Page 90 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I take the test in the powder room of the main house. I’ve taken a million tests at this point in my life for no reason at all. My period would be a day late and I’d be rushing off, too excited not to check. I hold the stick under the stream of urine, counting to five. And when I’ve finished counting, I pull the test back into view, watching as pink washes over the white screen. The control line appears immediately and I’m waiting for that other line as if my life depends on it.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Maren. It probably means nothing, and it’s for the best if…”
My brain goes silent. I didn’t have to wait a minute. There’s a second line, as dark as the first, almost instantaneously.
I am pregnant. I am definitely pregnant.
After all my years of doing everything right so that I’d have the perfect pregnancy, it happens now? I’ve been drinking, I’ve been running, I’ve been eating like shit. “You’re already aterrible mother, and it’s barely begun,” I whisper, and I’m weeping but smiling at the same time. It’s really going to happen. Maybe. I’ll need to take a blood test. I guess I’ll need to see a doctor. I’ll need to discuss it with…
Charlie.
God. How the hell am I going to tell Charlie?
He comesinto the house with a brow raised, glancing at the table laid out with enough food for ten people.
“I made breakfast,” I tell him.
He pulls me against him. “I see.” His mouth presses to the top of my head. “How do you feel? All recovered?”
My breath catches.I could tell him now. I should tell him now. But he’s just woken up and it can wait, right? It can wait until he’s fully awake, and he’s had some food.
“Totally fine,” I reply.
His hand palms my ass, and he gives it a light slap. “Then you really ought to be back in bed instead of in here, fully dressed. We’ve only got thirty minutes until the guys arrive.”
I laugh. “Breakfast will get cold.”
I know he’s thinking he’d rather get laid than fed, but he gives in with a reluctant smile and sits at the table.
I take a seat across from him, forcing down a little fruit, though nerves have demolished any appetite I might have had.
I watch the way his long fingers lift the fork, the way his beautiful mouth closes around it, the way his blue eyes catch mine. If I could pick anyone in the world to be my child’s biological father, it would probably be him, and if he could pick any outcome in the world, it would be to not father anyone at all. It’s a miracle, and it’s also deeply unfair to him—he thought I was this sure thing. It’s as if I’ve tricked him. Hopefully he won’t actually believe that but God, who knows?
I’ll offer him the option of bowing out. As much as it hurts to imagine leaving him, if he doesn’t want to be a part of this, I’m not going to force his hand. I’d go elsewhere, claim I conceived through IVF, and he’d need never get involved. Except we aren’t two strangers who’d never see each other again. There’d be holidays and family dinners and every occasion in between. Kit’s wedding, the birth of her children, our parents’ birthdays.
Is he really going to watch his own child—a child who might look just like him—running around the room at Christmas and pretend it isn’t his? Of course he won’t. He’ll feel duty-bound to help raise the kid, and probably to make an honest woman of me, too, once I’m no longer married to someone else—and that would make me so incredibly happy, but only if it wasn’t going to make him incredibly miserable.
Which it obviously would.
40
CHARLIE
Maren makes the next trip to New York in a single day and is home again by bedtime. I ask, just before we fall asleep, what her favorite Greek myth is.
“Orpheus and Eurydice,” she says. “But it’s kind of sad.”
“They’re all kind of sad. How the fuck did you end up memorizing them anyway?”
“Henry gave me this big colorful book when I was a kid with all the Greek myths. Gorgeous illustrations. I still have it, actually. I read it cover to cover, again and again, and then I read it to Kit when she was old enough.”
Thanks to the moonlight, I can just make out her smile...the way she always smiles when she talks about Kit. I suspect that’s where Maren’s obsession with having children began, because she’s way more of a mother to Kit than Ulrika has ever been.
“Okay, tell me about Orpheus and whoever the fuck he was in love with, who undoubtedly turned out to be a witch or a goddess who punished him for something dumb.”
She laughs. “Eurydice, and no, she wasn’t a witch or a goddess. She was Orpheus’s wife, but she was bitten by a spiderand Orpheus was so grief-stricken that he went to the underworld after her. He was a musician, so his music calmed Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld, and that allowed him to get by.”
I glance at Echo and Narcy, both snoring in their sleep. “Realistically, it seems like it should have taken a little more than that to get by a three-headed dog guarding the underworld. That wouldn’t even work withyourdogs, and they’re not smart.”
