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“I…” I swallow hard and try again. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
Then I make the extremely stupid mistake of looking right at him. Those deep gray eyes hold hues of blue and hazel under the soft warm lights. I can hear the loyal sister in me yelling, Mayday, mayday! Look away, you horny bitch!
But another part of me is pushing me toward a fresh start. Toward the possibility of a happy future. My vagina is inclined to agree.
“Wren.” Dmitri’s eyes are locked on me as intensely as mine are on him. All it would take is for one of us to lean in and that’d be that. Game over. Lights out. “I have something important to tell you.”
I gulp. “Okay…?”
His face looks as murderous as I’ve ever seen it as he leans ninety-nine percent of the way into kissing me and says, “If you tell anyone about my Pinterest page… I’ll kill you.”
Both of us burst out laughing at the same time. We laugh until our cheeks hurt, until our sides burn, until the good kinds of tears pour down our faces—well, my face, not his.
Dmitri and I are not meant to be—I know that. Our pasts conspired against us long before we’d even met. There’s no hope for a happy ending here. Maybe our son is the only happy ending we can ever hope to have.
But maybe, just maybe…
That’ll be enough.
14
WREN
I haven’t been able to go into the nursery yet.
I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the pressure of impending motherhood. Maybe it’s the dozens of little decisions I’m going to have to make with my unreachable, unknowable baby daddy. Maybe it’s the initials-carved swing that feels like a looking glass into my past.
So instead, I lie in bed, half-asleep, trying to remember things that I’d clearly missed when Rose and Jared were alive. It’s odd, the moments that your memory pulls up when you force it to remember. Hard to decipher what’s real and what’s just a scrap of a dream.
My eyes flicker open, just long enough to see that I’m in my bedroom with the blinds drawn. Light is creeping into the room from behind the curtains but it’s the silver glow of moonlight. Subtle and non-invasive. Which means sleep has abandoned me halfway through the night once again.
I sigh and let my head loll back on the pillow.
I remember that Rose’s last miscarriage was a bad one. I remember that in particular because it was the first time that Jared seemed to take the loss as badly as Rose. He stopped eating. He stopped smiling. There were nights he didn’t come home.
I went over to Rose’s place, a few days after she told me she’d miscarried again. She wasn’t expecting me and I had the feeling when she opened the door that she was disappointed to see me.
“Everything okay?”
Anger flickered across her eyes. “I just lost another child. So, no. Not great.”
I flinched back. “Shit, Rose. That’s obviously not what I meant.”
She sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. I’m being a bitch.”
“You’re allowed. Be as bitchy as you want. I can take it.” The fact that she still hadn’t let me into the apartment made my hands itch. I felt awkward and out of place, fidgeting on her doorstep.
“I just thought you were Jared,” she explained.
“He’s not home yet?”
She looked away from me and gestured me into the apartment. “He might have to cover extra shifts for Gavin. Probably won’t get home ‘til late.” She sounded nervous, uncertain. I just figured it was because she didn’t want to be alone.
“I can spend the night with you,” I offered.
She’d never turned me down so quickly or so bluntly. “No thanks. I’d rather be alone.”
It was an odd reaction. Even in our darkest moments, even in our saddest, neither one of us ever chose to be alone when we could be with each other. But that could be explained, right? I justified her brusqueness as extreme grief. I’d been hoping, even then, that she’d finally decided to give up. To let it go, because the price was obviously too damn high.
