The Good Widow(45)

“I do! I do!” I laughed and pointed up. But I hadn’t seen the stars connect the same way he had. I just didn’t want to disappoint him. I hated to do that. Disappoint people.

I close my eyes to turn the stars off. They know too much.

“Hey,” I hear Nick say.

I open my eyes and stare up at him.

“You look cold. Your arms are covered in goose bumps.”

Suddenly I realize how cold I am. I sit up and wrap my arms around my knees.

I feel Nick’s arm around my shoulder. “This okay? Or does it feel like that terrible hug?” he asks, and I want to laugh, to go back in time to when we were sitting on the deck of my hotel room with no clue about Dylan’s baby. But my sobs. They’re sitting so high up in my throat that it burns to push them down. So instead we sit in silence.

“It’s not our fault, you know,” he finally says. “This. Them. The pregnancy. These were choices they made, for whatever reason. This isn’t about you—or me.”

I could nod and pretend I agree. I could let Nick believe his own words. But I can’t. I have to tell someone.

“You’re right. It isn’t about you. But it is about me,” I say.

Nick shakes his head vehemently. “You can’t blame yourself.”

“Actually I can,” I say, and begin to tell him why.



I’d kept a critical piece of information from James while we were dating. Something he had a right to know, but that I didn’t tell him because he might not have married me if I had.

When I was twenty-one, I was diagnosed with severe endometriosis. I’d been bleeding abnormally and finally went to see my ob-gyn, who, after an ultrasound, grimly delivered the news: scar tissue had developed around my ovaries and could keep eggs from being released. Pregnancy would be difficult. Unlikely.

“How unlikely?” I’d asked. I was so young. At an age when not getting pregnant was the priority. I wasn’t that concerned. My only experience with babies had been when I’d babysat. And all I remembered was drool, poop, and crying.

Dr. Reynolds narrowed her green eyes. I’ll never forget their color—like moss on the back of a wet rock. “You might have a twenty percent chance of conceiving.”

“So I have a twenty percent chance?” I was naive. Twenty percent seemed doable. Plus, my reproductive prospects at that time were limited to a guy I’d met at a dive bar in Redondo Beach who used the word legit to answer almost any question. Back then, a family seemed so far away. So surreal.

James brought up having kids on our first date. I’d smiled and thought how different he was from the other men I’d dated recently—whose noses scrunched up if the word baby was mentioned, even in passing. He brought it up more seriously the night after he proposed. We were lying in bed, me wrapped around him. At that time I was like a sponge, desperate to soak up every drop he gave me. I’d sleep with my body pressed up against his each night, our legs twisted like a pretzel.

“So, when do you think we should start?”

“Start what?” I asked. Things I thought he’d respond with: training for the 5K he’d mentioned, getting our real estate licenses to flip houses because that was all the rage back then, or saving for a trip to Italy we’d talked about.

What he actually responded with: “A baby.” Then before I could respond, he continued on. “How many kids do you want? I’d like three, maybe four.”

The conversation with my doctor came rushing back. The way she’d looked at me like I didn’t understand the seriousness of what she was saying—that there was an 80 percent chance I couldn’t have a baby. The way I’d looked at her like she didn’t understand how young I was, how that wasn’t something I was even thinking about.

I was so devastatingly ignorant.

But now my future husband wanted to know when I could make him a father. Not if. He kept going, telling me about how he wanted to give his mom a bunch of grandkids.

And I wanted nothing more than to do just that—I was dying to see if our brood would inherit his brilliant-green eyes, the deep dimple on his right cheek, the shallow one on his left. Or would they possess my dark hair and quiet intensity? I felt desperate to know.

“Oh!” I responded in surprise.

James’s eyes narrowed. “I know that’s a lot of kids. But you’d be a great mom, and I’m going to be a dad who’s totally invested. I want to coach their sports, teach them to swim, everything.”

My silence must have concerned him, because he grabbed my hands and gave me the most serious look I’d seen from him at that point. “I should have told you something sooner. I had a younger brother who died when I was six. He had leukemia. My mom was going to have more children, but after he passed away she just couldn’t do it. She was so afraid of losing another child. And my dad, he was so upset. We’re Costa Rican. We have big families. My dad has five brothers. I have so many cousins, I forget their names.” He laughed gently. “I just feel compelled to continue our bloodline for him.”

I was beginning to see the downside of a whirlwind romance. In the few months we’d been together, we’d been busy falling in love and having fun, not discussing important details like this.

And now, after he’d told me his heart-wrenching story, how could I share mine? Because that would have been the time to do it. If I’d been honest, if I’d just repeated the three words my doctor had said to me—20 percent chance—would he have scooped me up in his arms and told me those odds were good enough for him?