I lay on Sarah’s couch. I needed time to figure things out. I would have been jumping for joy now if the doctor had said I was one week pregnant. But no—I was seven weeks pregnant, which meant I was already pregnant when Travis and I had consummated our marriage a week ago. If the time she gave me was right, I had already been pregnant before I even married Travis, and I was pretty sure nothing had happened between us on our honeymoon.
“Christian?” Sarah asked.
“How? I mean, I broke up with him months before I got married.”
“What were you doing around October twenty-fifth?”
“I was busy preparing for a wedding!” I replied.
Sarah took out her organizer and scanned through the dates. “Okay, October twenty-second, we all checked in to the hotel in preparation for your wedding. Are you sure you didn’t see Chris round about that time?”
I shook my head. “Of course! I haven’t seen him in months!”
“Eric?”
“Eric would never even be able to get it up!” I rolled my eyes.
“I was pretty sure I was the one who slept with the stripper.” Sarah giggled. “October twenty-fifth, we didn’t do anything,” she said. “That was the day before your family dinner.”
She stared at me blankly. I took a deep breath. She looked at me apologetically and reached out to give me a hug.
“Hey, it’s going to be okay.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not!” I said. “I’m going to lose Travis because of this. I won’t let him answer for a kid that is not his. And, Sarah, do you realize what a shame it is if you do not know how you got pregnant in the first place?”
She handed me a glass of water. “We’ll figure it out, sweetie. For now, take a rest. Your baby needs you to.”
I must have slept all day. I felt so sad and so scared. When I woke up, Sarah had already prepared dinner for us.
“Come, you must be hungry.”
I ate in silence. I still kept picking my brain for what happened during that time. And everything came up blank. I couldn’t remember anything significant.
“I was just thinking,” Sarah said. “I think I remember where we were round about that time.”
I stared at her, scared of what she was about to say.
“We went on a drinking spree,” Sarah said. “You wanted to forget the fact that Travis might sleep with the stripper in his stag party. We drank our wits out.”
My heart pounded in my ribcage. That was the night I didn’t remember how I got back to my hotel room, and my clothes were scattered on my hotel room floor.
“Oh my God, Sarah!” I breathed. “I don’t know what happened to me that night. I can’t even remember how I got back to my room! And I was…I was naked when I woke up!”
Tears rolled down my cheeks. Sarah hugged me. I wished this were all a dream I would soon wake up from.
After a few hours, everything was still a haze to me. No matter how much I thought about that night, nothing changed. I was left with a dead end. I couldn’t remember what had happened after I drank about a bottle of tequila.
“How did you wake up?”
She blushed. “Well, Dante, the cute bartender I was flirting with all night? He got one of his friends to cover him for the remainder of his shift. He accompanied me to my room…one thing led to another. But sorry, sweetie. I don’t remember seeing you off to your room. I think I left you at the bar, actually, because I was in such a hurry to go back to my room with Dante.”
A memory came to my mind. There was a bartender, there was another guy.
“Which reminds me, I need to pay you back for all the liquor I had that night.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think I paid the bill,” I said to her.
She blinked back at me. “Well, nothing is free these days!”
“If you don’t remember paying, then who paid?”
“Maybe Dante?” Sarah asked.
“Or maybe it’s whoever took me back to my room! Whoever did…took advantage of me and left me a souvenir.”
Sarah looked at me apologetically. “Do you want to go back to the hotel? We can check.”
“We need to go now.”
“What? Why now?”
“Because we need to talk to your bartender, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t take day shifts. And tomorrow, I should be ready to face Travis.”
Travis called me that night. I hated it, but I had to lie to him.
“I’m sleeping over Sarah’s. I feel tired, actually,” I said. “I miss you.”
He sighed. “I would give everything to have you beside me right now.”
I giggled. But he didn’t know there was a trace of bitterness to that. “We’ll see each other tomorrow.”
“That’s too long,” he sighed. “Next time, you’re coming with me on my trips.”
“Travis, you can handle a few days without me.”
“I discovered I can’t. Not anymore,” he said. “Take care of yourself while you’re there. And be miserable without me.”
I giggled. “I am.” That was true. I was miserable. Not only because Travis was not with me, but because I knew there was an eighty percent chance our marriage would end abruptly. I couldn’t let Travis save me this time.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Travis?”
“Love?” he replied.
“I need to go. It’s been a long day,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
“Brianne…” he said softly.
“Yes?”
I heard him take a deep breath. Then he said, “I love you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t,” he said.
“Of course I do. You always said I was the only thing left for you to love, remember?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But this ‘I love you’ isn’t like before.”
My heart stopped at that very moment. I even forgot to breathe.
“Wh-what do you mean?”
He sighed. “I mean I love you. Do you understand?”
I think my heart broke at that very moment, and immediately tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yes.” I took a deep breath. And because I knew I meant it, too, and because I knew tomorrow might change forever, I said, “I love you, too, Travis. The same way you love me.”
He sighed. “God, I wish we’d said that to each other before we parted.”
I took a deep breath. “Me too.” I wished I’d said that to him earlier. I wished I wasn’t pregnant and didn’t know who the father of my baby was. More than that, I wished I were pregnant with Travis’s child. That I was only a week or two along, because then I would definitely be sure that Travis was the father. I realized I didn’t want to get pregnant with anyone else. Just with Travis. But things were different. And I was a freaking mess because I knew that as much as I loved Travis, I couldn’t let him take care of someone else’s child. And that moment I heard my baby’s heartbeat, love had grown in my heart already. I loved this baby, even though I didn’t know who’d fathered him. Because no matter who the father was, I knew that he was mine.
“Well, that will be the very first thing I will say to you when I see you tomorrow,” Travis said.
“Can’t wait,” I whispered.
He chuckled. “Go to sleep now. There are no flights available to Connecticut at this hour. Otherwise, I would be taking them to get to you.”
“You have a meeting tomorrow,” I reminded him.
“That’s a bummer, huh!” he said, his voice full of frustration. “All right, goodnight, love.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you in my dreams.”
When we hung up, I couldn’t stop crying. The moment would have been perfect! But it was all ruined. Because I knew tomorrow did not bring anything that I should be excited about. Tomorrow, I might lose Travis forever. Actually, he was lost to me the moment I found out I was pregnant with somebody else’s child.
Travis had been there for me all my life. He’d saved me over and over in the past. But he couldn’t save me from this mess. I would not allow it. It wasn’t fair. Even if he insisted, and I have a feeling he would come up with another solution to my problem, I would not let him. He’d done so much already. I could free him of his promises to my brother. He had already fulfilled those promises a long time ago. And I loved him too much to ruin his life.
We checked in to the same hotel where we’d had my wedding. It was ten in the evening when we arrived. After getting our room, we headed to the bar where Sarah and I had gone drinking before my wedding.
A familiar face was there. I guessed he was the guy named Dante. Then another bartender was there, too. He was a blond guy with hazel eyes.
“Two faces I was not expecting to see tonight,” Dante said. He gave a dazzling smile for Sarah, and Sarah winked at him.
“Oh, please!” I rolled my eyes. I was starting to have nausea already.
“Sorry,” Sarah said. She turned to Dante. “Actually, we’re here to ask you for a favor.”
“Anything,” Dante smiled.
“Remember we were here before?”
“I remember everything, sugar,” he said to Sarah, which irritated me even more. But I kept my mouth shut.
“I left with you. And somebody covered for you, right?”
“That would be me,” the blonde bartender answered.
I stared at him for a moment. He was familiar. Like I had seen him before, and it could have been that night. I thought, in horror, that this guy could have been the one who took me back to my room.
“What happened after I left with you?” Sarah asked.
Dante was taken aback. He stared at Sarah for a moment and then he said, “Well, you couldn’t get your hands off me. Not that I minded. I took you to your room…”
“Not that!” I said in an irritated tone. “She meant, what happened here, in this bar, after you left with her.”
Dante shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, sugar.”
I turned to the blond guy. He narrowed his eyes as he stared at me, as if he was trying to place me or remember what happened.
“Don’t tell me you took me back to my room?”
“Of course not! I’m married. And faithful.”
Relief washed over me. But I realized that the horror wasn’t over yet. If he hadn’t taken me back to the hotel room, then I must have gone with somebody else. Although, it wasn’t really my thing to do one night stands. Maybe on that night, in my agitation about the fact that Travis was having his stag party and could be having fun with his stripper, I had decided to try something wild.
How could this happen now? Now that finally I had found the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Now that I had finally made a family with Travis. Now that I had finally saved him. This would break him as much as it would break me. Maybe even more.
“Did I leave alone?”
“I honestly don’t remember. It was more than a month ago.”
“I know,” I said in a desperate voice. “But could you please try to remember?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he stared at me for a long while.
“I remember Dante didn’t come back until five in the morning. You weren’t here anymore. You were gone.”
“Did you write off our tab?” Sarah asked both the men.
“We don’t earn big time, sweetie. And you two had too much to drink. I can’t afford to write off that bill,” the blond guy said. He turned to me. “I remember now. You were with a guy.”
Horror crept through me again. “Who?”
He shrugged. “I mind my own business. And it’s not like it’s an uncommon thing to have customers flirt with each other here. It happens all the time.”
“Where did the guy come from? He just sat beside me, started a conversation, and then I was all over him?” I asked. That didn’t sound like me.
He nodded. “Pretty much,” the guy replied. “You were laughing a lot. And then I think you started kissing him. You made out here—I had to turn away. And I guess you left with him.”
“Who was he?” I asked desperately.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” the blond guy said apologetically. “And we don’t have security cameras here. We can’t help you.”
“Why do you want to know, anyway? So you were with a guy for a night. You don’t remember who he is. What’s the big deal? You’re pretty hot. He won’t be the last guy on earth for you,” Dante said.
I glared at Dante. “How would you feel if a guy you couldn’t remember left you a souvenir?”
He backed off. “Ohhh! I’m sorry, sugar,” he said. He looked at me for a moment. “Well, I hope it’s curable.”
I looked at him disbelievingly. “It’s not a disease!” I turned back to the other guy. “What did he look like?”
He thought for a moment. “Caucasian. Tall. Good-looking fella.”
I stared at him, waiting for him to say more.
He shook his head. “I really can’t remember any more distinctive features.”
“You just described at least thirty percent of the male population of South Carolina. And I’m not even sure what you consider good-looking for a guy!”
“Look, sweetheart. I really can’t help you much.”
“Who paid my bill?” I asked.
“Ahhh…he did.” The guy smiled. “That I remember. You insisted on paying, but you were not fast enough to fish through your wallet. I think you were drunk out of your wits. He paid with an Infinite card. I was impressed. He also gave me a huge tip. Like, one hundred percent of the bill.”
“Hey! You didn’t tell me that,” Dante protested.
“Sorry, pal. I figured you already got the girl.” The guy grinned.
“Can…can I see the bill?”
“It’s not here, sweetie. And it was over a month ago,” he said.
“Is there a way for us to find it?”
“It’s in the office,” the guy said. “They’re not working now.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You really want to it that much, huh?”
I nodded.
The guy sighed. “Okay, tell me where to find you. I’ll pull some strings and get you a copy of the credit card slip. But there could have been at least ten customers that night.”
“Can’t you tell which one?”
He shrugged. “Difficult. But that narrows your choices.”
“When can you give it to me?”
“Tomorrow, noon?”
“Can it be any sooner?” I asked wearily. Who knew what time Travis would be in Connecticut.
“I’ll try. But no promises.”
I almost couldn’t sleep that night. So I was right—there was a guy. He’d taken me back to my room. What’s worse, the bartender told me I had been all over him. So it could mean that I’d slept with him. How could I be so damn loose? How could I flirt like that with a stranger? And how could I not remember?
“No matter how I look at it, that was the only instance that I could have been with a man,” I said to Sarah. “Travis slept on the couch the whole time, and I didn’t get drunk with him. I would have remembered. That night was the only night I was drunk out of my wits. And it coincides with the week I got pregnant.”
“Ultrasound results may change as the week progresses,” Sarah reminded me.
“But only plus or minus two weeks. Plus or minus two weeks from that night, I’m still positive I didn’t have sex at all! Christian and I were long over by then. Travis and I didn’t happen at all until last week.”
Sarah squeezed my hand. “Don’t stress the baby. Go to sleep now.”
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of making love to Travis. He touched me in the most sensual way. He was very gentle. I was the wild one. I dreamt about making love and reaching heaven. And then he stood up from the bed and dressed hurriedly.
“Why are you in a hurry?” I asked him.
When he turned around, I recognized in horror that he was not Travis. That face belonged to Christian! I dreamt of making love to Travis, but it was Christian who I was really sleeping with!
“No!” I screamed.
“Brianne! Brianne!” Sarah shook me. I opened my eyes and realized, in relief, that it was all just a dream.
I sat up from the bed and gave Sarah a hug. “Sarah.”
“Hey, you were having a bad dream,” Sarah said.
I was scared. I might have been in love with Christian before, but I realized I didn’t love him as much as I loved Travis now. I didn’t think I’d loved anyone as much as I loved Travis. And tonight, I would have to tell him that our marriage was over.
I rushed to the bathroom to throw up. The morning sickness was getting worse now. Even if I planned to wait for a week or so more to tell Travis, he would surely recognize the signs. He would know.
I dressed in a pair of drawstring pants and a comfortable shirt. I came out of the bathroom just in time to see Sarah open the door. She let Dante and the blond bartender in.
“We didn’t get your name,” I said to the blonde guy.
“Rick,” he said.
“So, Rick, did you manage to find something for us?” I asked.
He nodded. He took out a stack of paper and handed it to Sarah. “You didn’t get this from me.”
I nodded.
“Well, there’s about a dozen credit card slips here,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes.
“It was a busy night,” Rick pointed out.
“Thanks for your help, Rick,” I said. I took out some money from my wallet and handed it to him. “For your trouble.”
He accepted the money from me. “Anytime. Good luck with whatever you are looking for.”
And he left and Dante gave Sarah a wink before he exited the room. I took the papers from Sarah.
“Okay, I hope he only gave us the guys. I mean, no point getting the slips of female customers,” Sarah said.
Sarah and I split the papers to search separately. I read the names on my stack, trying to see if any of them rang a bell.
“Tyrone Gomez,” I read. “No. Don’t recognize the name.”
“Jackson Bow,” Sarah read.
I shook my head.
“Timothy Reyes.”
I shook my head again.
Sarah took another paper. She stared at the bill for a while.
“Oh my God!” she breathed.
I looked at her wearily.
“October twenty-six, one fifteen in the morning,” she said.
“Yeah, it could be around that time. What have you got?”
She stared at me with a worried expression on her face. And she handed me the piece of paper.
Her hands were shaking, and that made me extra nervous.
I knew then the name was familiar. Christian? Eric?
I read the copy of the credit card slip. The time and date were as Sarah mentioned. The bill was about four hundred dollars.
I scanned the bill for the name. When I found it, my heart stopped beating altogether.
After reading it a dozen times, I was convinced I was not dreaming. The slip still bore the same name:
Travis James Cross