It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. We weren’t supposed to have kids until after we’d started our careers, and gotten married, and been almost too old to make it happen. When we had money, and time, and had seen the world together. Once we’d gone to Thailand, and New Zealand, and all the amazing places we both swore we were going to visit so I could see the stars from every angle on Earth.
I clutched his keys in my hand tightly, squeezing the metal and allowing the pain to bring me back to the lake, the bitter cold, and the nausea working its way through my body as it had been for days now. I made my way slowly back to the truck and started to drive home before realizing I couldn’t do that either.
If I went home and Mayson or Mama saw me crying, they wouldn’t leave me alone until they’d figured out why. And I couldn’t tell my brother or my mother. I couldn’t tell anyone. I hadn’t wanted to tell Grandma Marina. Stephen had… He’d wanted someone to know, whereas I hadn’t wanted anyone to know because of what I was planning. Now, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to look Grandma Marina in the eye again, knowing I’d killed the baby growing inside me. Not after she’d lost her child and still mourned him.
I wasn’t sure anyone would understand.
Not anyone who hadn’t been in the situation of having a baby they didn’t want. I didn’t want mine. My heart flipped over because I knew it was a lie. I did want my baby. I just didn’t want it yet. Not yet. Not now. Not when life was really starting for us.
Edie looked beautiful pregnant, glowing even. All I felt was sick, and tired, and my eyes had shadows below them that they’d never had, even when we’d pulled typical college all-nighters. The thought of my body being as round as hers…at the thought of my boobs disappearing into saggy leftovers when the baby was done with them...God. I wasn’t prepared for it. I was only twenty-one frickin’ years old. I was barely able to drink legally.
Stephen said Edie hadn’t been ready either. That she and Garrett had decided against kids, so maybe, just maybe, she’d understand, even if she’d made the choice to keep her baby. I pulled the truck to the side of the road and hit the call button on my phone.
She picked it up after one ring. “Hey, Khiley. What’s up?”
Her voice was soft, but I heard in it what she wasn’t saying. Stephen had gone home without me―like he never did. And he’d been upset—mad―in a way he rarely was.
“Can you meet me somewhere?” I asked, hoarse from tears and fear and pain.
“Sure. You don’t want to come here?”
I shook my head and then whispered, “No.”
She was quiet, and I knew Stephen hadn’t told her about the baby, because in her silence, there was confusion.
“The Dairy Queen?” she asked. I didn’t want to be there either. I didn’t want to be anywhere where people I knew might see me crying.
“Can I just pick you up, and we’ll take a drive?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t come in,” I told her, not wanting to risk seeing Stephen. He had every right to be mad. The thing growing inside me was as much his as it was mine, and he deserved to be a part of any decision I made. And yet, I wasn’t letting him. I was excluding him in a way I’d never excluded him in all our twenty-one years together.
“I’ll be on the porch,” Edie said.
I hung up, turned Stephen’s truck around, and drove back toward the lake and their house. The home that had been mine almost as much as my own had been. The trundle in Stephen’s room being my bed as much as the one with the fake stars above it in my bedroom at the ranch.
When I pulled up to the house, it was drowning in Christmas lights. Lonnie never let a Christmas go by without decorating the hell out of it. Lights and holly wreaths and red-and-white-striped ribbons glistened in the frosty air. From the huge picture window, I could see the flocked tree that Wynn always had up. She liked everything snowy and white, whereas my mama liked all the greens and fir smells. Opposites and best friends. My best friend had always been the boy who’d left me at the lake.
Edie stepped off the porch, her baby belly sticking out of a blue peacoat that made me swallow hard. Maybe this was a mistake. Seeing Edie pregnant was what had started my waterworks at Grandma Marina’s house.
Edie used the handrail to help lurch herself into the truck, her once graceful ballerina body struggling with the weight of the baby, and I looked away while fighting the tears that hit my eyes.
Once she had her seat belt on, I turned the truck back down the drive and out toward the interstate. I didn’t know where I was going. Maybe a town over and a coffee shop where no one would know us—or fewer people would know us. All of us kids had been in the limelight off and on growing up because of our ties to Watery Reflection. Mayson and I’d had less pressure because our dad, Blake Abbott, was just the band’s entertainment lawyer versus being on the actual stage with them. Still, our parents had tried to protect us from the relentlessness of the paparazzi.
“You’re awfully silent for someone who needed company,” Edie said after we’d driven for about ten minutes.
“I need to stop driving before I talk,” I told her.
She didn’t say anything. Her phone was buzzing. She glanced down at it, grimaced, and put it in her bag.
“Was that Stephen?” I asked. My heart tightened, and my stomach rolled over again.
“No. Garrett.”
“I’m sorry. Take it. I promise to close my ears,” I told her.
She shook her head.
“It can’t be easy to talk while he’s in Scotland,” I said quietly, feeling remorseful for so many things.
“He can wait.”
We pulled into a coffee shop at the first exit. Edie ordered something without caffeine, and I went to order my regular but then realized I probably needed to order what she had. That just started the tears leaking out of my eyes all over again.
I left her in line and found a seat at a table without ordering.
She joined me, shoving a cookie my way, and I picked at it.
“What’s going on, ‘Ley?” Edie asked softly.
“He’s going to be mad if I tell you. But I think you’re the only one who might understand,” I told her.
“If you need someone to talk to, and he doesn’t understand that, then I’ll tie his shirt around his neck and give him a wedgie.”
I snorted and sort of smiled through the tears. “That’s more something Mayson and Ty would do.”
Edie nodded, and we shared a weak smile at my brother and our almost football star of a cousin who’d always been simultaneously the protectors and tormentors of the group.
“We screwed up. Stephen and I,” I told her.
She frowned, putting together all the clues we’d left her over the course of the day.
“You’re pregnant,” she finally breathed out.
I nodded.
“Oh, ‘Ley,” she said with a sigh of sorrow but also happiness. It was weird to have both of those emotions come together, but it was exactly how I’d been feeling. Sorrow and joy. Hate and affection. Loss and gain.