“What changed?” I asked. “Why are you here now instead of picking out tablecloths for the spring ceremony?”
“Because I went to a wedding dress fitting.”
My chest seized. The image of him sitting in some bridal shop watching Lorraine twirl in white hit me harder than I expected, a hot ugly jealousy mixed with hurt that made my throat tighten. “You went to a fitting. For your wedding. To another woman.”
“Lorraine dragged me. She came out in a dress, asked me what I thought, and I sat there feeling nothing. Not a goddamn thing. She was standing in front of me in a wedding dress and all I could think about was you.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered by that? That you were thinking about me while you were shopping for a wedding dress with her?”
“No. I’m telling you it’s what made me realize how wrong everything was.”
“You needed a dress fitting to figure that out? The engagement photos didn’t do it? The magazine didn’t do it? Rejecting me at my desk didn’t do it? You needed to see her in white before it clicked?”
He took that without defending himself, his jaw tight, his hands gripping each other between his knees. I was being cruel and I knew it and I couldn’t stop because the image of him in a bridal shop was eating me alive.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I should have stopped it sooner. I should have stopped it before it started.”
“Yeah. You should have.”
We sat with that for a second, the anger still hot in my chest but losing some of its edge because he wasn’t arguing, wasn’t making excuses, just sitting on the bottom step taking every hit I threw.
“So what happened after the fitting?” I asked.
“I walked out. Drove to my mother’s estate to tell her I couldn’t go through with it.” He rubbed his jaw, the muscle jumping under his hand. “When I got there, her room looked like it hadn’t been used in days. Everything was put away, clean, like a guest room. And she was outside, in her garden, looking healthier than I’d seen her in weeks.”
I stared at him. The words were there but my brain refused to assemble them into anything that made sense. “Are you telling me she wasn’t sick?”
“She faked everything. She found out about you and me through Lorraine and decided to get rid of you.”
I sat very still. The anger that rose in me was nothing like this morning’s slap. This was cold, deep, settling into my bones. I thought about sitting in that hospital hallway with Lorraine sneering at me, staring at the door, sick with worry, while behind it a perfectly healthy woman was performing dying so convincingly that her own son broke his life apart for her.
“I’m angry that she exists,” I said. “I’m angry that someone could do that to their own child. I’m angry that I sat in that hallway worrying about you while she was in there lying to your face.”
He looked at me and I could see gratitude in his expression, that I was angry at her instead of him.
“I’m still angry at you too,” I said. “Don’t get comfortable.”
We sat in the quiet. The dripping gutter, the distant dog, the porch light humming above my head. His hands were clasped between his knees, his eyes on the ground, waiting for whatever came next.
I looked at him on the bottom step. Soaked, exhausted, twelve hours on my lawn, taking every hit I threw without ducking. He lied to me. He broke my heart. He let his mother pull the strings because he loved her too much to see what she was doing. I understood that more than I wanted to, and hating him would have been so much easier if I didn’t.
He came here. He told me the truth. He sat in the rain all day even after I told him to leave and he chose to stay.
I put my hand on my stomach. The baby. Our baby. He didn’t know. He was sitting on my grandmother’s porch step with no idea that the woman he was begging for forgiveness was carrying his child, and if I sent him away tonight without telling him, I’d be doing the same thing he did to me. Making a choice that affected both of us without letting him be part of it.
I wasn’t going to be that person.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.
He looked up.
“I’m pregnant.”
His face went through something I’d never seen before. Shock first, his eyes going wide, his lips parting. Then something deeper, slower, spreading across his features like a crack letting light through. His hands went still between his knees. He stared at me, eyes bright in the porch light, mouth open with no sound coming out.
“A baby,” he said. Barely a whisper.
“Yes.”
