CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Not too long now,” Michael said. “A few more edits.”

Shannon drummed her fingernails against her kitchen table as she peered at the computer screen with Michael. “Colin’s such a loud mouth,” she said with a laugh.

“I know,” he said, taking a break from tapping away on her keyboard to pat her on the back. Michael had stopped by to help her finish editing a video she’d shot of rehearsals for the Edge show at her studio. The dance was almost perfect, but there was a section she wanted to review with her assistant choreographer. The problem was that Colin had stopped by during the rehearsal and had started talking her ear off about a new investment his firm was making.

“Ding dong,” she’d told him. “Now I’m going to have to edit out the audio.”

“Oh shit,” he’d said, covering his mouth.

“I’m assuming you don’t want to take a chance on anyone but me hearing about the new data storage company that has a ten times valuation of blah blah blah,” she’d said quietly, parroting him back as she held her phone to record the dancers.

“That’d be a no,” Colin had whispered, then mouthed a thank you as he zipped his lips shut and let Shannon finish shooting the video.

Michael was a whiz at editing video, so he’d stopped by to help her remove Colin’s audio. Which also meant now was as good a time as any to tell him what she was up to tonight. She hadn’t said a word to him last weekend at her grandmother’s house, but she didn’t know then that she’d actually be dating—seriously dating—her ex-fiancé. Now she was, and she didn’t like cloaking her life in lies around her brothers, especially Michael. They were as tight-knit as a clan could be, and that was because they’d protected each other and trusted each other through thick and thin.

She steeled herself for his reaction. Of all her brothers, Michael had been the biggest fan of Brent, and then turned the other way when Brent left her.

Best to rip off the Band-Aid.

Michael zoomed in on the software, pushing a flop of dark hair off his forehead as he worked. She cleared her throat. “I’m going out with Brent tonight,” she said before she could back out of her confession.

His fingers stopped moving. She didn’t see his eyes, just his forehead as he furrowed his brow. He raised his face, and rubbed his knuckle against his ear. “Pretty sure I just heard you wrong,” he said slowly. “Say that again.”

“I’m seeing Brent,” she said, straightening her spine, keeping her chin up.

“You’re dating him?” he said, as if she were speaking in tongues.

She nodded.

“I thought you were just doing business with his clubs,” he said, taking time with each word, as if he could restitch them into a pattern that made sense.

“I thought so, too. But then it turned into something more.”

“How? How did it turn into something more?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.

“We started spending time together again,” she said, keeping it PG.

“Why would you do that? You were pretty damn clear ten years ago you never wanted to see him again. You told all of us—me, Ryan, Colin. You made it abundantly clear he was persona non grata.”

“I didn’t want to see him then. But that was ten years ago, Michael. Things changed.”

“What changed?” he asked through gritted teeth. “I can’t imagine what could have changed in the last week or two that would erase what you went through.”

She bit her tongue. She didn’t want to serve up all her feelings for everyone to judge. It was hard enough to say them to Brent, let alone to her big brother. She didn’t feel she needed to defend her heart. Some things were personal. Some things were private. Like the fact that she was falling again for someone who was tender and kind, rough and fiery, funny and sexy, and who only had eyes for her.

Someone who was putting her first.

“He’s different. I am, too. That’s what has changed,” she said in a crisp voice.

Michael closed his eyes, gripped the side of the table, and breathed out hard. “I have no idea why you would want to do this. After everything that happened,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at her.

“Nothing that happened was his fault.”

Michael’s eyes widened. “If it wasn’t his fault, whose fucking fault was it?”

“Both of ours,” she said, holding her ground, even as something darkened inside her.

“Shan,” he said in a heated whisper, as if that was the only thing keeping him from shouting, and Michael Sloan never shouted. Michael Sloan never raised his voice. Michael Sloan stayed in control of his emotions at all times.

Except when it came to his sister. “I was with you in London. You were devastated,” he said, his eyes black and hard.

“Of course I was.”

“You were torn in pieces,” he said between gritted teeth.

She slammed a hand on the table. “I know! I fucking know. I was there. It was my body. Goddammit, Michael. I’m sorry you don’t like him, but I’m seeing him again and I care about him. And I’m not asking for your approval. I’m simply telling you because I don’t like to keep secrets from you. So if you could just chill out, that would be great.” She pushed back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping against her wood floor in a shrill shriek. The sound jolted her brother.

“Shan,” he said gently.

She held up a hand. Don’t come closer. Not now. “I need to get changed,” she said, and tipped her forehead to her bathroom. She wasn’t ready for him to say he was sorry for getting mad.

“I’ll be done soon,” he said, in a gentler tone.

She shut the door to her bedroom, headed to her bathroom, and stripped off her clothes as she turned on the shower. As she stepped under the hot stream, the water pelting her, she closed her eyes, returning to ten years ago.

* * *

Brent had been gone for a few weeks, and she was six days late. She’d hoped and prayed and bargained and bartered with the universe that she was simply that—late. Women all over the world were late, and it didn’t mean they’d been stupid. It didn’t mean the pill hadn’t worked. It only meant they were late, but that red was coming.

Right?

Right, she told her freaked-out brain.

While they’d stopped using condoms a long time ago, she was on the pill. She’d switched prescriptions, though, since the one she was on had been giving her headaches. They’d used condoms during that time, but something must have gone wrong. Hell if she knew when the little bastard sperm had breached her body.

She pressed a hand to her belly, alone in her tiny Brooklyn bathroom in a room she rented for one month from an older couple, fingers crossed behind her back, trying to remember if a condom had broken during those times they’d relied on them. But when the two pink lines appeared, churning her stomach and stabbing holes in her future, it didn’t really matter if she could recall the moment when the protection failed.

Her body had spoken, changing her life yet again.

Twenty-one, pregnant, and alone in her first job out of college. With the father of the baby on the other side of the country and out of the picture. Without a clue what to do, how to feel, what to think.

She sank down onto the toilet seat, dropped her head in her hands, and asked the universe for a redo. She waited for the tears to roll from her eyes, to saturate her cheeks. But, strangely, they didn’t come. Maybe she’d used up her lifetime supply when her daddy had died. Maybe whatever droplets were left had been reserved for the re-opening of that wound with her mom’s letters.

She did what shocked women around the world have done for years when confronted with two pink lines: retraced her steps to the drug store, glanced furtively around in case she saw anyone she knew, and grabbed another test from the shelf. She bought it, ran home, then peed on the stick again.

Another pair of pink lines punished her with their clarity.

You’re knocked up, bitch, the twin lines seemed to say with a cruel sneer.

She sank to the floor of the cramped bathroom, parking her rear on the cold teal tiles. Options flickered before her eyes. But really, the choices were very few. Terminating a pregnancy wasn’t on the table. That wasn’t anything she’d ever do.

So it came down to this—keep the baby or give up the baby.

Keep. Give up. Keep. Give up.

Over the next month, Shannon swung back and forth by the day, by the hour. Depending on what she ate, or what she didn’t eat. What she wore. How hunched over the toilet she was at West Side Story rehearsals. How well she hid her morning sickness from her boss.

If there was one thing Shannon Paige-Prince knew how to do it was keep her own damn secrets.

She hid it so well that no one knew why she kept popping into the ladies room to yack up her morning toast. Mercifully, the morning sickness didn’t last long.

As she packed up her bags for London, ready to move with the cast and crew to open the show on the West End, she picked up her cell phone. She flipped it open, ran her thumb across the screen, and started to dial the most familiar string of numbers in the world to her. The ones she’d called during college, every night, every day. Her man’s number.

She didn’t know what to say. Or what to do. Maybe it was better that way. A call for help. Let him listen. Let him talk. Let her not have to make this decision alone.

She ran a hand over her belly, still terribly flat. She threw caution out the window and dialed his number. She didn’t wait long to hear a voice.

“This cell service has been disconnected,” a recording said, tinny in her ear.

She tossed the dumb thing on the floor, and it clunked dully on her rug as she cursed her own stubbornness—she should have taken his calls those first few days. He was truly gone now. Off in Los Angeles, living his new life, with his new Los Angeles phone number that she didn’t know.

Or perhaps this was the sign that she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, so she flew to London, no one the wiser that she was stowing away an extra passenger in her belly. She saw a doctor twice. An ultrasound told her the baby was growing perfectly.

That made her sway closer to the keep side.

So damn close.

But then there was work, and her future, and those things seemed to tug her back to the give up side.

Work consumed her in London as the production began. Indecision swamped her nights and gripped her dreams. She and Brent had both wanted kids. They’d talked about having a family, but as a someday-down-the-road possibility. Knowing he’d wanted to though, eventually, was a heavy weight on her. Telling him would kill two birds with one stone—she’d have him back, and she’d have a decision. She could track down his number, call him, and tell him she was pregnant. If she did that she knew that they’d be together again.

He was too good, too upstanding, and too family-centric to ignore his duties.

He’d leave Late Night Antics in the blink of an eye, fly to London, and be by her side. As she rehearsed the cast through Officer Krupke on the new stage, her fingers itched to track him down again. She could drop this bomb on him, and he’d come running back to her. She desperately wanted him in her life again.

But as the dancers finished, she rewound to the day he’d shattered her heart. She clutched that memory in her hands, like a lifeline to her brain. Somehow, she had to connect her heart to her head. To find the wires, and reattach them properly, so her brain would receive the right message.

Keep the baby. Give up the baby.

One or the other.

She crossed the weeks off on her calendar, but she was no closer to a decision. Week sixteen. Week seventeen. Week eighteen. Week nineteen.

They came and they went. No one knew. She was barely showing. Even so, she snapped a photo of herself in the mirror, as if the reflection could confirm the small curve in her belly.

Michael had an assignment in Europe for a few weeks, and she vowed to decide when he arrived in London to visit her for a couple days. She’d lay it all out for him. Ask for his help. He’d always been her rock. Her guidepost.

They went to dinner at a pub after the theater, and she told him everything, then asked him what to do.

His answer was swift and immediate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and locked eyes with Shannon. “Call the motherfucking bastard. Tell him he knocked you up. And tell him to get his fucking head out of his ass and take care of the mother of his baby and his child. Done,” Michael said crisply.

“Oh, that’s all?”

“Do it, Shan. Do it,” he urged.

“I don’t have his number. His cell service is disconnected.”

“He works on that late-night show, right?”

She nodded.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and a few phone calls later Michael was writing Brent’s new phone number on a cocktail napkin. “Here you go.”

She put the napkin in her purse. A weight eased off her. It slid to the dirty, hardwood floor of the pub as Michael knocked back a beer, and she nursed a soda. The decision had been made.

“Tomorrow,” she said with a nod, resolute. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since those two pink lines had the audacity to fuck with her life. All she’d wanted was a path. A roadmap. A decision. She had it now.

She woke up early the next morning needing to pee.

The bed was already wet.

Embarrassment washed over her, even though she was alone in her tiny studio apartment. She hadn’t wet her bed since she was a child. But when she stood up, it wasn’t her bladder that was gushing. It was the water in the baby’s sac. A rush of utter helplessness slammed into her, then she rang Michael at his hotel and asked him for help. He called a taxi for her, and told her they’d meet at the nearest hospital. He gave her the name of where to go.

Fear seized her as she buckled the seatbelt, as if that safety measure would somehow protect them both—mother and child. As the cabbie drove her to the foreign hospital—it didn’t matter that the doctors there spoke the same language, everything felt foreign—she did what she’d already intended to do that day.

Called Brent.

Her cell phone service routed her to a switchboard, and then sent the call through to Los Angeles. International calls were hard to make directly. Usually only the country codes appeared on the screens. She hoped the London code would tip him off to pick up the call. But he didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Then she remembered—it wasn’t even after midnight. It was the night before, and his show was on. He was working. Always working. The thing he’d loved more than her. His job.

She hung up.

The tears she’d held back the last few months were unleashed, like a lashing of the windows during a hurricane, like the punishing of a cold storm. Wild and ravaging streams of tears, matching the way her body was once again letting her down. She hated the way she’d lost the ability to dance because of a fluke injury in rehearsal. Hated the way she’d become pregnant when trying not to. And hated the way her body was expelling a baby she didn’t know she’d wanted, but would now do anything to keep safe inside her.

She reached the hospital a wet mess.

“Your water’s broken, love. There’s nothing we can do,” the nurse said, her warm British accent almost fooling Shannon into thinking everything was going to be all right. But nothing was all right. Not as she went into labor—did they even call it labor at twenty weeks? It was fast and furious, and it barely hurt her physically. But it tore apart her already-shattered heart an hour later as she delivered a baby boy. Less than one pound. His heart no longer beating. The nurse wrapped her son in a white hospital blanket and handed him to the mother who was no longer a mother.

Her.

That was her.

She was there, but somehow seeing it all through a lens, as if that lens was supposed to protect her from the pain. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Not even as she watched the scene play out. Not as she sobbed into the blanket, and cried over a life she hadn’t even been sure if she was keeping for her own. A life that had stopped sometime in the early morning when she woke up. Or on the cab ride to the hospital. Or on the hospital bed. The nurses and doctor didn’t know when the baby had slipped from the living, but it didn’t matter. Her water had broken prematurely for unknown reasons. The baby would never have survived. It didn’t matter when his tiny heart stopped working.

The only thing that mattered was that the decision had been taken out of her hands.

Michael walked into the room and sat with her as she said goodbye to the son she would never name and never know.