Sweet Sinful Nights(72)
Seeing the ultrasound was one thing. Seeing her pregnant was entirely another. It walloped him.
He turned to the next page. The words nineteen weeks were written in blue ballpoint on the page, and in the plastic sleeve was another shot of Shannon, barely bigger. Then one at twenty weeks. He turned another page. An image of a white baby blanket on a hospital bed. After that the photos ended, and the last several pages contained only images of sunflowers.
He didn’t know what to make of the sunflowers, or of the way the story in these pictures was unfinished. The story ended, and then it became something else, told in a language he didn’t understand.
Shoes clicked on the floor, and the hair on his neck stood on end. He snapped the book closed as she called out his name. He started to stuff the book into the drawer. But when he turned around, she was standing in the doorway, and he had her photo book in his hand, trying to jam it into the nightstand.
Her expression was one of shock. Then disappointment, and next came a trace of grief. Somehow, her eyes contained all three.
She swallowed, and her face seemed pinched. But her voice gave her away. A bare whisper, laced with pain, as she closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke.
“Like I said, my house is a little bit messy.”
He nodded. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Yes. But why were you going through my things?” she asked again as she stood in the doorway. She wasn’t sure she could move.
Maybe he couldn’t either. He didn’t stray from the bed as he shrugged listlessly. “There’s no good answer, Shan. I saw the sunflower on the cover, and it matched the one in your picture frame.”
“So you went through a photo book that you found in my nightstand because it matched one in my kitchen?” she asked, taking the time to process each action he’d taken.
“It was open,” he said, his voice barren.
Her skin prickled with fear at the sound. With nerves too, because she was stumbling blindly now. She’d wanted to tell him on her own terms. Not like this. Never like this.
She shook her head, as if she could erase the last five minutes. Start over—begin at the beginning. Sit down, talk, share the whole sad story, and then feed the cat. She had never wanted him to discover the truth on his own. A part of her was mad as hell that he’d gone through her book, and a part of her was deeply ashamed at what he’d found—the evidence of all she’d withheld.
A new emotion bubbled up inside her, too. Terror. She was terrified he’d walk away.
“Were you pregnant ten years ago?”
No point lying. No point hiding. “I was,” she said with a nod.
“When?” he asked in a wobbly voice, as if every word was new and foreign.
“I found out two weeks after you left.”
“Where is the...” he said, letting his voice trail off.
Her heart cratered, beating a drumbeat of hurt and sadness.
Oh, this was the worst. This was harder than she’d ever imagined. She knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the awful words out, but being forced to say them tasted worse. Bitter and acrid to the tongue. She drew a deep breath, and laid them out, one by one, in a row of awfulness. “I was pregnant. It lasted for twenty weeks. My water broke and I went into labor in London, and the baby was born too early. He didn’t live.”
“He?” Brent asked hoarsely. It sounded as if he’d been punched.
She had never seen him like this, white as snow, shocked to the bone. “Yes. He.”
Time crawled painfully to the next minute, then the next, and then the next. Soon, he managed to string more words together. “Was. He. Mine?”
Something inside her snapped, like an electric wire sliced to the ground from high above. “Yes. How the hell can you ask that question?”
He held his hands out wide. “How the hell can I ask? Because you just told me you were pregnant. It’s normal to ask.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, with some kind of dangerous cocktail of anger, shame and hurt mixing up inside her. “That’s not a normal question. It’s an insulting question.”
He stood up from the bed, planted his feet wide. She knew that stance; it meant he was angry. Fear clutched at her heart, and she flailed for the right next words. She tried mightily to turn the knob inside her chest from boil to simmer. “Yes. The baby was yours.”
Brent wobbled. The world seemed to sway for him. He crumpled onto the bed. She rushed over and wrapped her arms around him. Thankfully, he didn’t shrug her off. In the smallest voice, he croaked out, “What happened? When did you know?”
She squeezed his shoulder, and ran a hand through his soft hair. “I had no idea when we split up,” she said immediately, because she couldn’t bear for him to even think she might have known then. “But two weeks later I was late, so I took a pregnancy test and then several more. I didn’t say a word to anyone at first because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I was going to keep the baby, or give up the baby,” she said, forcing her voice to stay even so she wouldn’t sob her way through the conversation. That was no small feat. As she told the story, tears fell anyway. “I knew if I told you that you would give up your job and come rushing to my side.”
He grabbed her hand, gripping tightly as he looked her in the eyes. His were full of fierce determination. “I would have. You know that I would have been there for you in a heartbeat.”