We overlapped in Connor’s dating history. This is specific and dated, and there will be a photograph of it in a public archive.
I’m shaking, but my voice is steady, surprisingly. “I want to understand. Walk me through it. When did it start.”
“A few months after you two started dating.”
“And you just… thought you’d help yourself to my boyfriend, while you played me like an idiot.”
“No,” she says, too fast. “We tried to keep it from becoming anything?—”
“How did you even meet back then? I wasn’t introducing him to anyone that soon.”
“I ran into him outside your cottage, and it clicked who he was. We started talking… and things just… escalated.”
“And you two have been together ever since?”
She shakes her head, braids smacking around her shoulders. “We’ve been on-again, off-again most of the time.”
“So while I was two miles away thinking I was on a romantic trip and about to be proposed to, you were there together.”
“Yeah.”
“And when I came home sad and you sat on my sofa and held my hand while I talked about the breakup, you knew. Everything. Start to finish.”
She nods.
“When I found out I was pregnant and you built me two websites and brought me toast and sat on my bathroom floor at two in the morning, you kept that giant secret from me.”
“I did.”
I stand in her sitting room and let the full, considerable weight of a year of that settle on me. “Why didn’t you tell me?” It comes out very flat. I think I’m running out of emotions at this point. “Why didn’t you tell me after? When it was over, or between times with him, whatever you call it.”
“Because you were—” She stops. “Because you came home and you were sad and then you found out you were pregnant and everything was so much at once, and I told myself it was over and it didn’t matter and telling you would only hurt you for no reason, and you were already going through so much?—”
“And you thought you were doing me a favor by holding it inside?”
She gulps again. “I thought… I fucked up, Sage. I thought holding that secret, letting it eat at me, was the price I had to pay. I could bear that for you, to keep you from suffering more.”
I am shaking so hard that I might vibrate into a new dimension. My voice doesn’t sound like me. “That was not your call to make.”
“I know.”
“That has never been your call to make. Not once. Not the hospital, not this.” I am still very calm and it is a very specific kind of calm, the kind that comes when you are past the anger and into something colder and more permanent. “You have been making calls on my behalf for over a year, Leigh. You have been deciding what I know and when I know it and what I can handle, and you have been wrong every single time.”
She doesn’t argue. She looks at me with the expression of someone who knows they have run out of runway.
Like our friendship.
I am aware, standing here, of how many times I have found my way to the complicated full picture of Leigh and chosen generosity. The hospital. The alleged friendship between her and Connor. Every time, I found the version of her that was trying, and I let that count for something. I don’t regret any of those calls. They were right, at the time, with the information I had.
This is different. “I can’t trust you, Leigh. I’ve been trying to find my way back to trusting you, and I keep finding more things. I can’t build on this.”
“Sage—”
“I’m not making any choices in anger, because I don’t make permanent decisions when I’m this upset. But I need you to know where I am.” I put my phone back in my pocket. “This is not… I don’t… I can’t…”
I don’t even want to look at her face right now. I’m disgusted. Furious. It’s not even about Connor. It’s seeing what I thought we had and finding holes in every direction.
Her voice is so fragile now. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Sage.”
