Tiffany, and the young girl followed her into the living room.
“Do you know if they’re going to be girls or boys?”
“What?”
“The babies.”
“Not yet.”
Her gaze lowered to Adele’s stomach. “You don’t look pregnant.”
“I’m not very far along.”
She looked back up. “When are the babies due?”
“August.”
Her eyes rounded and she pointed to herself. “My birthday’s in August.”
Adele smiled at the irony.
“My daddy said you won’t marry him.” Tiffany folded her arms across her chest. “Why?”
She really didn’t know how to explain it to a thirteen-year-old. So she said simply, “Because he doesn’t love me.”
“Maybe he will.” Tiffany shrugged. “Someday. You should think about it.”
Adele wasn’t going to wait for someday. She tilted her head to one side. “I thought you didn’t like me.”
“Things are different now.”
Which was a huge understatement.
“Where’s Kendra?”
“She and Sherilyn are bringing the baby home.”
“Gosh. Today?”
Adele heard the car pull into the driveway. “Right now.” A few minutes later they were all crowded in the baby’s room watching him sleep in the cradle Zach had put together. Adele was the first to leave the room. She returned to her spot on the sofa and closed her eyes. She was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep for a year or two.
She wanted to go home.
Chapter 18
“You’re what?” Lucy Rothschild-McIntyre sat up straight in her chair, a piece of chocolate torte suspended on the fork tines in front of her face.
Clare Vaughan stared across the kitchen table at Adele, her eyes wide as Maddie Jones set down her glass of wine and lifted a brow. “Are you shitting me?” Maddie asked.
Adele shook her head. Her three closest friends sat at her kitchen table in her home in Boise, feasting on Lucy’s torte. She’d been home a day and a half, and her friends had come over to cook dinner together and catch up. Adele had waited until dessert to drop her bombshell.
“Nope,” Adele answered, and took a bite of cake. “Not shitting you. I’m pregnant.”
“And you waited until now to tell us.”
Adele shrugged. “I knew that’s all we’d talk about, and I wanted to know what y’all have been up to first.”
One corner of Maddie’s lips rose. “Y’all?”
“How far along are you?” Clare asked.
“Eight weeks now.” Two months. The nausea hadn’t let up, and her breasts were sore. She could practically feel them getting bigger, pushing against the restraint of her C cups.
The three friends all glanced at each other, and Maddie asked, “Who’s the daddy?”
“His name is Zach Zemaitis.” The sound of his name on her lips brought back memories of him and made her heart stutter. Distance had not put a dent in healing her heart.
A frown wrinkled Lucy’s brow. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“He used to play professional football.” She remembered the day in his office when she’d read about his skilled hands. She took another bite and said around a mouthful of torte, “He played for Denver.”
The wrinkle in Lucy’s brow smoothed. “That Zach Zemaitis?”
“The quarterback?” Maddie once again reached for her wine. “He’s huge.”
“Yep.” Lord, cake hadn’t tasted so good since she’d dated stoner Doug back in college, and she tried to concentrate on that rather than Zach and how much she missed him. Just like the first time she’d been with Zach, their time together had been hot and intense and brief, and he’d left her shattered.
“I don’t watch football.” Clare shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t know who he is. How did you meet him?”
“I met him years ago at UT,” she answered, then filled them in on the past. She told them that Zach was the first guy she’d had sex with and she told them about Devon. “Now he lives in Cedar Creek with his daughter,” she finished. She took a drink of her decaf coffee and wondered what he was doing. If he even knew that she’d left two days ago. She’d left without telling him. Not out of hurt or spite, but because he’d want to know when she’d be back, and she didn’t know the answer to that herself. Or maybe he wouldn’t want to know. Maybe he didn’t even care. He hadn’t called, so her guess would be that he didn’t care. He was probably out celebrating her refusal to marry him.
“I guess it’s too late for my safe-sex lecture,” Maddie said.
“We used two forms of birth control.” Or at least she’d thought she had birth control.
“What’s he do now?” Clare wanted to know.
“He coaches high-school football,” she said, and recalled the way he pushed and pulled at his hat as he stood on the sidelines. Her chest ached, but she wouldn’t cry. Not now. Her friends were here. She didn’t want the sadness to swamp her like an incoming tide. Not yet.
“What does he think about the baby?”
Adele held up two fingers. “I’m having twins.”
“What?”
“No!”
“Yep. Twins, and Zach believes I got pregnant on purpose to trap him into marriage.”
“Jerk.”
“Ass.”
Clare reached for Adele’s hand. “You would never do that. If he thinks so, then he is unworthy of you.”
Adele smiled and squeezed Clare’s fingers. “Thank you.”
“What are your plans?” Lucy asked.
Adele shrugged and lifted her gaze to the dark windows above Lucy’s head. Outside, fat snowflakes floated toward the ground and blanketed the earth in virgin white. It was the first weekend in January. New Year. New snow. New life.
“You know we’ll help you in any way that we can.” Lucy spoke for all of them.
“I know.” She looked at her friends who were so important to her. The four of them were as close as family. They’d been through a lot together and shared their writing and heartache and joy. She loved them like they were her family, but a big chunk of her heart, her life, wasn’t here anymore. It was more than a thousand miles away. With Sheri and Kendra and Harris. And Zach. She wouldn’t raise two children so far away from their father. It wouldn’t be fair to them. Zach might be fine with having his children live several states from him. That’s how he’d raised Tiffany until three years ago, but it wasn’t okay with Adele. She hadn’t gotten pregnant by herself, and she wasn’t going to raise these babies by herself. Once the babies were born, she and Zach would have to work out custody. She couldn’t ask him to uproot and move from Texas. That wasn’t fair to Tiffany. Adele would have to move home, and the thought of leaving her friends added another heavy layer to her sadness.
“How do you feel?” Lucy asked. “You look tired.”
“I am tired. I sleep a lot, and I wake up tired. On the plane here, I read
