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One by one they left the room, with Devyn exiting last. He shot me one final look — something that looked like understanding maybe, but laced with sorrow.

Then he was gone.

The walk back through the foyer seemed to take a thousand steps, but I made it alone. I closed the door, started the car, and choked back tears as I turned out of the driveway.

Twenty-Nine

JULIANA

There was feeling bad, and there was feeling like utter and complete shit. Both sucked, but the third option — the feeling like utter and complete shit tinged with uncontrollable, irrational anger — that was the absolute worst.

The ride home was a nightmare montage of being angry, falling asleep, then waking up and feeling terrible all over again. I knew I’d handled the whole situation poorly. I’d broken the news to the guys in a way that was cold and clinical, at a time when they were all so happy to see me.

Then again, I needed to break ties. The longer I delayed cutting things off, the harder it would be for all of us. I obviously had to tell them, and I needed to know my child’s biological father. But beyond that, I didn’t need anyone else in my life. There would barely be time for the baby. And the baby, I knew, would require my full and total attention.

For the next week or more I remained numb, immersing myself in my work. I would stay at the office for as long as possible, before coming home exhausted and flopping into bed.

I eventually made appointments with a well-recommended obstetrician. I was given a clean bill of health and a regimen of prenatal vitamins and strict orders to avoid stress, caffeine, and a whole host of other things. From there I tried to focus on the joy of finally being pregnant. I even put together the baby’s nursery piece by piece, lovingly decorating everything I could without yet knowing the baby’s sex.

But no matter what I did, there was no joy. There was no happiness to the whole thing, knowing how I’d left it with the guys.

Shit.

So far they’d given me my space and hadn’t contacted me. Probably because it’s what they imagined I wanted. And itwaswhat I wanted… to an extent. At least it was what I told myself I wanted, for a good twenty-three hours of the day.

But it was always that last hour, right before sleep, that the doubts crept in. Those final delirious moments before sleep took me, where the loneliness was thickest and my heart felt heavy and the memories of being with all three of them would flood my tired, weary mind.

It was during one such night, right before midnight, that I picked up my phone on a whim. I punched in all three of their phone numbers and sent a single, two-word text message, making sure to hit the SEND button before something inside me cause me to change my mind:

I’m sorry.

I thought it might make me feel better. It didn’t make me feel anything. Maybe because, as Gage had pointed out, I was still only thinking about myself. I was only trying to rationalize things within my own brain and assuage my own guilt. I still wasn’t thinking abouttheirneeds,theirwants,theirdesires.

In short, I sucked.

The guys still hadn’t responded to my text, nor did I really expect them to. I could only hope they believed the sincerity of the statement.

Their swabs still rested in the pencil-holder on the corner of my apartment’s desk. Three plastic tubes. Three names. Three amazingly brave, fantastic men who would be the envy of any woman in the world. Men who would each make an incredible biological father, no matter which of them it might be.

And yet I still didn’t know.

Pre-birth paternity tests were so simple now, and non-invasive. Nothing like the potentially risky amniocentesis tests of old. It required DNA swabs from the potential fathers, and a small sample of the mother’s blood, taken right from the arm. It was quick. Easy. Definitive. And it could be done as early as the fifth week of pregnancy, which I was well past.

So how come you still haven’t done it?

That was the million-dollar question. There was something stopping me, some unknown reason preventing me from going forward and finding out whether my baby would be Maverick’s, or Gage’s, or Devyn’s. I’d thought hard about all three of them. I could even admit I loved each of them in their own special way, and would be thrilled no matter who ended up fathering my child.

No, the guys were definitely not the problem.

The issue was with me.

I was waist-deep in the usual bullshit of the day when Aric came bursting into my office, moving at least fifty-percent quicker through the glass hallways than usual. His Clark Kent face was drawn with something that looked like worry. And worry wasn’t something that suited him.

“We might have a problem.”

I stopped sifting through the artist proofs for Bagel Maniac, which I’d promised to make the premiere bagel outlet in all five boroughs. The campaign would be fun, funny, and aggressive. I was actually looking forward to it.

“I just heard from Robert Valentine,” said Aric. “Really strange phone call. I got the sense hemightbe giving us the brush-off.”