Finally, after I rinsed my mouth out for the millionth time with mouthwash, I emerged, trembling.

He took me into his arms. “Are you okay?”

“It might be the seafood from last night,” I told him, though in the pit of my stomach I knew that wasn’t it. My period was ten days late now. I’d been ignoring it long enough.

“Stupid Rod, trying to poison us,” he muttered, holding me.

No, not stupid Rod, I thought. Stupid me. I’d been lazy with the pill lately, forgetting to take it on more than one occasion. But being in love gives you some kind of insurance against the world and I believed that after all we’d been through, surely we wouldn’t be handed this.

But it looked like that’s exactly what we got. Later I went to the pharmacy and bought one of the generic kits. I felt too nervous to use it at home so I used a gas station restroom instead. I felt like genuine trailer trash and remembered that’s exactly what I had been at some point in my life. Remember Ellie Watt? the voice whispered on the breeze.

I ignored it. I saw the test and it was positive.

Fuck.

Naturally, that was my first thought. I was twenty-one and didn’t have a maternal bone in my body. I had so much of my life left to live. I had the world as my oyster.

And I was making excuses. Because deep down, I imagined a life springing from my lie, and I imagined that lie becoming real. I imagined Javier as a father and knew he’d be an excellent one, giving and protective as hell. I knew our child would grow up never needing anything and he’d have all our love, since our hearts together were bigger than the moon.

A new life would help to bury my old one. Perhaps even both of ours.

But Javier. What would he say? What would he want? That’s why I had done the deed in the stinky restroom, double-checking the package and the stick a million times until I knew it was real, then wrapping it up in toilet paper and throwing it in the garbage. I didn’t know how he would react. Despite the way I loved him, the way he felt about me, this was a whole new angle to our lives together, spinning our relationship around.

I steadied my nerves and drove back home, waiting in the truck for a few moments before I decided to head out onto the beach. I walked across the soft sand, wrapping my cardigan around my shoulders and plunked myself down. I watched the waves roll in; a dog ran past me after a renegade Frisbee. I sat there for hours, watching the sky fade with the dusk, until Javier came out beside me, the white sand flying off his feet like salt from a shaker.

“Eden?” he asked delicately, taking a seat next to me. He was dressed all in black again: long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black linen pants, bare feet. The sand stuck to him like snowflakes.

I took in a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

There really was no other way to say it.

I heard his breath hitch. I slowly turned my head to face him. His mouth was agape, eyes wide, brows raised to the heavens.

“You…you are?” he said.

I nodded. “Yup. I’ll have to go to the doctor to take a blood test to make sure, but yeah. Ten days late on my period. Threw up today. Drugstore test ran positive.”

He sucked on his full lower lip, blinking hard. It was rare that I saw him bewildered.

“I don’t know what to say…” he started, then frowned. “Ten days late? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of facing the truth.”

He studied my face for a moment before exhaling sharply. “So. What do you want to do?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, I honestly don’t.”

His head cocked to the side like a beautiful bird. “You honestly don’t know? Eden, Angel…we’re having a baby.”

I gave him an odd look. Maybe I didn’t hear that right. “What?”

He grinned in pure joy. “We’re having a baby!”

He leaped up onto his feet and pulled me up with him. He hugged me, tightly, dancing around and laughing, then let go and clapped his hands together. “Oh, my angel, another beautiful angel is on the way.”

I smiled back. It was infectious. “You want this?”

“Oh, my love,” he rushed forward, cupping my face in his hands. “I want you. I love you. And I want the product of our life. It’s a new life, don’t you see?”

I did see. I saw that very well. I let out the whoop of joy that had been sneaking up on me, allowing myself to feel it, feel everything, my heart running over butterflies soaring from head to toe. Happiness popped like fizzing champagne, saturating us as we held each other on the beach, laughing and crying tears of bliss. New lives, for both of us. Another new start and this one was for keeps.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A few days later, the day before my doctor’s appointment, I saw something that made me die inside. My underwear was stained; just a drop of blood, but enough for me to know that this was it. It wasn’t for keeps at all. It was over, and over before we were really allowed to believe it.

I trundled out of the bathroom, trying to deal with the new pain. The crushing disappointment. I kept it to myself, holding the truth back, holding back the tears. I held on under false hope until I used the toilet again later. The blood was in full-force, my regular period, just two weeks late.

Telling Javier that the pregnancy had been false was the hardest thing for me to do, much harder than telling him I thought I was pregnant to begin with. I felt like a total idiot getting our hopes up like that. I should have waited for a doctor’s test to confirm it; I should have bought another kit just to be safe; I shouldn’t have trusted the cheapest brand. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions and I shouldn’t have sunk my teeth into the one I’d jumped to. It’s just that he was so happy…I’d never seen him that way before. He’d even gone out, and bless his heart, bought a tiny plush angel for our future baby.

He was devastated. He’d never looked so wrecked to the core, just absolutely devastated. He didn’t cry or yell or anything. But I could tell in the way he held me that he was just trying to hang onto himself. That he might not even stay together. And I was the one that broke him.

Days passed by in a weary silence as if we were living in a funeral home and were strangers to each other. I had my own grief to deal with, but I put that aside for him. He had fixed me once, hadn’t he? Why was it so much harder for me to fix him?

I even told him that we could actually try. We could try to get pregnant; we were both young, and if that’s what we wanted, it would stick. For keeps. For real. We could have it, it would be ours. Your wish is my command.

But it only angered him and I didn’t know why. Maybe since the bad news he’d changed his mind, adjusted to the new reality just as I had done before and constantly. One morning I went out on to the porch and saw him at the edge of the water, throwing the plush angel out into the waves. I imagined the poor thing would float for a while, lost at sea, then finally sink, maybe finding its resting place beside a small bottle of acid. A seafloor full of things we needed to forget.

Before I knew it, the days had turned into weeks and I felt like we were just shadows of the people we used to be. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore, not about what was important, not about what we used to. Our conversations were shallow and safe. He became busier, and in retaliation, so did I. I took on extra shifts at Hogan’s Heroes because it kept my mind off of it, working all weekends. Julie was a good person to lean on and she never asked too much about him, never questioned why we hadn’t gone on a double date in a while. I guess some things were pretty obvious just by looking at me. Yet I’d stare at him over and over again for one hint of why that coldness that had crept into his eyes and I couldn’t glean anything. I loved him with all my heart, and all I could think about was that he was slowly slipping away. I just wanted him to keep loving me like he had, because the minute he stopped would be the minute everything ended.

One Saturday night I was driving to work when I noticed a whole slew of fire engines parked outside. It turned out there was a small kitchen fire, not enough to cause a lot of damage, but enough to close down the bar for the night. To tell you the truth, I’d been looking forward to gabbing with Julie and having a few well-deserved drinks after our shift, but she’d already gone home.

I stopped by the gas station, filled up the truck, and picked up a six-pack of Tecate. I liked the Mexican beer more than Javier did, but I figured I might win some points by showing up at the house with it. Perhaps it would lead to the bedroom too. That was the lucky thing about Javier and I—even though we weren’t communicating by voice, our sex life had filled in the blanks. His desire for me was still at full throttle and I never had to complain.

The house was completely dark when I pulled up to it, which struck me as odd considering Javier was at home when I had left, tooling around on the computer. When he went out he usually went out late at night and it was only eight p.m. I parked the truck in the garage then decided to go in the house through the door there instead of the porch. Thinking he could be napping, I quietly closed the door behind me and crept down the hall and up the stairs. I put the beer on the counter in the kitchen and pulled one off the ring. If he was awake, it was his, but if he was asleep, it was all mine. I tiptoed down the hall toward the bedroom door.

And heard him moan. For a split second I wondered if something was wrong, if he was hurt or maybe having a nightmare. But this wasn’t a moan of pain. It was the all too familiar moan of pleasure, the sounds he’d make in my ear when he was riding me hard.

I raised my brow, tickled at the fact that he was jacking off, wanting to go in and watch him as he came. But that whole idea, my whole world, came to a halt when I heard the sound following it.

A woman’s cry of equal pleasure. A woman in the throes of passion. A woman moaning and groaning along with Javier. A woman that wasn’t me.

I was stuck to the floor, my chest being beaten from the inside, my heart sinking to the ground. The shock, the hurt, the sadness, the grief. The disbelief. The terrible disbelief. This wasn’t real; this had to be a dream. I could hear their cries get louder and louder until they were both coming, the sounds filling the house—our house—and stabbing me in the gut. My insides twisted, feeling the pain that was all too physical, almost falling over. The beer almost slid out of my hands and I caught it just in time.

This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening. But my body knew the truth, and it was aching, breaking—I was falling apart. Javier was cheating on me. He was fucking another woman in our house. In my bed.

I put my hand to my mouth, trying to keep the vomit at bay. I was going to be sick. Oh, I couldn’t be sick here; they’d come out and they’d see me, they’d see the vomit everywhere, and I’d have to confront it all. I’d have to face it and her and him and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to.

I swallowed the bile that had filled my mouth and fought to take in air. I stood there, in the hall, one beer in my hand, a person drowning on their feet. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t be. The anger, the pain, my fucking heart.