Her tears stung, salt on a wound that had never healed quite right. That she knew now never would. But she made herself say the words she’d never said aloud before.
“I was pregnant.” The words hollowed out her chest, like someone had dug her heart out with a spoon, leaving her raw and scraped up.
Wes shook his head, like his body couldn’t process what his mind had already pieced together. “When you shoved that goddamn ticket to Connecticut in my face and told me that if I really loved you, I’d drop everything to go with you? You were pregnant?”
“Yes.”
He staggered, like the word was a blow.
“You didn’t tell me.” He shoved his hands in his hair, looking helpless for a second, before anger flashed in his eyes. “How could you not tell me?”
“Because I was terrified!” The words came out with more force than she’d intended. “More scared than I’d ever been in my whole life. You’d been so distant, so focused on Soteria.”
She couldn’t hold back all the old feelings. “I needed you, Wes! I needed you to want me. To want to be with me. Not because I was pregnant, but because I was important to you. More important than all those investor dinners Jesse kept dragging you to. More important than your business plan and your goddamn computer.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now? You think that’s a good enough reason?” He stepped back from her.
It wasn’t. She knew it. She’d known it then. While they’d fought. While they’d had sex. While she’d boarded the goddamn plane.
“I meant to tell you. After I left, I spent weeks trying to figure out the best way to tell you.”
Wes sneered at the flimsiness of her defense. He stepped back again. “Oh, you meant to tell me. You meant to fucking tell me that we had a baby.”
She shook her head, and her throat constricted at the prospect of telling him now. “There was no baby.”
The anger had been a good distraction, but now the overwhelming sadness was back. Tears dripped down her face.
“I’d made an appointment for a ten-week ultrasound to find out the sex.”
An appointment she’d had to cancel. For a baby that would never be.
“I thought that’s how I’d tell you, because you’d want to know. I practiced it so many times. ‘Wes, I’m pregnant. It’s a girl,’ or, ‘It’s a boy.’ But three days before, I woke up and everything hurt so badly. I remember calling 911. Then I passed out.”
Vivienne stared at the ring on her left hand as she twisted her fingers in her lap.
“When I woke up from surgery, I asked about our baby. I swear to you, it was the first thing I asked. But the doctor explained that I was in the hospital because I’d had an ectopic pregnancy and my fallopian tube had burst.”
She forced herself to meet Wes’s eyes, even though he was blurry through her tears.
“It was all for nothing.” The words clawed at her throat. “Our whole lives changed and there wasn’t even a baby.” Breathe, she reminded herself. “There wasn’t even the chance of a baby. And so I told myself it was better if you didn’t know, because when I asked you to come with me, you turned me down.”
The stricken look on Wes’s face hurt her all the way to her bones, and she hopped down from the counter at the sudden need to go to him. To erase the distance that had sprung up between them. But when she would have reached for him, he stepped back from her, did up his jeans.
“I need to get out of here.” He stalked toward the door, grabbing the hooded sweatshirt from the coat rack and shoving bare feet into his sneakers.
Vivienne watched as the man she loved walked out the door, flinched as it banged shut behind him.
Her greatest fear made manifest. Again.
Everyone who’d ever mattered to her left her when she needed them most. Her mother. Her father. Wes.
She’d known they were destined for this. It was why she’d fought her feelings so desperately. Because if she and Wes were meant to be, it would have worked out the first time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PREGNANT.
When she’d first said the word, it was like someone had shoved a spike through his skull. Disorientation. Nausea. Agony. He couldn’t get his brain to focus.
Now, after an hour of walking aimlessly down the street in the middle of the night, he was just numb.
He couldn’t feel anything anymore.
Wes jammed his hands deep in the pockets of his hoodie.
Pregnant. But not pregnant.
Wes walked faster, hoping motion would help dissipate some of the toxic emotional cocktail that was swirling in his gut. He was trying so goddamn hard to hold on to the anger, but other stuff kept getting in the way. Especially after he pulled his phone out of his pocket and googled ectopic pregnancy.
Vivienne had never been totally sold on the idea of having children. She’d told him that once, a few weeks into their relationship when she’d asked him if he wanted kids and he’d said yes. One day.
She hadn’t quite been able to squelch the fear in her eyes.
“I’m not sure if I do,” she’d confessed. She was worried that she wouldn’t be a good mom because no one had taught her. Cancer had stolen her own mother before she’d had a chance to learn anything.
The memory chilled him.
Vivienne had been knocked up and terrified, and instead of turning to Wes, she’d fled across the country alone.
It broke his fucking heart to think he was the greater of two evils for her in that moment. A moment when he should have been there for her.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Burst fallopian tubes, according to what he’d read, could be life-threatening.
She’d almost died and he hadn’t even known. How could he not have known something like that?
Jesus. No wonder she’d left him.
At the time, her sudden announcement that she was going to Yale instead of Stanford,
