‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
I took the champagne bottle from his hands and set it on the table beside the glasses. Sidling up to him, I wove my fingers between his. I needed to be close to him as I told him. This moment would last forever, we’d recount it to our son or daughter someday – I was pretty certain it was a girl – and I wanted it to be perfect.
‘Us.’
I held out the pregnancy test for him to take. But he didn’t. Instead he just went still, gawking at it, looking anything but happy.
‘What is that?’
‘It’s a pregnancy test, Ben. I’m pregnant. We’re pregnant.’
Only now did he look at me, and it was with clenched-jaw anger. Only now did he take the plastic stick, and throw it against the crisp white wall.
‘How is this possible? You told me you were on the pill.’
I had told him that, hadn’t I?
‘It’s not always one hundred percent effective. I guess this baby was really meant to be. Our little miracle.’
‘No.’ As if that word simply erased the baby’s existence.
He pushed me away from him. Not our little miracle, apparently.
‘You’re not happy,’ I stated the obvious.
He slammed his fist into the mattress, then rose from the bed, running his hand through his hair like he was trying to rip it out.
‘Of course I’m not happy. I’m married, Candace. How the hell am I supposed to tell my wife I’m expecting a baby with another woman? She’ll never forgive me.’
‘I thought you and I would get married and—’
‘You and I are nothing!’ he yelled over my voice, over my dreams, over our future together.
I felt the embarrassment of tears. How could I have made the same mistake twice, loving the wrong man, a man who didn’t love me back? How could I fall for a man who used me, tinkered with me until he broke me?
Ben stomped across the blue carpet, blue like the water I wanted to drown myself in. I slid off the bed and threw on my clothes while Ben fumed back and forth. When he paced himself out, he spoke, as if he had come up with a logical solution.
‘You have to get rid of it. There’s no other choice. I’m not raising a baby with you, and I’m not leaving Harper. I don’t know how you could be so irresponsible.’
As if I impregnated myself. As if he had no part in it. He turned to me, glaring with such hatred that I felt it seep into my pores.
‘I’m not getting rid of my child, Ben. You’ll just have to come clean to Harper and tell her what happened.’ I grabbed my purse from the red nightstand, knocking over the champagne flutes, and headed toward the door. ‘Or I will.’
His hand reached out, jarring me backward. Flinging me around to face him, he leaned toward me, his face inches from mine. ‘This is your one warning, Candace. Fix this problem, or I will.’
The fingers pinching my muscles tightened until I yelped. ‘You’re hurting me!’ I whipped my arm away, finding five oval bruises where his fingers had been. Ben wasn’t the knight I had thought he was. He was another Noah.
Chapter 36
Candace
The words exchanged at the hotel room cut me badly. But the letter Ben tucked under my windshield wiper later that night ripped my heart out.
I had given him time to reconsider as I drove home from the hotel and spent the next hour weeping in solitude. Flipping through the countless letters Ben had written me over the months, I re-read his poetic professions of love, hating how he had entrapped me with his words:
There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.
When you want to hide from the world, hide in me.
To my beautiful Candace, whose name means ‘clarity.’
You’ve given my life clarity and purpose: to bring you joy.
I wake up to exist for you. I open my eyes to see you. I breathe to inhale you. You are my reason for each moment.
You once told me that you felt broken beyond repair. Let me mend you. Let me make you whole again.
And so many more, all garbage. All lies. All ammunition for the hatred burning inside me, begging me to end the pain, end the rejection. Except I was tired of being the victim and just taking it. Driven by a fury and desperation I had never felt so strong before now, every cell of my body demanded justice.
Resting my hand on my stomach, I refused to lose a baby again. I had fought far too long for a child, and no fickle, selfish prick was going to take it away from me. I had brooded enough over Ben’s dismissal of me. I wasn’t some rag he could toss in the garbage, and his unborn baby wasn’t some mere inconvenience he could ignore. Maybe if I said the right thing I could win him back. So I texted him, but his curt replies only scratched at the wound.
We need to talk, I texted. I couldn’t let Ben end things. I needed to fight for him.
There’s nothing left to say, he replied.
You can’t walk away. We’re having a baby together, whether you like it or not.
You can’t prove that. And if you try to tell Harper about it, I’ll take the baby and you’ll be left with nothing. No court would give a child to a single, broke psycho, but an upstanding family man with the means to give the child everything … I always win, Candace.
And then poof! That was it. He ghosted me. For the next couple hours he ignored my texts and calls, and with the lengthening silence my anger swallowed me deeper inside of it. He was under the false assumption I would tuck my tail between my legs, admit defeat, and walk away. Boy, did he have a thing or two to learn about me. I’d been a doormat before,
