Reading was good for the soul, though.
He didn’t mind.
“Tomorrow,” Chris said as he navigated the war zone that had become Maria’s floor with all her dolls, their accessories, and the sleeping kittens that had somehow found places for their bed, “we’re cleaning this room.”
“Aw,” she groaned. “But why?”
“It’s a mess.”
“Except I know where everything is!”
As true as that may be ...
“We gotta clean it up,” Chris muttered, finally making his way to the bed. In no time at all, he’d made a decent place to sit beside a resting Maria with his back against the headboard of her bed. He reached for a book, but she was already handing him one. “Merci.”
“That one first.”
Chris peeked at the cover. “We read it fifteen times this week.”
The girl shrugged. “And it’s still my favorite.”
“What’s fifteen more times, then?”
She beamed.
He grinned right back.
Honestly, this was his favorite part of the day. Or really, doing anything with Maria always made everything better. He loved his girl. Messy room and all. But they would still be cleaning the damn thing tomorrow one way or another.
Chris made it through three books before Maria handed him the next in her pile. The title? My New Little Sister. It made him pause because he hadn’t seen the book on her shelves before, and this was the first time she’d ever asked for him to read it. But a quick turn of the page explained exactly where the book came from. The school’s library stamp on the title page and the little card on the slot inside said everything.
“Missy has a new baby sister,” Maria said, although more to herself than to Chris, he thought. “She said the book was good, so I got it next.”
“Oh?”
“Mmhmm. Will I have one, too?”
Okay, that made him quiet.
For all of three seconds because kids were smarter than a lot of adults gave them credit for and even when one didn’t think they were listening, they probably were. They heard a lot more than anyone thought, and knew more than people assumed.
Especially his kid.
Nearly a month after Valeria’s appointment with her doctor where she didn’t get her birth control switched, and the two of them had more conversations than he could count about adding to their family. Despite trying to have those chats away from young ears, there was a good chance Maria had heard them talking about it once or twice nonetheless.
Unless she asked, however, he wasn’t going to bring it up. Adult conversations were meant to stay between adults unless there was no other choice but to bring it to a child’s attention. If Maria didn’t outright say she heard her mom and dad talking, then Chris wasn’t going to pry the information out of her.
“Would you be happy,” he started to ask, “if you had a baby brother or sister?”
Maria shrugged. “Yeah, I think so.”
He chuckled. “Only think?”
“Well, my room would still be my room, right?”
“But you might have to keep it picked up. There’s a lot of little things in here that babies don’t understand they can’t put into their mouth. We wouldn’t want that to happen.”
“Right,” Maria said, nodding once. “I could keep my room clean.”
“And share toys.”
She sighed. “Well ...”
“We can come back to it,” he said, attempting to hide his laughter.
“Maybe we should,” she agreed, “but I still think I want one.”
“We’ll see.”
• • •
Chris had just closed the door to Maria’s bedroom when a throat clearing down the hall had him looking up to find the source of the sound leaning against the wall. There stood Valeria with a frown on her pretty face and an item in her hand that he hadn’t expected to see.
A pregnancy test.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She shrugged as he came closer, and then took the test from her once he was close enough to grab it. It only took a quick look down at the white and pink strip of plastic for him to understand the source of her sadness.
Not Pregnant, the digital screen spelled out clearly.
“My period hasn’t started yet,” Val said quietly, “but it’s been a month, and so I figured I should at least take one and see, right? Maybe we’d be lucky, and—”
“It’s only been a month,” he was quick to say, dropping the pregnancy test into the pocket of his slacks so that she wouldn’t have to keep staring at it. Because clearly she looked at that test and only saw failure. Chris was not the same. “Do you know how rare it is to get pregnant the first month of trying, Val?”
“Well—”
“Hey.”
In a breath, Chris closed the distance between the two of them so that he could wrap Valeria in his embrace. There, he hid her away from the world and nothing was wrong. No one could touch her or hurt her. She was too perfect for that nonsense, anyway; too sweet to be sad or anything of the sort.
Pressing a kiss to the top of her head, he murmured, “Just give it some time.”
“How long do we give it before—”
“No befores; no buts. None of that, mia cara.”
She let out a slow, steady stream of air. “You always know the right things to say, don’t you?”
Chris smirked and then leaned in to let her kiss him on the mouth. “Kind of my job. It’s what I do.”
And he didn’t mind a bit.
15.
Valeria
Four months later ...
“MRS. Guzzi,” the man drawled from his seat behind his desk, “if you’re not one-hundred percent invested in entering a program at this school, then—”
Valeria’s gaze narrowed at the bored tone of the admissions officer of the university. “Excuse me?”
“Well, you didn’t let me finish.”
“Why would I?” Valeria shot back. “You began this conversation with that statement. Assuming I’m not invested in an education, or rather, getting one. Is that how you greet every potential student that comes into this office?”
The man said nothing.
Not right away.
Valeria didn’t mind.
Ignorant asshole.
It wasn’t entirely the admissions officer’s fault for Valeria’s bad mood, but she figured if he was going to be terrible, then who better to put her mood on? Add in the fact she was four months in to trying for a baby and had yet to get pregnant despite actively tracking her cycle—after it returned to normal two months after having the IUD removed—and everything else the doctors and the internet told her she should do, and yet ... no baby.
No pregnancy.
She was starting to think something was wrong. Not that she had anything to give her that indication except for a lack of pregnancy, but she couldn’t help the way her mind went. Today, on her way home, she should pick up a pregnancy test and take it because she was, once again, two days late for her period.
Same as last month.
Yet, Valeria had a distinct feeling she wasn’t pregnant. Once again. Maybe the cramping in her midsection didn’t help either, a good signal that her period was going to start very soon.