Page 72 of Mending Hearts

From the shelf by the door, he grabbed his keys and was gone.

“You two fight?” Pasha cut into his egg and deposited the piece onto his toast.

With a frown, I turned to face him. “Not exactly. Why?”

“Weird feeling.” He made a circular motion in the air with his knife.

“Yeah, well, he asked me to talk about something I didn’t want to talk about.”

“He do things for you all time.”

“So what?” I shot him an irritated glare. “I’m just supposed to lay myself bare to him?”

“I think you do already.” He chuckled and sipped his coffee.

“Uh, not emotionally.” I made a back-and-forth motion with my hand. “He and I have an agreement. Whatever is going on isn’t emotional.”

Pasha rolled his eyes, actually rolled his eyes. “He love you. You love him. Have baby. Be happy.”

I shook my head and shoveled a spoonful of granola and yogurt into my mouth, chewing slowly. Once I swallowed, I said, “I don’t love him. The baby loves him.”

The coffee cup was at his lips when I spoke, and he sputtered, spilling coffee on the island. A string of Russian flew out of his mouth, and the look on his face was full of disbelief.

“I mean,” I conceded, “sometimes, I thinkImight love him a little bit too. That maybe it’s notallbaby hormones.” I stared into my bowl and then glanced at Pasha. “I’m going to tell you something, but you’re not allowed to think I’m a bad person.”

He frowned while he wiped the counter with a cloth. “Okay.”

I took a deep breath and wondered if I could really speak the thought aloud. It was a new one, a crazy one. The only other person I’d told was Sarah. “I wish it was possible to keep Tyler, you know, as my boyfriend, without having to be a mother to this thing.” I pointed to my enormous belly.

Pasha reached for my phone and turned on my translating app. I always knew we were getting into a serious discussion when broken English wasn’t enough. Sometimes, I got a lecture, and sometimes, I got understanding. He spent more time with me and Tyler than anyone else. I trusted his judgment.

“You don’t like kids?”The robotic voice was the newest app we’d discovered that did close to real-time translations. Pasha had said the onlything better would be hooking up something directly to his brain. The visual had been disturbing, and I’d told him never to mention it again.

“I like kids. Other people’s kids, mostly.” I stirred my granola, swirling it around the berries. Not that I’d been around a lot of kids. “I’m only twenty-one. What do I know about being a mom?”

“Lots of women are mothers at twenty-one.”

“Maybe they had a better role model to start with.” I shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t think I could protect a child.”

“Why?”

I recognized the Russian word before the app translated. A good question, one I wasn’t sure I knew how to answer. No one protected me, and I suspected I would be just as terrible with a child.

“In all seriousness, if you think Tyler loves me, do you think I could ask him to put the baby up for adoption and keep me instead?” My heart hammered in my chest. I couldn’t believe I voiced the thought out loud. I’d danced around the idea with Sarah, who fluffed me off as being a romantic instead of a realist. If allowing a husband to cheat constantly was being a realist, I didn’t want her version of real life. I would rather live in the land of romantic notions.

Pasha shot me an annoyed look and shook his head. He stuck his fork into his egg and sliced through it with the knife, driving the piece into his mouth. When he’d finished chewing, he stared at me until I started to squirm.

“It was a dumb question, I guess.”

“It’s an impossible choice.”He sighed and rubbed his face.“Don’t ask him to do that. It’s not fair.”

The sight of the food in my bowl turned my stomach. With my spoon, I scraped it into the garbage and rinsed it out before depositing it in thedishwasher. “So, I guess I just have to hope all these feelings really are the baby, huh?” When I turned to look at Pasha, his eyes were filled with sympathy.

“You need to talk to someone about all the things that have happened to you, the reasons you think you can’t do this.”

I frowned at the translation app on my phone and shook my head. The only good thing about waiting for my phone to spit out his words in English was the chance to avoid eye contact. “Like therapy or some shit? Uh, no. That sounds like a terrible idea. Let’s take every bad thing that’s ever happened to me and hold it up to a microscope to dissect. No. Nope. Not gonna happen.”

“You like being unhappy?”

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