Page 91 of Maybe in Another Life

He stops me. “You’re really ready to be a single mother?”

“No,” I say. “But this is the way life has worked out. And I’m embracing it.”

“But I mean, this could be a mistake,” he says. “What if you just made a mistake one night with this guy? Are you ready to live with the consequences of that for your entire life? Do I have to live with the consequences of that for mine?”

I sit back down. “I have to think that there is a method to all of this madness,” I tell Ethan. “That there is a larger plan out there. Everything happens for a reason. Isn’t that what they say? I met Michael, and I fell in love with him, even though I can clearly see now that he wasn’t who I thought he was. And one night, everything happened just so, and I got pregnant. And maybe it’s because I’m supposed to have this baby. That’s how I’m choosing to look at it.”

“And if I can’t do it? If I’m not ready to take all of this on?”

“I suppose it would follow that if you and I come to a place we can’t get past, then we aren’t meant to be. Right? Then we aren’t right for each other. I mean, I think I have to believe that life will work out the way it needs to. If everything that happens in the world is just a result of chance and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, that’s just too chaotic for me to handle. I’d have to go around questioning every decision I’ve ever made, every decision I will ever make. If our fate is determined with every step we take... it’s too exhausting. I’d prefer to believe that things happen as they are meant to happen.”

“So you and I finally have the timing worked out, we can finally be together, be what we suspected we always were. And in the middle of that, it turns out you’re pregnant with another man’s baby, and you’re sayingque será será?”

I want to cry. I want to scream and shout. I want to beg him to stay with me during all of this. I want to tell him how scared I am, how much I feel I need him. I want to tell him how the night I reconnected with him, the night we spent together, was the first time I’ve felt at ease in years. But I don’t. Because it will only drag this thing out further. It will only make things worse. “Yeah.Que será será. That’s what I’m saying.”

I get up and walk out into the living room. He follows me. I can smell dinner. I wish, just for a moment, that I hadn’t told him. Right now, we’d be in his bedroom.

And then I think, if I’m wishing for things, maybe I should wish that I’m not pregnant at all. Or that it’s his baby. Or that I never left Los Angeles. Or that Ethan and I never broke up.

But I wonder how different my world would be if any of those things had happened. You can’t change just one part, can you? When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.

“Ethan,” I tell him, “the minute I saw you again, I just knew that you and I were... I mean, I’m pretty sure you and I are...”

“Don’t,” he says. “Just... not right now, OK?”

“OK. I’ll leave you with yoursopa seca.” I smile tenderly and then open the door to leave. He sees me out and shuts the door.

When I get to the last step, he calls my name. I turn around.

He’s standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at me. “I love you,” he says. “I don’t think I ever really stopped.”

I wonder if I’ll be able to make it to my car before I burst into tears, before I cease to be a human being and become just a puddle with big boobs and a high bun.

“I was going to tell you that tonight,” Ethan says. “Before all of this.”

“And now?” I say.

He gives me a bittersweet smile. “I still love you,” he says. “I’ve always loved you. I might never stop.”

His gaze falls to the ground, and then he looks back up at me. “I just thought you should know now... in case...” He doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t want to say the words, and he knows I don’t want to hear them.

“I love you, too,” I say, looking up at him. “So now you know. Just in case.”

Luckily for everyone involved, my physical therapist is not my type.

“OK, Ms. Martin,” he says. “We are—”

“Ted, just call me Hannah.”

“Right, Hannah,” Ted says. “Today we’re going to work on standing with a walker.”

“Sounds easy enough.” I say it because that’s what I normally say to everything, not because it actually sounds easy enough. At this stage in my life, it sounds quite hard.

He puts my feet on the floor. That part I’ve gotten good at. Then he puts the walker in front of me. He pulls me up onto him, resting my arms and chest on his shoulders. He is bearing my weight.

“Slowly, just try to ease the weight onto your right foot,” he says. I hang on to him but try to back off just a little. My knees buckle.

“Slow,” he says. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

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