Mari

“Sweetheart, what are you doing here? I had no idea you were coming home.” My mother cups my face in her hands, welcoming me inside the foyer of our family’s home.

My shoulders tremble, and I try my hardest to keep myself together, but my legs are shaky and my eyelids heavy and I just want to lie in my childhood bed and forget about life for a while.

“You look like you’ve been crying.” She inspects my face. “What aren’t you telling me? Did something happen with Hudson?”

She pulls my left hand toward her, searching for my engagement ring.

“The bastard left you, didn’t he?” she asks, lips pressed flat.

I shake my head. “I left him.”

Her expression shifts, her mouth agape. “Why?”

“First he was a bastard. Now he’s wonderful?” I half-laugh, half give up.

“Come inside. I’ll have your father carry your bags upstairs when he gets home. I have to say, we’re thrilled you’re home, but I’m sorry you had to come home under these circumstances.” She leads me up the split foyer, toward the living room, and covers me with a knit blanket the second I spread out across the sofa.

I don’t move for a minute.

I simply breathe in the comforting cocktail of scents that make up this house. My mother’s pot roast in the slow cooker. Her favorite cotton-clean fabric softener. A black cherry candle flickering on the stove.

Across the room my mother rocks in her La-Z-Boy, worry lines sprouting across her forehead as she twirls a strand of gray-blonde hair around her finger. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. I know she’ll listen when I’m ready to talk.

Lying on my back with my hands folded over my stomach, I stare at the ceiling and take a deep breath.

“I’m pregnant,” I say, exhaling.

My mother stops rocking, stops twirling her hair.

“And it’s not Hudson’s. It’s this guy I met a couple months ago and it was a fling that meant absolutely nothing,” I continue. “But the guy happened to be a friend of Hudson’s because of course he was.”

I squeeze my eyes, this feels like the hardest confession of all if only because I’ve never lied to my parents before, not like this.

“And Hudson? He was my boss in New York,” I say. “The one I hated. The one who treated me like shit all the time.”

My mom still hasn’t said a word, still hasn’t moved. That’s never a good sign.

“He needed a fake fiancée,” I say. “And I said yes because he was going to pay me a lot of money. Like, a lot. And I knew I was pregnant. I knew I’d need a way to support myself and the baby. And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

I run my fingers through my hair before digging them into my scalp. It feels good to feel something other than dazed and disoriented. I left Montauk yesterday, cabbed it back to the city, slept on Isabelle’s couch for a night, then grabbed the first flight to Omaha the next day.

The last twenty-four hours has been a blur and a nightmare all rolled into one, and though I knew this day was inevitable in some ways, it still doesn’t feel real.

“Anyway, I came clean to Hudson about the pregnancy,” I say. “And he was upset. Understandably. So I left. But as I was leaving, his mom said something to me that made me realize that he lied to me about something too. Something pretty major. So I guess you could say we’re even now. But we’re also over. And that’s that.” I look at her across the room. She’s biting her nail now. At least she moved. “And now I’m home … homeless and pregnant. Yay.”

She stares at me, hard.

“Mom, say something. You’re freaking me out.” I sit up, throwing the blanket off me because suddenly I’m hotter than a furnace.

“I … wow, Mari.” She sits up in her chair, clearly at a loss for words. “I don’t know what to say other than we’ll get through this. You’ve got us. Daddy and me. And we’ll make the best of this situation.”

She gets up, taking a seat beside me and placing her arm around my shoulders. I stare straight ahead, but I feel her looking at me. A moment later, she kisses the side of my head.

“Life has a way of forcing us to go exactly in the direction we’re supposed to go, even when we don’t want to,” she says. “You may not think so now, but someday you’ll look back and you’ll connect the dots and it’ll all have been worth it.”

The sliding glass door to the patio fills our quiet house.

“Mari, what are you doing home?” My father asks when he comes around the corner. He takes one look at me and silences his commentary.

With tear-filled eyes, I hold my wrist out, the one with the Cartier bracelet. “Think you have any tools that could get this stupid thing off me?”

“Damn right, I do.”