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That’s what she’d been thinking as she saw the tiny image that Molly carried. She wanted that baby and she wanted her first one. She wanted her babies.
And she felt set apart from both of them. Some of that was her own doing. She was deliberately keeping herself from Libby’s life. She told herself it was for the girl’s well-being, but it was also because she wasn’t ready to untangle her feelings over giving birth and relinquishing Libby to adoption. She sure as heck wasn’t ready to articulate any of that to Rafael.
“Maybe you should check in with the counselor once we’re home,” Rafael suggested.
“I’m sure she’ll say this is normal,” she dismissed.
He snorted.
“Normal for people in our situation.” Was it, though? She felt as though she was walking farther and farther onto ice that was beginning to crack. The shards would shred her on the way through before frigid waters closed over her, suffocating her completely.
She stood at the window looking out, not wanting Rafael to see how fragile she was. How close to her breaking point.
“Now that the scan had confirmed everything is fine, Molly said she’ll put in her request for leave. She’s not showing yet so she thinks she’ll stick it out another four to six weeks.”
“Is that what you talked about when you were locked in the toilet with her for thirty minutes?”
“Oh, my God, Rafael! Do you really want to know what I said?” She flung around to face him, feeling persecuted. “I told her that as grateful as I am, I resent her, too, because this has come so easily to her. I’m the one who should be carrying our baby.” She stabbed at her own chest.
He sucked in a breath and his head went back.
Molly hadn’t been shocked by her words, probably because the counselor had warned them both that Sasha might feel this way. Sasha had apologized even as she said it and Molly hadn’t taken any of it to heart. They had hugged it out while Sasha spilled out all her worries about becoming a mother. Her fear of being a bad one.
“When we married, you said you would need an heir. I’m trying to give you one.” Jagged sensation tore up her voice. “I can’t help that this has been hard for me.”
“I know it has.” His expression flexed with torture. He lifted his hand to rub the anguish off his face. “If I had known—”
“Don’t,” she warned coldly. “Don’t say you wouldn’t have come this far because I want that baby. But I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want my wife back,” he said with blistering frustration. “This...” He waved at her from eyebrows to open-toed pumps. “I don’t know who this is. You’re becoming a stranger.”
She choked on a humorless laugh, turning her face to the window again because this person was closer to the real her than the woman he’d been living with for the last three years. Sasha was broken and messy and tired of making the best of the choices she’d made, but she didn’t know how to make new ones. Not without losing the pieces of this life that she valued. Like him.
She couldn’t tell him that, though, could she? Not if he was already frustrated that she wasn’t the superficial socialite he’d married. Did he really want her to be that and only that?
Despair thickened her tone as she said wearily, “I don’t know you, either, Rafael.”
“How is that possible? I’m exactly the man I was when we married. Only richer,” he said pithily.
“Exactly. I don’t know anything more today than I did three years ago.” She rounded on him again. “I know your parents’ names and where the marina was located. I know you once got arrested for breaking into it, but what happened after that? Who bailed you out? Why do you have a scar under your chin that is so thin and straight that it looks like it came from a knife? Hmm?”
His expression shuttered, exactly the way it always did if she brought up something he preferred to pass off as “nothing worth talking about.”
“I know the deal with Gio will put you into the Nine Zeroes club, but all you talk about is how quickly you might double it. Why isn’t one billion enough? Why does it have to be two? You say you want this baby, but why? So you can task them with all this work that makes you so short-tempered?”
“I’m not short-tempered,” he bit out.
“We promised never to lie to each other,” she shot back.
“Fine. I’m not short-tempered about work. It’s this.” He pointed at her. “You fell apart in the doctor’s office, but won’t tell me why. Is that really all you talked about? You needed thirty minutes to tell Molly you have complicated feelings about her carrying our baby? Why the hell are you so reluctant to tell me?” The last came out like the dying breath of a dragon.
“Because you don’t want to hear it! You sure as hell don’t want to give me the same courtesy. Did you hear yourself just now? I asked you a half dozen questions and you turned it around on me, not answering a single one of them.”
“My mother bailed me out,” he muttered as though it was obvious. “And you want money as much as I do.” He turned away to pour a drink at the sideboard.
“No. I want my money. I don’t want to let someone take what belongs to me. That’s different from wanting to collect it and hoard it and use it to take over the world. Why are you so determined to do that?”
He stood very still. She could only see his profile, but she saw his cheek tick. Otherwise, he was like a statue. He blinked and finished pouring.
