The truth is, I need to talk to someone. My sisters will be too much. Reese will attack me with business-like bullet points, and Remy will drone on and on about the romance of it all. And my mother ... my mother. Even the handful of friends I have don’t appeal to me. I either keep this bottled up or talk to the man who’s forcing me to call him dad.
“Eight years ago, Nash and I met and fell in love. Five minutes flat, just like you and Mom. Difference is, we got married. Fast. A month fast. Like we couldn’t not, you know?”
“Sure as shit do.”
I drop my head back on the lawn chair. The clouds drift overhead, teleporting me to the split second that changed my life all those years ago when he walked into Old Vines. His wild hair, his perfect face, his ridiculous shirt covered in ice cream cones. He bought that harmonica and stole my heart.
“He drove me crazy—clearly still does—but it was like I couldn’t not be with him.” Just saying it out loud pulls at me like a deep stretch on a sore muscle. Pain and relief at once. Mom was right, I was besotted. We both were.
“Why’d it end?”
“Because it never should have started.”
He looks at me like that’s not good enough, so I tell him the whole story.
About how I saw those pink lines on that stick and knew as sure as life was growing in my belly, our lives would change. I was scared but excited. I wanted it. In less than a minute I saw our whole lives unfold as a family in the same town I grew up in.
“What do you think of babies?”I asked him over dinner, trying to be coy.
“Right now?”He laughed between bites.“They’re great. For other people.”
We got married so fast, we’d never had the big conversations. We didn’t care about them. They were future concerns. Untilthat moment when the future arrived and everything inside me deflated like a tire on a rusty nail.
He kept talking, oblivious.“And there’s no room for babies if we’re living in DC.”The world stopped with the scratch of a record.“There’s a job—I took it.”The crinkles around his eyes from his smile lashed my heart into a million pieces.“Teaching history in a city with so much of it? Spending our free time lost between monuments and museums for a few months? Can it get any better, Rue Conway?”He always loved saying my first and last name, and I’d yet to legally change it to his—we were only two months married. What’s the rush when you have forever? Over my plate of then-cold spaghetti, I knew I never would. We were over.
He wanted to go—he always would.
I wasn’t going to DC, but he was.
“A stint away from Fontain?”he asked, so happy.“Who knows where it could take us?”
I knew I couldn’t tell him. Knew as sure as he was looking forward to his next adventure that he wasn’t ready to be a dad. To be moored in place like a ship made for deep waters. He loved what he did—this was a city he’d told me he wanted to go to—and I wasn’t going to stand in the way. I didn’t want him to stay out of obligation only to end up resenting me, or even worse, our unborn child. I should have given him the chance to decide, but my fear wouldn’t let me.
All at once, every mistake we’d made snapped into focus.
How fast we had moved.
How opposite our visions of the future.
How many big conversations we forgot to have because we couldn’t slow down when it came to each other.
This was the price I had to pay.
Just like the split second it took for me to fall in love with him, everything I loved about him made me see red.
His free spirit.
His lack of foresight.
How okay he was with us living in the tiny apartment in the storage room of Old Vines, littered with his clothes and books and little army men he insisted he needed for battle reenactments with his students.
I did what I had to: I told him we’d made a mistake, he needed to take the job, and I would take care of the divorce papers.
Mostly.
I also cried, called him a slew of names while listing off every flaw he had, and lied through my teeth when I told him I never wanted to see him again.
It was the only way I knew to protect me, him, and the baby I never wanted to grow up thinking she had a dad who didn’t want her.
