If he picked up the journal, suppose he learned something about Lexie, something he didn’t know or might not want to know? Would that affect the way he felt about her? Would it make him throw in the towel and storm away without ever looking back?
He tried to fit the pieces together. Whoever sent the e-mails not only knew that Lexie was pregnant and that Jeremy had Doris’s journal, but was also bold enough to suggest he would learn something Lexie had been hiding. The implication, again, was that someone wanted to break them up.
But who? Granted, anyone in town might know Lexie was pregnant; few, however, knew he had the journal, and aside from Lexie, he could think of only one person who knew the contents of the journal.
Doris.
But it made no sense. She was the one who’d pushed Lexie toward Jeremy in the first place; she was the one who explained Lexie’s behavior so Jeremy could understand Lexie better. Doris was also the one Jeremy talked to about his writer’s block.
He was so lost in thought, it took a moment for him to realize that someone was knocking at the door. He crossed the room and opened it.
Lexie forced a smile. Despite her brave expression, her eyes were red and swollen, and he knew she’d been crying. At first, neither of them said anything. Then:
“Hey,” she offered.
“Hi, Lex,” he said. When he made no move toward her, she stared down at the floor.
“I guess you’re wondering why I’m here, huh? I was sort of hoping that you would come back, but you didn’t.”
When Jeremy didn’t respond, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. You were right about everything. I should have told you, and I was wrong to have done what I did.”
Jeremy studied her before taking a step back from the door. With that tacit permission, Lexie entered his room and took a seat on the bed. Jeremy reached for the chair in front of the desk.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t plan on going,” she said. “I know you might not believe it, but when I left Doris’s, I was intending to go home and . . . I don’t know . . . it just hit me that I should probably talk to Rodney. I figured he’d be able to tell me where Rachel might have gone.”
“What about before?” Jeremy said. “At the boardwalk. Why didn’t you tell me about that?”
“Rodney’s just a friend, and he’s going through a rough time. I know how it might have looked to you, but we go back a long way, and I was just trying to be supportive.”
Jeremy noticed the careful way she’d avoided answering the question. He leaned forward in the chair. “No more games, Lexie, okay?” he said, his voice steady and serious. “I’m not in the mood. I just want to know why you didn’t tell me.”
Lexie turned toward the window, but he could see the reflection of the lamplight in her eyes. “It was . . . hard. I didn’t want to be involved in the first place. And I didn’t want to involve you, either.” She laughed, sounding shaken. “But I guess I did, huh?” She shook her head and drew a long breath before going on. “The thing is, Rodney and Rachel have been arguing a lot lately because of me.”
Her voice grew softer. “Rachel has been having a hard time with the fact that Rodney and I dated. But more than that, she knows how Rodney felt about me. And that’s the thing. Rachel still thinks Rodney has feelings for me, and—according to Rachel, anyway—Rodney still brings my name up now and then, usually at exactly the wrong times. But if you talk to Rodney, he claims she’s exaggerating. That’s what we were talking about at the boardwalk.”
Jeremy brought his hands together. “Does he have feelings for you?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
When she saw Jeremy’s expression of disbelief, she went on quickly. “I know that’s a cop-out, but I’m not sure what else to say. Does Rodney still care about me? Yeah, I think he does, but we’ve known each other ever since we were little. The question you want me to answer is whether he would be seeing Rachel if we weren’t engaged, and all I can say is that I think he would. I’ve told you before that I always thought those two belonged together. But . . .”
She trailed off, her brow knit with concern.
“You don’t know for sure,” Jeremy finished for her. If he were Lexie, he wasn’t sure he would have been able to come up with an answer either.
“No,” she said. “But he does understand that I’m engaged to someone else. He accepts that it’s not going to work between us, and I know he does care for Rachel. But Rachel is sensitive about me, and I think that Rodney inadvertently makes things worse. He told me that Rachel got mad at him one afternoon when they were driving because he glanced up at the library. She accused him of looking for me, and they ended up arguing for hours. He was telling her that it was just a habit, that he didn’t mean anything, and Rachel kept saying that he was never going to get over me and that he was making excuses. The next day, he was still upset and dropped by the library to get my advice, so we went to the boardwalk to talk.”
She straightened up with a sigh. “And tonight, like I said, it just happened. Since I know both of them, since I care about both of them and want it to work out between them, I feel like I should try to fix it. Or at least listen when one of them wants to talk to me. I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of something, and I don’t know how to get out or what I’m supposed to do.”
“Maybe you were right not to tell me. These southern soap operas aren’t my thing.”
For the first time since she’d arrived, she seemed to relax.
“Mine either. There are times when I wish I were back in New York where everyone was a stranger. Things like this get old, and it’s even worse because I made you angry. I made you suspicious, and then I made it worse by trying to cover it up. You have no idea how sorry I am about that. It’s never going to happen again.”
Her voice had grown even softer and began to break; when she swiped at the corner of her eye, Jeremy rose from his chair and took a seat beside her on the bed. When he reached for her hand, her shoulders began to tremble and she drew a ragged breath.
“Hey,” Jeremy whispered, “it’s okay. Don’t cry.”
His words seemed to release her emotions, and she lowered her face into her hands. Her sobs were deep and heavy, as if she’d been holding them in for hours, and when he slipped his arm around her, her crying only intensified.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
“No . . . it’s . . . not,” she choked out between sobs, her face still buried in her hands.
“I mean it,” he said, “I forgive you.”
“No . . . you . . . don’t. I saw . . . the way you were . . . looking at me . . . at the door . . . when I got here.”
“I was still mad then. But not now.”
She shuddered, her face still hidden. “Yes, you are. You . . . hate me. . . . We’re having a baby, and all we ever do . . . is fight. . . .”
This wasn’t going well. Feeling lost, Jeremy reminded himself again about her surging hormones. Like most men, he assumed that hormones were the explanation for every emotional outburst, but in this instance it really seemed to be true.
“I don’t hate you. I was mad at you, but that’s over now.”
“I don’t love . . . Rodney. I love you. . . .”
“I know.”
“I won’t ever talk to Rodney ever again. . . .”
“You can talk to him. Just not at his house, okay? And don’t hold his hand, either.”
If possible, his comment made her cry even harder.
“I knew you were . . . still mad at me. . . .”
It took almost half an hour for Lexie to stop crying; by the end, Jeremy had decided it was best if he didn’t say anything, other than to deny that he was still mad. Anything else seemed only to make it worse. Like a small child after a severe meltdown, every thirty seconds or so she would draw a series of jagged breaths, and her face would screw up as if she were about to start crying once more. Unwilling to risk pr
ovoking another crying fit, Jeremy sat in silence as Lexie tried to recover.
“Wow,” she said, her voice raspy.
“Yeah,” Jeremy agreed. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, seemingly as dazed as he felt. “I don’t know what happened there.”
“You cried,” Jeremy said.
She shot him a look; with puffy eyes, it didn’t have quite the same effect as it usually did, though.
“Did you find out anything about Rachel?” he asked.
“Not too much. Except for the fact that Rodney’s pretty sure she didn’t leave today. He thinks she left after work yesterday. They’d had an argument on Thursday night, and according to Rodney, she told him it was over and that she never wanted to see him again. Later, when he passed by her house, her car wasn’t in the driveway.”
“He was spying on her?” Jeremy prompted, glad he wasn’t the only one.
“No, he wanted to smooth things out. But anyway, if she left on Friday after work . . . I don’t know, maybe she’s planning to be gone the whole weekend. Still, it doesn’t explain why she didn’t call Doris to tell her she wouldn’t be in this morning, and it still doesn’t tell us where she’s gone.”
Jeremy thought about it, remembering that both Doris and Lexie said she’d never mentioned friends from out of town. “And she wouldn’t have just headed to the beach or something? Maybe she wanted to be alone. Or at least away from Rodney for a while.”
“Who knows.” Lexie shrugged. “But even before this . . . I don’t know.” She seemed to be trying to choose her words carefully. “She’s been acting strange lately, even with me. Almost like she’s going through a midlife crisis.”
“She’s too young for that,” Jeremy pointed out. “Like you said, it probably has something to do with her relationship with Rodney.”
“I know . . . but it’s more than that. Like she’s being secretive. Normally, she talks all the time, but when we went out shopping for her bridesmaid’s dress, she didn’t say much at all. Like she was hiding something.”
“Maybe she’s been planning this weekend for a while.”
“Maybe,” Lexie said. “I just don’t know.”
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. In the silence, Lexie tried to stifle a yawn, looking sheepish when she finished. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m getting tired.”
“Crying for an hour will do that to a person.”
“So will pregnancy,” she said. “I’ve been tired a lot lately. At work, I’ve even been closing my door so I can rest my head on the desk.”
“Well, take it easy. You’re carrying my baby, you know. And you should probably head home so you can get some sleep.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Do you want to come over?”
He thought about it. “I’d better not,” he said. “You know what happens when I sleep over.”
“You mean we don’t actually sleep for a while?”
“I can’t help it.”
She nodded, suddenly serious. “You sure you’re not staying here because of—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off with a smile. “I’m not mad. Now that I understand what’s been going on, I’m all better.”
She kissed him, then rose from the bed. “Okay,” she said, stretching. He noticed her belly didn’t flatten as much as it once did, and his gaze settled there for an instant too long.
“Don’t stare at my fat,” she chided, sounding self-conscious.
“You’re not fat,” he said automatically, feeling pleased. “You’re pregnant, and you look beautiful.”
She watched him as he answered, as if wondering again whether he’d been telling the truth about the reason he wasn’t coming over, then seemingly thought better of rehashing the conversation. Jeremy rose and walked her to the door. After kissing her good-bye, he watched as she made her way to the car, replaying the entire evening in his mind.
“Hey, Lexie?”
She turned. “Yes?”
“I forgot to ask you. Do you know if Doris has a computer?”
“Doris? No.”
“Not even at work?”
“No,” Lexie answered. “She’s as old-fashioned as they come. I doubt if she even knows how to turn one on. Why?”
“No reason,” he said.
He saw the confusion in her face but didn’t want to get into it. “Sleep well,” he said. “I love you.”
“Love you, too,” she said, her voice subdued. She opened the car door and slid behind the wheel.
Jeremy watched as she started the car, backed up, and headed down the gravel drive, the rear lights fading as she rolled out of sight. A few minutes later, he was at his desk, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up.
A lot had been explained tonight, and it all made perfect sense. His suspicions about Rodney had been put to rest—assuming he’d ever really believed them in the first place—but there was still the matter of the e-mails.
If Lexie was telling the truth, Doris hadn’t sent them. But if she hadn’t, who had?
On his desk was Doris’s journal, and he found himself staring at it once more. How many times had he debated whether or not to read it in the hopes of finding an article to write? For whatever reason, he’d avoided it, but he thought again about the latest e-mail.
HAS SHE TOLD YOU THE TRUTH? READ DORIS’S JOURNAL. YOU’LL FIND THE ANSWER THERE.
What truth? And what would he find in Doris’s journal? What answer was he supposed to find?
He didn’t know. Nor was he even sure he wanted to find out. But with the message still playing in his mind, he found himself reaching for the journal.
Ten
Jeremy studied the journal for much of the next week.
For the most part, Doris had been meticulous with her notations. In all, there were 232 names in the book, all written in pen; another 28 women were listed by initials, though no reason was offered as to why they weren’t further identified. Fathers were usually, but not always, identified. For the most part, Doris had included the date of the visit, an estimate of how far along the mother was, and the predicted sex of the baby. The mothers signed their names after her prediction. In three instances, the women she’d written about hadn’t even known they were pregnant.
Beneath each prediction, Doris had left a space where she’d later written in the name and sex of the baby once it had been born, sometimes with a different-color pen. Occasionally she included the birth notice from the newspaper, and as Lexie had told him, Doris had been correct with every prediction. At least with those she’d actually made. There were thirteen instances where Doris hadn’t predicted the sex of the baby—a fact that neither Lexie nor Doris had mentioned. In those cases, Jeremy assumed by further notes that Doris made, the mother would eventually miscarry.
The entries, one after the next, seemed to blend together.
February 19, 1995, Ashley Bennett, 23, twelve weeks along.
Tom Harker the father. BOY Ashley Bennett
Toby Roy Bennett, born August 31, 1995.
July 12, 1995, Terry Miller, 27, nine weeks along. Lots of morning sickness. Second baby. GIRL Terry Miller
Sophie May Miller, born February 11, 1996.
He continued reading, searching for patterns, trying to spot anything unusual. He read through the journal, entry by entry, half a dozen times. By midweek, he began to feel something gnaw at him, as if he were missing something, and he read through the journal again, this time starting from the back. Then he read through it again.
It was Friday morning when he finally found it. In half an hour, he was supposed to pick up Lexie so they could close on the house. He still hadn’t packed for his trip to New York, but all he could do was stare at the entry that Doris had scrawled in shaky penmanship.
Sept. 28, 1996: L.M.D. Age 28, seven weeks along. Trevor Newland, likely father. Found out accidentally.
Nothing else was listed beneath, which meant the mother had miscarried.
Jere
my gripped the journal, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. Only one name, one he didn’t recognize, but initials that he did.
L-M-D. Lexie Marin Darnell.
Pregnant with someone else’s baby. Another lie of omission.
Another lie. . . .
His thoughts started racing with the realization. Lexie had lied about this, just as she’d lied to him about spending time with Rodney. Just as she’d once lied about where she went after seeing Doris . . . and before that, lied about knowing the truth about the mysterious lights in the cemetery.
Lies and hidden truths . . .
A pattern?
His lips tightened into a grim line. Who was she? Why was she doing this? And why on earth wouldn’t she have told him? This he would have understood.
He didn’t know whether to be angry or hurt. Or both. He needed time to think things through, but that was the thing: There was no time. Soon he and Lexie would own a house; in a week they’d be married. But Alvin had been right all along. He didn’t know her, had never known her. Nor, he suddenly realized, did he completely trust her. Yes, she’d explained her deceptions, and taken in isolation, each had been explained. But was this going to be a regular occurrence? Would he have to live with twisting of the truth? Could he live that way?
And who had sent the e-mail? Again, it came back to that, didn’t it? The acquaintance he had looking into the routing information for the mysterious e-mails had called earlier in the week to let Jeremy know that the e-mail most likely came from out of town and that soon he hoped to have an answer. Which meant . . . what?
He didn’t know, and he didn’t have time to figure it out. The meeting with the lawyer to close on the house was scheduled in twenty minutes. Should he postpone the closing? Could he, even if he wanted?
Too much to think about; too much to do.
Moving on autopilot, he left his room at Greenleaf; ten minutes later, with his thoughts in disarray, he pulled to a stop in front of Lexie’s house. Through the window, he saw movement, and she stepped onto the porch.
Idly, he noticed she’d dressed for the occasion. Wearing tan pants and a matching jacket over a light blue blouse, she smiled and waved as she skipped down the porch steps. For an instant, it was easy to forget she was pregnant.
Nicholas Sparks Page 13
