving, he’d spent the week preparing for this dinner, reorganizing his internal files, practicing conversations in his head, and calculating the probability of awkward silences versus outbursts, normal or otherwise. He liked being prepared for these sorts of things.
But he hadn’t anticipated her shutting him out.
Across the twenty-foot table, which Frankie had decorated with a mortifying abundance, the conversation ping-ponged from football to movies. Next to him, Zion was carving up his ham with the single-minded focus of a two-star chef.
“How are things in the private sector? Is it what you expected?” he asked, not looking up from his plate.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. He wouldn’t be starting until after the first of the year.
Zion looked up at him, surprised. “You don’t have a job lined up.”
“I do.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to work with Adam Dorsey.”
“Dorsey?” Zion’s brows furrowed. “Is he related to the guy who owns the bar?”
“It’s his cousin.”
Zion let out a huff of laughter. “Sometimes it feels like everyone in the town is either related by blood or marriage.”
AJ glanced over at Deacon to see if he had any response to Zion’s statement. He was speaking to Phoebe’s husband, Roger, so he may not have heard the comment, or he may havepretendednot to hear.
Just that morning AJ received the report he’d requested over a month ago after Deacon showed up at Poppy’s door when she hurt her head. AJ knew something was up with the man, and his suspicion had been correct. He could have easily found out anything he wanted to know within an hour on his own, but that felt wrong, and AJ lived by his own strict moral code. So he asked a friend, Alex, who owned a cybersecurity firm in San Francisco, to look into him, which might still be wrong, but it felt less personal that way. He told him to only let him know if there was anything that would affect Poppy.
The voicemail he received put him both at ease and on edge.
