Chapter 28

We drop off Lani, then Cora. Sienna and I are left in the car alone as she turns toward Jack’s house. Stripes of light from the streetlights carve across our faces and laps. She’s taking the back route, off the main drag.

“Thank you again for including me. I had a great time. I loved the musical. But I also really loved your friends.”

Both had hugged me tight as we said goodbye, and Lani had said, “Let’s hang out again soon, okay?”

“I could tell they loved you, too,” Sienna says lightly, but it doesn’t feel light. It feels like a lot of bounty, something big to be grateful for. I’ll never be glad for what Harris and Mia did, but I bet someday I’ll look back at it as one of my life’s best reminders that spring always comes after winter.

“Maddie?”

Sienna’s tone is serious, and without knowing exactly what she’s about to say, I feel myself hunkering down.

“I know it’s none of my business…”

I clear my throat.

“And I know that’s what people say when it’s really none of their business…”

I’m quiet, unwilling to let her off the hook, but not quite ready to shut her down, either.

“What’s going on with you and my brother?”

I think about saying, nothing, but can’t, not quite. It’s too big of a lie.

“It’s just…” Sienna continues. “I see the way he looks at you. I’ve never seen him look that way at anyone. And I saw your face when Lani was talking about him. Maddie, you’ve got to know there’s nothing between them.”

“Nothing?” I challenge.

Sienna sighs. “I mean, they’ve gone a round or two. Or, I don’t know, twenty.”

My gut goes sours with jealousy. And Sienna takes her eyes off the road at that exact moment and catches the expression on my face.

“My point,” she says quietly. “But, Maddie, it’s just convenience sex with them. They’d both tell you that straight out if you asked.”

I hunch my shoulders. Maybe it’s the words convenience sex, which I know she means to make me feel better, but—

How different is that from what he’s doing with me? I mean, how much more convenient does it get than having your fuck buddy live in your house?

“I probably—I don’t think I should be talking about this with you.” She puts a gentle hand on my arm. “I like to think I know my brother better than anyone. I like to think I understand what he’s gone through and what matters to him. And—you can’t tell him I told you this, Maddie.”

For a split second I’m sure she’s going to say, He’s never going to be the guy you want him to be.

Instead, she says, “I think he’s in love with you.”

Something inside me, rusty with disuse, tries to grind to life. And that little flare of hope scares me so much that I declare, “It’s lust.”

I say it so flatly that it comes out harsh, so I try to soften it: “It’s crazy-good sex—”

She puts a hand to her temple like she’s blocking me out.

“Sorry. But you asked!”

“I did. Which I might live to regret. But I can’t watch two people I care about—three, counting Gabe—dance around each other and go spinning off in different directions. So I will put on the big-girl pants and let you talk to me about my brother’s sex life. ‘Crazy-good sex.’ ” She winces, visibly. “And so you think it’s just lust.”

“I know it is. It’s—” It’s almost painful to say it, but I do. “Just ‘convenience sex.’ ”

“For you?”

“For both of us. It’ll burn itself out, like last time.”

She turns onto Jack’s street. Pulls up in front of his house. Parks the car and half turns in her seat to look at me. Her gaze is sharp, knowing. “Last time?”

“None of your business,” I mutter. I reach for the car door.

“It isn’t. I get that.” Her voice is gentle.

I pull my hand back. And sit there, staring straight through the windshield, seeing nothing.

“What happened?” she asks quietly.

My period was five days late, and I peed on a stick and a small pink plus sign appeared. It was that simple. There was no denial, no days of delay while I lied to myself about why I was so nauseous or tired or my breasts were swollen or I was peeing all the time. I stared at the white plastic stick numbly for a few minutes, and then went and lay down on my bed and fell asleep. Not because I was so tired, but because I couldn’t face reality. Not yet.

I was going back to school in two days, and that was bad enough. It was bad because I was in love with Jack Parker and I hadn’t found a way to tell him. And I was pretty sure that even if I did tell him, it wouldn’t matter. Two nights before I took the pregnancy test, after he turned my world upside down for the umpteenth time, while I was still lying next to him trying to recover my breath and my equilibrium, while I was thinking, This. This is how it’s supposed to be, he’d said, “I am going to miss this after you’re gone.”

Not, “I’m going to miss you so much.”

Not, “I’m going to miss this until I get a free weekend and can drive down to Eugene so we can do it again.”

Not even, “I’m going to miss this until you get home to visit and we can knock boots like old times.”

Just, “I’m going to miss this after you’re gone.”

So even before the stick showed me its little pink secret, it was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do, telling Jack the truth. Going to him and saying, “For me, this isn’t just sex. This is about feeling like when I’m with you, I’m completely safe and happy and exactly where I’m supposed to be. It’s about feeling like we fit together. Like I see the best in you and you see the best in me. Like being together makes us both better people than we could ever be alone.”

But I was going to do it. I was going to say it because I couldn’t imagine having to live with not saying it. With never knowing if he felt the same way.

Once the stick betrayed me, though, it became a whole different truth I was going to have to tell. And I knew exactly how Jack Parker felt about fatherhood because he’d told me, after we’d run into a high school friend of his who was about to become a father.

“That poor fucker,” he’d said, after the guy left.

“He seems happy about it,” I hazarded. He’d been talking about shopping for a stroller with the same passion other guys talked about cars.

“He’s too young.”

“And that’s what bothers you?”

“I just don’t see him—he’s not ready to give this up.”

He indicated O’Hannihans around us, the sex-drenched scene, seeming to encompass me, even us, in his gesture.

“Are you sure you’re not just projecting?” I teased.

“Yeah, well, that,” he said, grinning at me.

“So—no fatherhood in your future plans?”

I asked it as casually as I could.

“Might be for some guys, but it’s not for me. Not the way I was raised, not with my dad. Just seems like shitty odds I’d be any better at it than he was.”

I’d left it at that. If I felt a twinge of grief, I shrugged it off because, after all, there wasn’t anything at stake.

And now here I was, on my way to his apartment with information he didn’t want, poised to shit all over his happy bachelor life, and without even any assurance from him that I was worth the five-hour drive to Eugene, Oregon, let alone a life sacrifice of epic proportions.

But I was doing it. I was going.

I parked my car in one of the visitor spaces and looked up at the balcony that contained his door. I was gathering my courage and still trying to figure out how to get it all out in an order that made sense. Would I tell him first how I felt about him, and then present the fact that I was pregnant? Or should I lead with the big news? Maybe this seems incredibly obvious to you, but even now, five years later, I don’t really know the answer. Either way, it felt like an ambush.

As I hesitated, the door to Jack’s apartment opened and someone stepped out. It was a woman. I didn’t recognize her. She had shoulder-length glossy blond hair and wore a short, emerald-green A-line dress. She was made up in a showy but not cheap way, and she was carrying something in one hand.

I observed all these details dispassionately, one at a time, just the way I’ve reported them.

Despite the glossiness of her hair, a bit of it had gone askew and was clinging, staticky, to her cheek. The makeup under one eye bore a smudge.

The item in her hand was her high-heeled sandals. And something else.

She came down the steps along the side of the building and crossed not too far from to my car. Close enough that I could see what the other thing was that she held in her hand.

It was her bra, balled up but not fully contained by her fist. I could see one strap with its unmistakable metal slides, and a bit of emerald lace.

My breath stopped for a moment. I think my heart might have paused, as if it, too, were waiting to see what would happen next. And then the world and all the implications of what I’d just seen rushed in like water into a collapsing levee, and I almost choked on it.

I took a breath—shallow but sufficient—and shored up the levee with all the emotional sandbags I had at my disposal.

Then I started my car and pulled out of my parking spot.