Little Secrets

by Megan Hart

  “A girl…with dark hair…like yours when you were small.”

  Ginny closed her eyes and whispered, “Baby, are you here?”

  But when she opened them, the room was still as empty as it had always been.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Have you seen my mug?”

  Sean didn’t even look up from his iPhone, where he was busy tapping away at some zombie game he’d become obsessed with. “No.”

  Ginny looked again into the cupboard. She ran her fingers along the collection of mugs. None of them matched, which had never bothered her before but suddenly irritated her. Their plates matched. Their silverware matched. Their glasses even matched, a full set of tumblers, drinking glasses and wineglasses in a pattern she’d picked out for their wedding registry and sometimes regretted because it had been the most expensive one. They’d had to spend a fortune to finish the set after getting only a few pieces, and the cost to replace any that broke was ridiculous.

  Ginny started pulling out the motley collection of freebies from banks and charities, lining them up on the counter until Sean finally bothered to look up and ask what she was doing. “I’m looking for my mug. I told you. Have you seen it?” A sudden uncharitable thought made her eyes narrow. “Did you take it to work and leave it there?”

  “No.”

  “Think hard.” She kept her tone as pleasant as she could, as nonconfrontational, but she couldn’t keep it entirely sweet. “Did you take my mug?”

  “I don’t even know which mug you’re talking about.” Sean stood. “I gotta run.”

  And run he tried, without bothering to put his dish in the dishwasher. Or even the sink, which would still have been an affront, but would’ve at least been something of an effort. Ginny stared at the plate, the fork still soaking in the mess of fried eggs and last bit of jelly toast he hadn’t eaten.

  She’d be damned if she cleaned it up. She’d cooked him that breakfast when the very smell of frying eggs still made her want to heave. She’d even spread that toast with jelly, grape, which she also loathed, because he’d been running late in the shower and she didn’t want him to have to rush. And now he not only got up without bothering to pretend he intended to clean up after himself, like any adult would, but to add another insult, he was ducking away from her inquiries about her mug.

  “Hey!” she cried, stopping him at the front door. The cold swirled in, but she didn’t care just then. The house was going to be too damned cold anyway. A few minutes of wintery air pummeling her hardly mattered. “My mug.”

  Sean sighed and turned. “Which one?”

  “The one with the pink skull and crossbones on it. The one my sister bought for my birthday.” She eyed him, still suspicious. “You know, the tall, skinny one?”

  She saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes. It made her frown. She liked that mug because her sister had picked it out for her on a weekend trip away a few years ago. They’d gone to a bed-and-breakfast and done some outlet shopping, eaten in nice restaurants that weren’t kid friendly. It had been the last time they’d done anything like that—life had gotten in the way. Ginny had spent her next birthday in the hospital, miscarrying.

  She liked it because it reminded her of good times. Sean liked it because the tapered bottom fit neatly into his cup holder. She’d bought him a travel mug, but he still took hers. He didn’t see the problem, after all. There were plenty of mugs for her to use, and of course her insistence that he leave “hers” alone made her out as some unreasonable shrew.

  “I didn’t leave it at work.”

  “Did you use it?” The accusation rang out, too loud, too harsh for this early in the morning and the enormity of the offense. Or lack of.

  His gaze skittered from hers. “I…if I did, I put it in the dishwasher. Look, I have to go. I’m going to be late.”

  “Fine. Go.” She flapped a hand at him, already turning to swallow her anger, to shove it down deep so it couldn’t come out in another outburst.

  “Maybe you left it somewhere,” he said from the doorway, but was gone before she could reply.

  Left it somewhere?

  It could’ve been a dig. At least, in the mood she was in, Ginny wanted to take it that way. It was true; she was more apt to be the one leaving her belongings strewn about. Her shoes, car keys, a sweater draped over the railing instead of hung in the closet. It was a flaw, she knew it, but because she knew how it irritated him to find her stuff all over the place, she’d been trying harder to make sure she was better about it.

  Because she listened to him, she thought bitterly as she yanked open the dishwasher. The mug wasn’t in there, and she wasn’t surprised. She hadn’t used the fucking thing. Yesterday she hadn’t made tea because even the decaf seemed to be wreaking havoc with her sleep. She’d been up every night for the past three. Counting backwards from one hundred did nothing. Neither did lavender on her pillow, though it did give her varied vivid and intriguing dreams during the few hours she did manage to sleep.

  Ginny closed the dishwasher and moved again to the cupboards to search them all in case someone had put it away in the wrong place. Nothing. Anger simmering, she drew in a slow breath and let it out, reminding herself to keep her blood pressure from rising. She could drink her herbal, decaf tea from a different mug. No big deal.

  Except that it was, and she wanted to cry when she filled another mug with hot water and let the tea bag steep. Even as she swiped her tears with the back of her hand, Ginny knew she was being ridiculous. But that was the deal with pregnancy and lack of sleep, wasn’t it? Emotions running high and close to the surface, ready to spill over.

  Tonight if she didn’t sleep she’d think about making an appointment with the doctor, she decided when she took her tea into the living room to look through the old issues of her magazine subscriptions that had finally caught up to the address change and arrived in bulk. She’d suffered this before. Not quite insomnia. She had no trouble getting to sleep when she went up to bed. Hell, there were some nights that if she hadn’t had to wait for Sean to get home from class so they could have dinner and spend some time together, she’d have put her pj’s on and hit the sheets by eight. No, her trouble wasn’t falling asleep, but staying asleep, then getting back to sleep once she woke up. Every night between midnight and 2:00 a.m. She told herself her body was preparing for the baby. It didn’t make the mornings come any later.

  In the living room, the slick pile of magazines slipped from her fingers and the tea scalded her when she tried to keep from dropping them. She stubbed her toe on a box that had been nudged out of place, even though she’d specifically shoved it up against the wall, hard, last night. Ginny let out a muttered curse and set her mug down on the end table that should’ve been an inch or so to the left but instead had also been shifted so the mug toppled to the floor and soaked the magazines. It didn’t break, at least there was that.

  “God damn it,” she said, then louder, “son of a bitch.”

  She yanked a roll of paper towels from the cupboard and got on her hands and knees to blot up the mess. Her magazines were salvageable. She could make more tea. But, damn it, Ginny thought as she looked around the chaos of her living room, when the hell was Sean going to finish unpacking all these boxes the way he’d promised he would weeks ago? Months, now. It had been more like a couple of months.

  “Screw this,” Ginny muttered as she got to her feet. Her knees hurt, and so did her hand from the hot tea. For the first time in weeks, she’d been planning on just sitting with her feet up, the way her husband insisted, now that she had something to do while she sat, since everything else she might’ve occupied her time with was mostly still packed away in boxes. All she’d wanted was to read through the accumulated weeks of gossip from the celebrity magazines and maybe check out a few new recipes. Hell, learn a few things from Popular Science or the news magazines she’d ordered from her nephew’s scho
ol fundraiser.

  But nope. Instead, she looked around at the mess and could no longer ignore it. Couldn’t avoid it. She was done waiting for him to “get around to it.”

  By lunchtime, Ginny’d managed to unpack every box in the living room and move the ones that still needed to go upstairs into the hall. She’d been ruthless. If she took something out of the box, it either found a place in the living room or was designated for some other specific place in the house…or put into the trash. She’d hauled two full trash bags out to the curb and half filled another.

  She even moved the furniture. Slowly, a little bit at a time, but she did it. It helped that they didn’t have much. The furniture that had filled the living room in the townhouse left plenty of space when divided between the living room and dining room, and she wasn’t quite sure that everything was placed exactly where she wanted it, but it would do. At least they could freaking use the room, she thought as she took a few minutes’ breather by settling on the couch, her feet on the ottoman, the now-dry magazines on her lap and a fresh mug of tea on the end table.

  Yes. This. She looked around the room with satisfaction, ignoring for the moment the boxes in the hall that would need to be carried upstairs and her rumbling stomach, which would be soothed only for so long by the liquid. For now, she was going to sit and enjoy the results of her hard work.

  She woke up an hour later, her neck stiff, the magazine article only three-quarters read and the tea long cold. Blinking, wincing, Ginny stretched and rubbed her furry tongue on the roof of her mouth. She looked outside, where the skies had gone gray enough to make it seem later than it was.

  She’d needed the rest, that was for sure, but it would’ve been nicer to take a nap in her bed. Or at the very least, lying down on the couch instead of sitting up. Now everything ached, joints popped, and she didn’t feel very rested at all. She was hungry, though. Starving, in fact, which was a nice change from the intermittent nausea that had plagued her with enough frequency that even when she didn’t feel sick to her stomach, she worried enough about feeling sick that she kept herself from eating too much.

  Now she felt like she could down an entire twelve-inch hoagie, a whole pizza, a couple of cheeseburgers with an order of fries and a thick, creamy milkshake. Chocolate, she thought as moved through her now completely uncluttered living and dining rooms toward the kitchen. No, mint chocolate chip. Yes. Maybe there was some ice cream in the freezer, and she’d treat herself to a scoop. Or two.

  She hadn’t felt this good, aside from the creaking joints, in ages. Even the nagging loss of Noodles wasn’t weighing on her. She actually hummed under her breath as she pulled out the makings for a sandwich and lined it up on the kitchen table. Bread, turkey, roast beef, lettuce, pickles, mayo. She sliced some tomatoes and added them to the growing tower of lunchy goodness. No true Dagwood sandwich would be complete without some good spicy mustard—her mouth watered at the thought—and a few slices of Swiss cheese.

  Except that when she looked for the mustard, the spot where it should be on the fridge door was ostentatiously empty.

  Huh.

  Ginny looked again. Then at the other shelves. Then at last she found it, shoved way to the back behind the bottle of lemon juice and an expired carton of half-and-half she took out to toss in the trash. She pulled out the deli package of cheese too, frowning. Sean didn’t use mustard. He liked mayo or, shudder, margarine on his sandwiches. She’d even known him to spread white bread with ketchup before adding bologna, a combination that had made her gorge rise even when she wasn’t fighting the pregnancy nausea. He didn’t use mustard, so she couldn’t blame him for putting it away in the wrong place, because how hard was it, exactly, to put things back in the place where they’d been found. Right? Even Ginny, who admittedly sometimes left her shoes by the front door until she had more pairs there than in her bedroom closet, knew enough to replace the mustard in its slot on the door. Next to the ketchup and mayo and salad dressings, that’s where the mustard went, and since it wasn’t there, she had to assume she’d been the one who hadn’t put it back.

  Uneasily, thinking of her lost mug, Ginny opened the mustard jar and found it so empty she could barely scrape enough out of it to spread on her bread. This was annoying, but not tragic. What she found when she pulled the cheese out of the package, though, was enough to make her throw it down on the table with a low cry of outrage.

  It was bitten.

  Someone, and it could only have been Sean, because who else would’ve done it? Someone had taken a bite out of the entire block of sliced Swiss cheese and put it back in the package. The tooth marks were clear, rippled around the edge of one of the larger natural holes in the cheese. The entire package was ruined, and why? To what freaking purpose?

  “He doesn’t even like Swiss cheese!” Ginny cried aloud.

  Which probably explained why he’d taken only one bite, though it didn’t come close to making sense of why he’d bitten it in the first place. Grumbling, Ginny threw the cheese and the half-and-half into the garbage, then finished her sandwich. Sans cheese it was still good, but her appetite had been cut in half. She finished only part of the sandwich and wrapped up the rest for later, tucking it back into the deeper realms of the fridge so Sean wouldn’t accidentally take it for his lunch tomorrow.

  “He’d take it and complain about how it had mustard on it,” she groused to her sister when she called a few minutes later while Ginny was cleaning her mess. “Gah. Peg, I’m so annoyed.”

  “I hear that.” Peg’s sigh filled up the phone. “It’s like a war zone in my house right now. Between indoor lacrosse, Dale’s triathlon training and work, oh yeah. Work, ’cuz everything else we do is ‘leisure.’ We barely have time to breathe.”

  Ginny’s hands drifted over the mound of her belly. “It was different when I worked. I didn’t notice the mess or care about it as much, I guess. Or maybe he was just more in to helping out, we both pitched in. But now that I’m home full time…”

  Peg snorted a chuckle. “Oh, just wait until the sprout arrives. You’ll look back on this time as your glory days.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Sorry.” Peg sounded anything but contrite, but she did try again. “I guess my best big-sister advice to you is to take it easy. Let Sean do the unpacking, like he wants to.”

  “Like he says he wants to. But then never does. I understand he’s tired when he gets home from work, and school’s been harder than he thought it would be. I get that too. But, Jesus Christ, I’m the one who has to maneuver around everything in boxes, try to find stuff…” She trailed off.

  “You need to take care of yourself. Should I have Dale talk to him?”

  “No,” Ginny said, thinking of how little Sean would appreciate a lecture from his brother-in-law. “You guys are busy enough. Anyway, I did it all down here, and he won’t be home for a few more hours. I’ll do some more and it won’t even be an issue.”

  “It sounds like it is an issue, though. And, Gin, you need to be careful…”

  Irritation flared. “Sean says the same thing. You’re supposed to be on my side.”

  More silence.

  Ginny sighed. “I had an appointment just last week. The doctor said everything was fine. I’m not on any restrictions. I’m not high risk. There’s absolutely no indication of any problems. At. All. I’m not running a marathon or lifting barbells, for crying out loud, Peg. I’m just putting away books and knickknacks.”

  She didn’t mention the huffing and puffing of pushing the couch and chairs into place, or the boxes of books that were meant to be taken upstairs. Her sister’s pregnancies, all six of them, had gone off without a hitch. By the last one, she gave birth at home in her bed, with all the kids around her, cheering on the birth of their new baby brother, and it was over before the midwife even arrived.

  Her sister didn’t have any real idea what it was like to kno
w that the life inside her had died and was decaying, or what it was like to crouch in a public restroom, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop her body from rejecting it. Her sister understood grief and could probably understand the loss of a child more fully than Ginny could yet grasp, but she couldn’t really understand what it was like to lose one in the womb.

  Peg also couldn’t understand how important it was to Ginny that her loss did not define her. Not her life, and not this pregnancy. This child was still clinging to life inside her and had not yet shown any indication of giving up, and Ginny refused to surround herself and this baby with fear.

  “I’m not overdoing it,” she told her sister. “Trust me.”

  “I just worry for you. That’s all. I remember how devastated you were—”

  “I’m fine.” Ginny cut her sister off. “Really. But I have to go. I’ve got to defrost some things for dinner and stuff.”

  “I guess you won’t be serving any Swiss cheese,” Peg said, and Ginny found some laughter at what just a short time ago had made her so angry.

  “I should serve only Swiss cheese,” she said. “And mustard.”

  They said their goodbyes the way sisters do, without a lot of mush and gush, but a lot of love nevertheless.

  Then Ginny went back to the task she’d set herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  By the time Sean got home that night, bringing flowers for no reason he’d admit to but which Ginny suspected had something to do with her missing mug, she’d carried all the books upstairs and put them away in the bookcases. She’d cleaned them all first, of course, and swept the floors. Dusted the mantel, that sort of thing. But what had transformed the room was the addition of her collection of hardcovers and paperbacks, many she’d owned since childhood, all arranged and displayed. Those books adorned the shelves like they’d been meant for them.

  She took him by the hand after feeding him a slow-cooker beef bourguignon and homemade biscuits. When she led him upstairs, his confusion was obvious. And when she pushed him gently forward, inside, to show off her efforts, his face first fell. Then he scowled.