“No,” she said, “none.”
He sagged into the chair and sat, frozen. He knew she was worried about him. Hell, he was worried about him too. Of all the blows he’d taken in life, this one had knocked his feet out from under him. He didn’t even know how to feel. He was relieved that she’d decided to carry his child, saddened that he had missed out on the child’s life, horrified that he hadn’t been here in the first place and that she hadn’t even told him because she was trying to save him. Was he so pathetic and had he been such a mess that he didn’t see anything else around him?
“You wouldn’t have known,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I didn’t show for several months.”
“Your parents?”
“They basically kicked me out of the house.”
He blanched at that. “I never did like them.”
“They never did like you,” she said cheerfully.
He let his breath out with a whoosh. “And they had good reason. I knocked up their daughter and walked out.”
She stopped, looked at him with a hard gaze, and said, “I know you were a mess back then, but you aren’t now.”
“No, I’m not now,” he said, “but I missed something major in my life.”
“We all miss things in life,” she said. “I think the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to capture what we can and to hang on to what we hold in our hands. The rest is too intangible, and it’s gone within seconds.”
“I missed his entire life,” he said, staring at her in shock. “You got to hold him. You got to watch his first step. You got to get up in the middle of the night and soothe him and make him feel better.”
“Yes, I did,” she said, “and that’s why I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. And believe me. I was under an awful lot of pressure to do so.”
He nodded. “I can imagine. Your parents were also fairly religious, and I didn’t fit their mold of a good future son-in-law.”
“Not only didn’t fit the mold,” she said, “you weren’t here.”
He winced. “And that all goes back to the fact that I would have stayed if I’d known.”
“And where would that have taken us?” she asked quietly.
He looked at her with a pain-filled gaze. “You could have told me before now. I didn’t have to lose all his life.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe that’s true. But, at the same time, when was I supposed to contact you? A year later? When he was one year old? Or on his fifth birthday, when you were probably off, for all I know, married with a whole life completely independent of me, of this place? You didn’t ever want to come back here. Remember?”
“Nothing was here for me,” he said sadly.
“And you say that,” she said, “but I was always here.”
“But I didn’t know that,” he said, looking at her in surprise. “All you talked about was leaving.”
She tilted her head and studied him and then nodded. “I forgot that,” she said. “I always did talk about leaving, didn’t I?”
He nodded. “It’s one of the reasons I think we spent as much time with each other before we left because we were both caught up in this need to get away. But I did, and you never did.”
“No, I never did,” she said calmly, “because I found home here instead.”
“Where did you go after your parents?”
“My sister’s.”
He nodded slowly. “I remember she lived on her own, didn’t she?”
“Yes, and she took me in and helped me raise Jeremy for the first few years while he was baby. When I got accepted into med school, I pushed the start off for one year, but then I had to make a decision, if I would finally go or stay home with my child.”
“How did you manage financially?”
“My grandmother. She passed away not long after Jeremy turned one, and she left me enough money to at least get started,” she said. “I’m still paying off student loans. I applied for a lot of grants, and I did get some, but, as you can imagine, it was hard with a baby at home, trying to keep a roof over my head. If not for my sister, I never would have made it.”
“I can’t believe that you made it even now,” he said. “I’m really proud of you.”
She stared at him in shock.
“I know it’s not what you expected to hear,” he said, “and I’m still reeling with the pain of having lost all those years with Jeremy. I don’t know how to reconcile that because I know I was an ass back then, and I know I needed to leave, and I also know that leaving was the best thing for me. But it wasn’t the best thing for you, and that’s very hard for me to accept.”
She walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat down beside him, picking up his hand. “I wish you’d come back to town years ago. I finished school and only in the last year or two did it really occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t being fair to Jeremy. I didn’t know how to get a hold of you, but I didn’t try either. So I’ve been feeling guilty as hell, and that made it very difficult.”
“No, you wouldn’t have known how to contact me,” he said, staring off in the distance. “I had no ties here. I had nobody here to keep in touch with—except for you—and I knew that you were better off without me. All I could see was our life together here and me dragging you down to the level I was in, and that was not what I wanted for you. I wanted you to go to med school, to become a doctor, to become somebody, and to have that family you always wanted.”
She gave him a misty smile. “And you gave me that,” she said. “You just didn’t know it.”
“Until today.” He pulled away his hand, looked at her, and shook his head. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“Yes,” she said, “but you have no idea how happy I am that we’re talking about it right now.”
He searched her gaze, looking for a hint of deceit, but couldn’t see any. “You were always one of the most honest people I ever knew,” he said. “So this isn’t about you being dishonest. Yet it does feel like a betrayal. But I don’t know if it’s a betrayal of you to me or of me to me,” he murmured.
She reached out her hand again, grabbing his. “And I get the first one,” she said, “because I feel betrayal too, but I feel like I betrayed my son by not giving him a father. And it did cross my mind, at one point in time, that maybe, just maybe, I should do something about giving him a father. But, every time I thought about it, it felt wrong.”
He looked at her, dazed. “You mean, like, marry somebody else?”
“Yes,” she said honestly. “Not the best idea if I didn’t feel the emotions to go with it, but a lot of women have married for a lot less reasons,” she admitted. “Security, companionship, help raising a child are all part and parcel of that.”
He stared down at her hand that held his, and he laced their fingers together. “When you’re young and stupid, you don’t really realize the consequences. I can’t imagine how shocked and scared you were at the time.”
“No,” she said, “but you have to balance that with how absolutely delighted I was too.”