Page 38 of The Road Back to Us

I brushed my teeth and was rinsing my mouth when Cole walked in, knocking on the bathroom door that was still open.

“Hey, Kara said you’re not feeling well. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said with a sigh as I placed my hands over my stomach.

I watched his eyes as they drifted down, catching the motion.

Then I caught the look on his face, the smile that immediately floated across his lips before he forced it away because I was sick—not pregn—.

The blood drained from my face as I felt a new wave of nausea come over me. I looked away from him and stared at my stomach in the mirror. I could feel Cole watching me, but I couldn’t focus on it because my mind was going a mile a minute as I did the math as quickly as possible in my head.

“Lyric?”

I could hear the worry in his voice, but I ignored it because I was freaking out enough for both of us.

How long had it been since the night we had sex? Four weeks? Five weeks?

Shit. Why couldn’t I remember how long it had been? Days seemed to blur together, and now I was stuck, not able to recall how long it had been since I’d had unprotected sex with my husband.

“Lyric,” Cole repeated, his voice firmer as he stood beside me and placed a hand on my lower back.

I looked up, meeting his eyes in the mirror as the words sat on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t say them.

Seconds felt like hours as I watched Cole’s expressions change on his face as he went through the same thought process I had, finally coming to the same conclusion.

“You’re pregnant,” he said, his voice lacking any emotion.

Thirty-Four

Cole

My words echoed through the room as Lyric and I stared at each other in complete silence.

I could tell by the petrified look on her face that she had been thinking the same thing, but I wasn’t sure she had heard me say it. Lyric could get so far inside her own head that she was dead to the world.

“You’re preg—” I started before her eyes flashed with something that looked like a mixture of anger and fear, before she looked away.

“Shhhh,” she hissed, eyes narrowed as she looked at her stomach and removed her hands as if that would somehow make her un-pregnant.

I stepped away from her, giving her some space as I shoved my hands through my hair and let everything sink in.

Lyric was pregnant.

With my child.

Again.

And she was pissed off about it, which I guess I couldn’t blame her because out of all the things we hadn’t talked about, this was at the top of the list. We had just barely scraped the surface the other night when she revealed how she had felt when she left for New York. It felt cruel to bring anything else up while we still needed to work on fixing the things we could—if they were even fixable.

Our past was as complicated as our current predicament because, whether she wanted to believe it or not, I knew Lyric was pregnant. Over the years, I got to know Lyric so well that I often knew her body better than she did. I could tell when a migraine was coming or when she was going to start her period. I also knew every single time she was pregnant. It got to the point where we would joke about not needing to buy pregnancy tests because I was a human pregnancy detector. But that joke died out quickly when every pregnancy terminated before we could get our hopes up that we might get lucky and that one would stick.

“Are you okay?” I asked, my voice soft and gentle as I tried to keep myself calm.

I knew the fear that was consuming her at the thought of trying to carry another child because that same fear was creeping its way up my ribcage and scraping its claws at my heart.

“How can I be okay?” she whispered, shaking her head in disbelief. “We both know what will happen if I take a test and it’s positive.”

I bit my tongue to keep from responding because she didn’t need me to talk her through this right now. She needed to feel whatever she needed to feel before she would be able to think straight. There was no point in trying to assure her that this might be the one that sticks, because I knew how great the risk was, given all the losses we had suffered over the years. Lyric had been through so much, and I couldn’t stand the thought of her going through that turmoil again if this one didn’t have a happy ending.