“The baby is a gift,” I said simply. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
Roseanne smiled at me. We finished our drinks while we talked about fashion, and then she left me sitting there, feeling exhausted and wrung out.
I’d turned down the opportunity of a lifetime, and that was okay. The last opportunity of a lifetime had landed me pregnant and on my own, so I was happy to play it safe for a while.
“You!” a voice cut through the noise of my thoughts and drew my gaze to the caf積ntrance. Penny stood there, red-haired and freckle-faced, a little boy on her hip, a furious expression on her face. “You’ve been avoiding us! I thought we talked about this when Layla was playing the ostrich with her head in the sand.” She stomped over to me and loomed over my table, as much as someone so short could. She pulled her phone out of her purse and, one-handed, tapped on it and put it to her ear. “Bonnie? I just found Iris. Hurry up and get to the coffee shop, because I’m not letting her out of my sight, and I don’t know if she’s going to make a run for it.”
“There’s no need to be dramatic,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke-but there was a weight in my chest that I didn’t want to look at too closely.
Penny stood beside my chair, boxing me in, while her boy wriggled his way out of her grasp and crawled onto the seat across from me.
“Hello, Tim,” I said to him.
“Hi.” He pulled a toy car out of his pocket and started making engine noises, driving the car along the strip of pale beige that ran along the edge of the table.
“Where have you been?” Penny accused. “We stopped by your place and heard you’d moved! And you’ve barely been answering our texts.”
“Well…I’ve been in hibernation,” I admitted. “Some might say I’ve been nesting.” I ran my hand down the front of my loose tunic dress, letting the fabric trace the outline of my tiny bump.
Penny’s eyes grew huge. Her jaw dropped. She widened her stance like she’d bodily block me if I tried to make a run for it and got her phone out once more. “Bonnie! Hurry! There’s an emergency here!”
As if to underscore the point, little Timmy began making siren noises as he drove his toy car over and back along the table.
And I couldn’t help it. I began to laugh. It wasn’t really funny. This whole situation was tragic, really. All my girlfriends had gotten their happily-ever-afters, and I was looking at a life as a single mom. I still hadn’t told Jared about the baby. I was jobless, and I had about four months’ worth of cash to sustain me through however long it would take to find a job as a heavily pregnant lady.
In short, my life was in shambles.
But Penny was here, and Bonnie came in, her bump a little more obvious than mine on her thin frame, blond hair windblown and glossy. The two of them got on their phones and called reinforcements, namely Dani and Layla, our other two girlfriends.
They sat me down and I told them the whole sordid tale, NDA be damned. They laughed and cried and hugged me, and I realized I’d been wrong about these women.
They saw me. They loved me. I wasn’t a placeholder or a stepping stone to them. I wasn’t a vague, woman-shaped entity in their lives that they picked up and put down whenever it was convenient.
I was a friend. A friend who had hurt them by keeping myself apart.
But, oddly, I felt like I’d needed my months of isolation. I’d needed that time to remind myself that I mattered; otherwise, no matter how many times one of them wrapped me in a hug or held my hand or told me they’d help me through the next year, there was no way the old me would have believed them.
I would have thought they were telling me pretty lies, and I would have gone home to lock myself away on my own.
Now, as they rallied around me, I was ready to accept their support.
“You’ll need baby things,” Dani said. She had two of her own. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure that out for you. Won’t we?”
“Damn straight,” Penny said, and Tim looked up with wide eyes. Penny kissed his head and said, “I know I said a bad word. I’m allowed. You’re not.”
The mischievous glint in the little boy’s eyes told me he didn’t quite believe his mother. I laughed, knowing I had that to look forward to in a few years.
The future wasn’t quite as bleak as it had been an hour before. I was still jobless and broke, but I realized that I mattered to these women. And I mattered to myself.
The only thorn in my side was the little detail of telling Jared about the baby. Now that the first trimester had well and truly passed, my list of excuses was dwindling down to nothing. Roseanne had said it to me straight: I was acting like a coward.
It was time to face the man that had broken my heart and nearly broken me in the process. I just didn’t know if the newly transformed me would be strong enough to deal with the consequences of his reaction.
Jared’s POV
Will and Natasha were lucky with the weather for their wedding day. It rained in Lake Como for a week straight leading up to the big day, and the morning of the big event, the skies cleared and revealed a beautiful, mirror-still lake surrounded with rolling hills. The trees were only just starting to bud, so the hills weren’t as lush and green as they would be a month or two from now, but it was still a beautiful sight. As it was only early March, it was the off-season, so we had the whole place to ourselves. My family had rented out the entire luxury hotel on the bank of the lake, and the whole place was abuzz.
Iris would have loved this view of the lake, with the early morning sun glinting off the water and the surrounding slopes. She’d worn a dress the exact color of the water on one of our first nights out together.
I turned away from the sight, grimacing. I had to stop thinking things like that. We’d been apart for longer than we’d been together; it was getting ridiculous.
“Jared!” My mother walked down the cobblestones leading to the lookout where I stood. I leaned against the hip-high stone banister and waited for her approach. She surveyed my tuxedo with a critical eye, plucking a piece of lint off the lapel. “I need you to go see your brother. He’s already drunk and making a fool of himself. I want him standing on his own feet in his wedding photos.”
“I wonder if Will wants the same.”
She gave me a withering look and clip-clopped back up the path. Halfway up, she turned to give me an exasperated look. “Well?”
I pushed off the balustrade and followed her. Doing my mother’s bidding once again. Some things never changed. She hadn’t mentioned Iris or the contract, but it hung between us. She knew, and she knew I knew she knew.
My brother was well on his way to being plastered when I found him in his suite, his tie askew, his nose red. I took the glass of alcohol out of his grasp and replaced it with water.
“You’re no fun,” he complained.
“I have strict orders to get you to your own wedding without you falling flat on your face.”
Will snorted. “Try-hard,” he mumbled under his breath. “Always have to be the perfect son, don’t you?”
I frowned as I dumped his drink down the sink, grabbing another water for myself. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.