Tragic

by Devney Perry

  “Oh, really.” She frowned. “And what did he have to say?”

  “Ugh.” Why had I even opened that email in the first place? “The subject line was CONFESSION. That should have warned me away.”

  Instead, his shouty caps had enticed me to read the message that should have been sent straight to the trash.

  “First, he scolded me for blocking his number. Then, he scolded me for not returning the messages he’d left from other numbers. After that, he went on and on for five paragraphs, telling me that the fertility news hit him hard. He blames his lies on shock. And once he started that lie, he didn’t know how to unravel it.”

  “Was there an apology in there somewhere?”

  “He admits that how he reacted was wrong. But he asked me to look at it from his point of view. We’d been under the assumption that I was the reason we couldn’t have a baby. He knew how badly I wanted to get pregnant. So the news that he had the problems and he couldn’t give me a child was devastating. He realizes he should have talked it through with me, but instead, he made some stupid mistakes.”

  Thea scoffed. “Putting your dick inside a woman who is not your wife a week after lying to her about fertility test results would definitely qualify as a mistake.”

  “But according to him, totally justifiable,” I deadpanned.

  The rest of his email was another plea for me to reconcile. He had yet to grasp that his mistakes were unforgivable. As much as I’d wanted to respond, reinforcing that we’d never be together again, I’d simply moved the email to the trash.

  Silence would speak louder than a reply.

  I’d considered blocking him but just hadn’t been able to click that button. Why, I wasn’t sure. Maybe because he’d been in my life so long, and though I was furious at him, blocking him felt too . . . extreme.

  “After a while, he’ll move on,” Thea reassured me.

  “I hope so.” I shrugged. “I loved him for a long time, and even though he hurt me, I still want the best for him.”

  “You’re a better person than I am. I kind of want him to get a receding hairline and beer belly.”

  A fate akin to death for Adam. His vanity had grown throughout our marriage in steady increments. Something I’d noticed, but like a lot of things, I’d adjusted to. Now I saw that he was more worried about being handsome on the outside than making sure he was beautiful on the inside.

  “Anyway, enough of him.” I waved that conversation away and picked up the book of baby names I’d left in here. “I think I’ve got boy names already picked. But I’m struggling with girl names. Feel like helping me make a list of possibilities?”

  “I’d love to.”

  The two of us retreated to the living room, where we settled into my cozy furniture. I went through the baby book, reading off names I liked while Thea kept track in a notepad. Then the two of us ate lunch, gossiping about things in town, until she decided to head home and let me catch a nap.

  I stood on the front stoop, waving as she backed away from the house. It was strange to look outside and not see the Airstream or my Mini. Logan had come to collect their camper last week, and three days ago, my Mini had been supersized to the white Tahoe parked in my garage. With two babies on the way, I needed space and four-wheel drive for the winter roads.

  I went inside, deciding to spend time in the office before I lazed on the couch for my Saturday afternoon nap. With Logan leaving for New York, I wanted to double-check all of the meeting materials and items for his trip were ready to go.

  Hours later, I’d missed my nap and had eaten my favorite summer pasta dish for dinner at my desk. I’d found spelling errors in three of the presentations, so I’d gone through the entire week’s worth of slide decks to check for more.

  I was halfway through a small stack of Oreo cookies when the doorbell rang.

  Smiling to myself, I hurried for the door. Mom’s daily delivery of baby items was coming in late today. Normally, my packages came about six in the evening, including Saturdays. John, my deliveryman, stopped here last on his way home to his wife and three kids. But I guess he had more packages than normal today.

  “Hi, Joh—”

  It wasn’t John on my doorstep.

  It was Kaine.

  “Hi,” he rumbled.

  My jaw dropped.

  In nineteen days, Kaine had changed. He’d trimmed his beard shorter than I’d ever seen before. His hair, which I loved to comb my hands through at night, was shorter too and brushed away from his forehead. And for the first time ever, he was wearing something other than a T-shirt.

  His navy, button-down shirt went all the way to his wrists. He’d tucked the hem into jeans and was wearing a leather belt. Its brown color matched his polished boots.

  His image was so different, he could be an imposter if not for the same colorful swirl in his eyes I’d memorized months ago. Still, it took me a good minute before I clamped my mouth shut and crossed my arms over my chest.

  I was so angry at him for leaving, and our argument in the shop. But could I remember a single thing I wanted to say to him? No. The ass chewing I’d been practicing was gone. Poof. Vanished.

  All I really wanted to do was give Kaine a hug.

  What was that? Why did he always make me want to hug him? I closed my arms tighter across my chest because there would be no hugging until I got an explanation. And an apology.

  “I’m sorry.” His eyes pleaded for my forgiveness.

  Now I just needed the explanation.

  I opened the door wider, stepping to the side to let him in. He nodded, then crossed the threshold. His eyes raked over the room, taking note of the changes I’d made since he’d been here last.

  While he ran his fingertips across an end table by the couch, I had the perfect view of his backside. Why did he have to look so good? It made summoning my lecture even harder.

  “Place looks good.” He took a seat on the edge of the couch, his forearms resting on his knees.

  I shrugged, then went to the chair opposite him. I waited for him to speak first, but instead of giving me the explanation I was due, he slid the baby names book across the coffee table.

  As he stroked the cover, his shoulders rolled inward. His entire frame slumped deeper into the couch. “I have a confession to make.”

  Ironic word, that.

  It was also ironic that I seemed to have the propensity to fall in love with men who ran away from their problems. When things had gotten too hard in our marriage, Adam had run into the arms of another woman. Had Kaine done the same?

  My spine stiffened at the idea of him with someone else. It had crushed me to find out that Adam had cheated, but my heart had healed—quicker than I would have imagined.

  If Kaine had spent the last three weeks with someone else, I’d be destroyed.

  “Will you hear me out?” he asked, setting the baby name book aside.

  I waited a beat, then another, finally giving him a nod.

  His broad chest caved in with a deep sigh. “I said some awful things to you that I didn’t mean. It’s not an excuse, but I was scared and let my fears get the best of me. I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  “Thanks.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he just sat there looking at me with those vivid eyes.

  My eyes narrowed. If he thought that qualified as a confession, he was sorely mistaken. The air in the room grew tense and heavy. My lungs seemed to be working twice as hard, but I couldn’t take a deep breath. The rage I’d been nurturing bloomed inside my chest, flaring like a campfire doused with gasoline.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s your confession? You were scared?”

  He held up a hand. “I—”

  “No.” I shot off my chair. “I’m talking now.”

  Wisely, he dropped his hand and closed his mouth.

  “You don’t think I was scared?” I pointed to my chest as I began pacing between my vacated chair and the coffee table. “Do you
have any idea how big of a shock that was for me? Do you think it was easy for me to come into your shop and tell you I was pregnant when I was the one who had assured you we were safe? That was my mistake and that is on me. But your reaction? That’s on you.”

  He nodded. “You’re right.”

  “Damn right, I’m right. You disappeared for nineteen days. That’s almost three weeks! And you couldn’t even manage to pick up the phone and let me know.”

  “I didn’t take my phone. And I don’t have your number.”

  I stopped midstep, shooting him a glare that could level one of the hundred-year-old trees outside. “Not a good excuse.”

  “I should have called.” He held up his hands. “But I didn’t want to have this conversation over the phone. I’ve got—would you please sit down?”

  “Fine.” With a harrumph, I recrossed my arms and sank into the chair.

  “There’s a lot about my past I need to explain. I’m hoping when you hear me out, you’ll understand why I got scared. But—”

  “There’s always a but, isn’t there?” I huffed. Kaine had avoided his past over and over and over again. When was I going to learn that he didn’t trust me enough to confide in me?

  “But,” he said, his jaw ticking, “I’d like it if you weren’t seething when we had that conversation.”

  “That might take a while.”

  “I’ll let you cool off and come over later.” He stood from the couch. “Is that okay?”

  I nodded, letting him see himself out.

  The door closed behind him and I didn’t move. My heart was pounding, my pulse booming through every vein. I took a few deep inhales, calming myself down because getting this worked up couldn’t be good for the babies.

  When my shoulders finally relaxed, I stared at the place where Kaine had been sitting. Would he explain? Would I finally understand what haunted him so deeply?

  I guess we’ll see. When he came back from his cabin, I’d do my best to shove my anger and frustration aside and listen to his story. When he came back from his cabin—

  My stomach plummeted.

  “Oh, shit!” I leaped out of my chair, racing across the room. I reached the door just as a very large, very male, very angry fist pounded on it from the other side.

  I opened it, this time expecting Kaine’s face.

  He had his own fury going. “What the fuck happened to my house?”

  “Yeah, about that.” I winced. “I kind of, um, accidentally . . . set it on fire.”

  “Let me get this straight. The morning after I left, you came over to my house and saw I was gone. So you went to the shop, locked it up for me, then came home. You waited a week for me to come back, and when I didn’t, you came back to the cabin. And cleaned?”

  Standing on the other side of the island in her kitchen, Piper shrugged. “It was dirty. And I was mad at you.”

  “So you cleaned and did my laundry?”

  Her cheeks got red as she muttered, “Tried to do your laundry.”

  “Even though you were mad at me.”

  “Yes, I was. Am,” she corrected quickly. “I decided to kill you with kindness, or whatever that saying is. And your garbage was starting to grow creatures. I didn’t want one of them to sneak over and smother me in my sleep.”

  This woman. She never stopped surprising me.

  While I was gone, she’d gone over to do her revenge cleaning. She unloaded my dishwasher, took out the garbage and found a load of laundry in my washer that had been sitting wet for a week. So she rewashed the clothes and put them in the dryer.

  Except she didn’t know that the sensor in my dryer was broken. She didn’t know that I wasn’t great about cleaning out the lint trap.

  Piper turned on the dryer, then came home, assuming it would stop on its own.

  It stopped all right. After catching fire.

  The fire destroyed my laundry room and about half of my living room. Luckily, she had her windows open, and when she smelled smoke, she called the fire department. They were able to save the house but there was a lot of work to be done to get it back to rights.

  “I guess this makes us even for the fight,” I teased.

  “Even?” she gaped. “No way.”

  “You set my house on fire.”

  She raised her chin. “You accused me of getting pregnant on purpose.”

  Fuck. “Okay. Not even.”

  Her shoulders fell. “I really am sorry about the fire.”

  “It’s only a house. I’m just glad you weren’t hurt.”

  If she hadn’t noticed the smoke, it could have started a forest fire. Something of that magnitude would have consumed both our homes. The idea of her and our baby trapped here in a blaze made my stomach churn.

  But she was okay. My house could be repaired. And to be honest, I wasn’t even that mad.

  “My contractor is just finishing up a job,” she said. “Then he promised to get his crew up here to fix it. He said it could be as soon as next week.”

  I nodded. “Sounds good. I’m sure the motel has a room open.”

  “Or you can stay here.” She said it so quietly, I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I am.”

  I rubbed my beard, looking outside at the fading evening light. It had been a damn long day, and the longest part was yet to come. I’d gotten up early, spent the morning finishing a couple of projects on Mom’s house. Then I’d showered, hugged her good-bye and hit the road. The five-hour trip from Bozeman to Lark Cove had been tense, mostly because I’d had no idea how I was going to explain everything to Piper.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “I went to see my mom.”

  “For three weeks?”

  I nodded. “I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in three years. We had a lot to talk about.”

  The last nineteen days had been filled with apologies and honest conversations. Mom knew all about what I’d been doing these last three years. I’d learned about her new job as the office manager at a law firm and the man she’d just started dating. We talked about everything, except for the one topic that we avoided completely. And as far as I was concerned, we’d never talk about him again.

  Piper didn’t know it, but she was the reason I’d reconnected with Mom. If not for this pregnancy, I don’t know if I ever would have returned home. I liked to think I would have pulled my head out of my ass eventually, but the truth was, it had become easier to hide out.

  But the day Piper had come to the shop and told me she was pregnant, everything had changed. It had taken me these last nineteen days to close the book on my former life.

  The friend I’d called to deal with my house had actually worked with Mom to get it rented. But boxes and boxes of my things had been shoved in storage, so I’d had to go through them all. Sorting through the nursery items had been the hardest. The clothes and old mementos had been easier, just time-consuming. The same was true with my old shop.

  I’d spent the last two and a half weeks selling some items, tossing others and donating the rest. On top of that, I’d met with the tenant in my house and worked out an agreement for them to purchase the place.

  Everything from my former life was being put to rest. Once I told Piper about the accident, I wanted to leave it behind for good.

  “Come sit down.” I retreated to the living room and took one end of the couch while she took the other.

  She tossed her knees up into the seat between us, and the lights above us cast a soft glow on her skin. Hardly an hour had passed over the last nineteen days when I hadn’t pictured her face. But my mental image hadn’t done her beauty justice.

  “You look beautiful,” I told her, earning a blush. “How are you doing? Feeling okay?”

  She nodded. “A little sick here and there, but nothing I can’t manage.”

  “Everything check out with the doctors?”

  “I’m good. The babies are good and should be arri
ving around March eleventh.”

  “March eleventh,” I repeated, penciling that date into my mental calendar. Unless we had an off winter, we’d be surrounded by snow. “The roads might still be icy then, but if we plan—wait. Back up a minute and say that again. The babies?”

  She raised a shoulder. “You have magic sperm.”

  Magic sperm. “How many babies are we talking about here?”

  Piper laughed, flashing me those dimples. “Just two.”

  “Just. Two.” My head fell back into the couch as it raced. Twins. We were having twins.

  It was hard enough to wrap my head around the idea of one kid, let alone two. But in seven months, we’d be parents. To twins.

  There were so many things to figure out by then, like where they’d sleep and which car seats to choose and if we’d be those parents who assigned each of their twins a color so we could tell them apart.

  Twins.

  “It kind of blows your mind, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  I made an explosion sound.

  Piper laughed again, shifting in her seat to reach for a blanket.

  I sat up straight, helping her cover her legs. She was in leggings that went to her ankles, the tight black material wrapping around her curves, much like the fitted gray T-shirt she was wearing. She didn’t look pregnant, but that was how Shannon had been too. She hadn’t looked pregnant until around the fifth month.

  “About four years ago, I met a woman in a bar. Her name was Shannon. We hit it off right away. One thing led to another, and I took her home. Neither of us wanted anything serious. We had our fun, then I drove her home the next morning. I figured I’d never see her again. She came back about six weeks later and told me she was pregnant.”

  Piper flinched and the sound of her gasp filled the room.

  “It was never meant to be something serious with Shannon, but plans change when you’re having a baby. Suddenly, this woman who I’d spent less than a day with was going to be in my life for good.”

  Just like it would be with Piper. The thought of having Piper in my life felt right, but things with Shannon had never really fit.