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“I’m not.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, but I got out before she could press me. My legs felt like Jell-O. It was all I could do to pretend to be normal. Walk normal. Breathe normal.

Lieutenant Dan was walking next to me, pushing his head under my hand.

When we got in the house, I couldn’t focus. The twins jumped on me. Jafar was strutting through the hallway squawking obscenities, Grandpa was harassing Briana, who was harassing him back, and the whole thing felt like it was happening underwater. Time felt elastic. I couldn’t tell how long we’d been here. A minute? An hour? Did the limo get here yet? No. I would have remembered. Would I have remembered?

Then I was in the living room, sitting on the sofa with everyone.

Amy and Jeremiah were there and about twenty other people for the parties.

Briana was holding my hand, but I swear I could hear her phone going off, even though I knew the sound was down. My heart rate was up and my mouth was dry and Lieutenant Dan was shoving his head under my arm, and I had the realization that I was having a panic attack.

Amy and Jeremiah were making some sort of announcement. I was in a fish tank.

I could see Amy’s mouth moving. “We’re having a baby.”

And then I was conscious of everyone’s eyes darting to me and I said the only thing I could think of saying because I had to get the hell out of there. “In this economy?”

Then I fled from the room while I could still make my legs carry me.

Chapter 39

Briana

As soon as Amy made the announcement, Jacob disintegrated. The shift was palpable. The tipping of a teetering glass on the edge of a table. Shattered.

His anxiety had been high all day. Probably because he knew he had this bachelor party and was already worn out from dinner with my family last night. He’d been sort of moody and detached from the minute he woke up. I’d been trying to give him space since he was people’d out, so I’d spent the day watching TikTok videos and texting Alexis so I stayed out of his hair. But now I wished I’d gotten him to stay home instead. He wasn’t in a good place to hear this news on his best day.

He used his escape phrase and practically ran to the steps leading to the basement. By the time I got down there, he was sitting on the little futon sofa in the room with the pool table, crying and breathing into his hands.

He was having a panic attack. Like, an actual panic attack. Because Amy was pregnant.

My heart broke.

I stood in front of him, watching him have a breakdown on this futon, and I couldn’t begin to describe the way it felt seeing him like this. Watching him live the moment he realized that it was really over because there was going to be a baby now and they might have figured it out before that, but now it was real.

She wasn’t leaving Jeremiah for him.

Amy and Jeremiah were going to be a family.

It was over.

All his hopes were over. He was heartbroken, and so was I.

I was right here. I was right here and I was in love with him and he didn’t care because he couldn’t even see me past her. I had fallen completely and utterly in love with him and he had stayed completely and utterly in love with someone else.

I started to cry too.

I just stood there in front of him, my shoulders slumped, tears starting to roll down my face.

Lieutenant Dan was almost frantic, trying to crawl into the space between Jacob’s stomach and the hands he had cupped over his mouth. And I wanted to crawl into that space too.

Screw it. I did.

I moved the dog over and climbed into Jacob’s lap. I straddled him in my blue summer dress and wrapped my arms around his neck and put my lips to his ear and just kept whispering the same thing over and over and over again. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

He responded immediately. Like I’d reached him in the fog and he was clinging to me before he lost me again. His arms wrapped around me and he buried his face in my hair and it felt like the magnets that had been flipped and turned and flipped and turned had finally snapped together and spun to a halt.