Page 100 of Good as Gold
She laughs. “We did.”
“And how do you feel?” I ask, my arms tightening around her.
“Tired,” she admits. “I have to nap every day after I get home from school. And I’m nauseous, but not as bad as Skye.”
Skye had been sick a lot. Benito could talk of nothing else for a while.
I’d been tuning him out to protect myself. But now my head is spinning. “I’m honestly speechless.”
“But is it a happy kind of speechless? Be honest.”
“God, Leila.” I kiss her jaw. “I couldn’t be happier for you.”
Her body relaxes by several degrees. “I know this is a lot. It was theoretical before, and now it’s real.”
“I wish you’d told me,” I blurt. “Three months is a long time.”
“Yes and no,” she says. “I took that first pregnancy test, and it was positive… I just didn’t believe it. I didn’tfeelpregnant. So I thought I’d wait a few days. And then I started googlingpregnancy at thirty-five, and the first thing you see are the miscarriage statistics.”
“Oh,” I say softly.
Oh.
“There’s so much grief in your life already. I didn’t want to tell you—and thenuntell you two weeks later. So I waited. And then I had a doctor’s appointment, and they explained how all the important tests aren’t done until you’re three months pregnant…”
“Okay,” I say quietly. “I get it. And how are you feeling about this now that it’s real?”
She lets out a nervous laugh. “I’m scared. I mean—I got what I wanted, but now it’s all on me to do everything right.” She takes a deep breath. “It’s such a gift you’ve given me, and I don’t want to mess it up.”
That sounds like a lot of stress. I kiss her palm, because I don’t know how else to help. “Does anyone else know yet?”
“Nash, as of yesterday.” She clears her throat. “He was my trial balloon, so to speak. And I didn’t name you, of course. I won’t do that at all unless you decide you want to be involved.”
“How did Nash take it?”
She chuckles, and I feel it in my chest. “He was weird about it. Like he couldn’t believe I’d become a single mother by choice. He even said, ‘Raising a child is hard.’”
We both laugh, because you have to consider the source. If you look up “playboy” in a dictionary, there’s probably a photo of Nash with a beer in one hand and a woman’s ass in his other. He probably doesn’t even remember what a child looks like.
“He’ll come around,” Leila says, with a wave of her hand. “Babies just scare him.”
“When are you going to tell your parents?”
“Soon. Now that these tests came back with optimistic news, and now that I’ve told you, I can start to share the news. I guess I’ll wait until after you’ve left town again, though. I don’t want my family jumping to conclusions.”
“Smart.”
She turns in my arms. “How are you, anyway? How’s Colorado? How does it feel to be back at work?”
“Awful,” I say, opting for the truth. “But work will get easier. Maybe once I’m back on the mountain, I’ll remember why we built that business in the first place.”
She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. This isn’t my favorite topic. What about your job? When would you have to take a leave of absence?”
“Not until April,” she says. “I can work until my due date, if I want to. But I’ll still have to warn the preschool in January or February, so they can find someone to jump in at the end of the school year. And pretty soon I’ll have a bump, anyway.”
Unbidden, my hand finds its way to Leila’s tummy.
