Page 7

It’s been three weeks since my night with Beau. And my period is late.

I stare inside my medicine cabinet for a long moment, willing a pregnancy test to magically show up on one of the shelves. Or even better, for a period cramp to seize me and blood to gush out of me. What I wouldn’t give to ruin a pair of ridiculously expensive panties right now.

Because I absolutely cannot be pregnant right now. Do I want to one day be mentally well enough to try to have a baby with Beau again? Absolutely, yes. Do I think I am anywhere near that right now? Hell no.

No matter how long I stare into the unorganized abyss of my medicine cabinet, a pregnancy test never appears. I feel panic clinging to the edges of my consciousness, fighting to seep into my mind and take over, but I push it down. If there was ever a time to need to be calm, this is it.

I take three deep breaths like the useless app I downloaded on my phone tells me to do. It does nothing. So I make my way into the kitchen and fill a glass of water with shaking hands, forcing myself to drink it slowly before pulling my phone out of my back pocket.

I click the second number on my favorites list and listen to the dial tone, letting out a relieved sigh when my best friend’s voice fills the line.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I need you to take me to Bozeman to buy pregnancy tests.”

She’s quiet for a moment, no doubt processing the information. “Okay, why Bozeman?”

“Everyone in this town already hates me for leaving Beau. Can you imagine if they saw me buying pregnancy tests?”

“Right,” she says, and I hear a rustling. I imagine her nodding on the other end. “I’m at the ranch right now, checking on a cow. I can be there in twenty.”

The mention of the ranch—Lucky Stars Ranch, the Jenningses’ ranch to be exact—has my heart galloping in my chest.

“Please don’t mention this to anyone,” I gasp out.

“Of course not.” Her voice changes then to something snarkier. “It’s just Cooper here, and I wouldn’t tell him anything important if my life depended on it.”

My pulse ratchets higher and my mind swims. “You’re with Cooper?”

“Yes,” she tells me, and then I hear a deep voice on the other line. “Mind your own damn business, Cooper. It’s my urologist. I have an overactive bladder. Is that what you wanted to know, you intrusive piece of shit?”

Their bickering soothes something inside me, pushes the panic back even farther, and I take my first deep breath since opening my period tracker app this morning and seeing that I was four days late for my period—something that has only ever happened one time before.

“Yeah, I bet you’re sorry,” Jade says, voice still muffled as she talks to Cooper.

“I’m going to go,” I tell her.

She returns to the conversation. “Yeah, I’ll be there in just a minute. I need to wash my hands. I just had them up a cow’s vagina.”

“God, please do.”

“How do you feel?” Jade asks me an hour and a half later, staring at me with wide, unblinking eyes.

I swing my head to face her, hands still propped on my bathroom counter. “Pregnant.”

“Do you actually feel pregnant, or are you just saying that because there’s a positive pregnancy test right in front of you?”

We stare at the positive pregnancy test I just took.

And when I say positive, I mean really positive.

I grew up in dance and Jade grew up on a ranch, which means neither of us has ever cared about having any semblance of privacy.

She stood in front of the toilet and mocked me for not being able to aim at the stick properly, and then we both watched as two lines started to show up before I even set it on the counter.

“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. There have been…

signs. Ones I remember from seven months ago, the last time I was pregnant.

The nonstop urge to pee. The cramps that feel like my period could show up at any second.

The way I’ve passed out on the couch the last two nights before ever making it to bed.

There were signs that I should have caught, but I didn’t.

Not when the night with Beau felt like so many other dreams I’ve woken up from, alone and covered in sweat in our bed.

Until looking at those two lines, I was convinced I’d made it up, that he hadn’t actually left the fingerprint-sized bruises on my hips or the hickey on my chest.

But now I know that what we did was very, very real. And had very, very real repercussions.

“Are you okay?” she asks me, and I really don’t know how to respond. I meet her green gaze in the mirror. She might have just come from a cattle ranch, but she still looks effortlessly stunning. She has the kind of natural beauty that people pay lots of money to achieve.

“I don’t know,” I say truthfully.

I’m separated from my husband and pregnant with his child. Just five months after I miscarried our last one.

Oh yeah, and I feel like I’m going to throw up my breakfast.

I let my head fall back, closing my eyes against the bright bathroom lights. “Not good, I don’t think.”

“So…” She hesitates. “How far along are you? Probably, like, five weeks, right? Unless you guys—”

My eyes connect with hers in the mirror again. “No, we didn’t. Again.”

Even though I’ve wanted to. God, I forgot how much I love having him like that . I’ve missed him in so many ways over the last three months. I’ve missed hearing his laugh and cuddling up to him in the middle of the night when I’m cold and having someone to eat dinner with at night.

But it wasn’t until that night three weeks ago that I realized how much I’d missed his hands and mouth and the way he makes me come alive with just one touch. That night felt magical.

And looking down at my flat stomach that will soon start to become rounded with our child, I guess it was.

“Five weeks,” I confirm. “If I had to guess.”

Jade’s voice is softener, less tinged with shock, when she asks, “How do you feel, really?”

I shake my head, so, so many thoughts jumbling around inside it, and turn around to face her in my bathroom. “I’m scared, Jade,” I whisper, wishing I could feel the relief of tears.

I’ve experienced so much hurt, so much grief this year, but I’ve hardly been able to cry. I think I’m broken. No, I know I am.

Jade wraps her arms around me, and I sink into her embrace.

She’s so much taller than me, and I love the way she always rests her head on top of mine when we hug.

It always makes me feel intense comfort, right down to my bones, and this time is no different, even if it doesn’t manage to knock all the anxiety away.

“It’s going to be okay,” she promises, her voice raspy. She has the kind of voice they put in men’s deodorant commercials. The ones where ridiculously hot women are talking about how their ridiculously hot partners smell so good in this three-dollar deodorant.

“You don’t know that,” I say into her chest, willing the panic not to take over, not when Jade is here and I can’t retreat into myself.

That’s all I can think about. How excited I was last time.

How finding out I was unexpectedly pregnant was the first bright spot I’d seen in the months following my injury, the first happy thing I’d felt since learning I’d never be able to dance professionally again. It was sunshine after months of rain.

And then I lost the baby.

And the world suddenly felt so dark again.

“I don’t know if this baby will make it, Els,” she says, and although some people might feel hurt by those words, they feel good to me—validating my fears. “But I do know that whatever happens, you will make it through this. We will. You are so strong.”

“I don’t feel strong,” I choke out around the lump forming in my throat.

She pushes back from me, her hands holding my shoulders tight. Her face is stern as she looks into my eyes. “You are the strongest person I know, do you hear me? You may not feel it, but you are. You danced on blistered feet and twisted ankles for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.”

“I was different then,” I say, voicing the fears that have been bouncing around inside my head for the last year. “I knew who I was then. I was a dancer. I don’t know who I am anymore, Jade.”

My whole life, I’d been chasing one thing. Dancing. Professional ballet. And when I got it, it was ripped away from me. And I looked at my life and realized I didn’t know who I was without it. I realized I wasn’t much of anything.

Since then, I’ve been floundering, trying to figure out who I am and what I want.

And now, I’m bringing another human being into this world when I don’t even know where I fit into it.

Jade’s face softens, and her hands move from my shoulders down my arms, squeezing along the way. “You’re still strong, Els, even if you can’t see that.”

The other fear I’ve been harboring comes out before I can rein it in. “I don’t know how to tell Beau.”

She looks momentarily confused, her perfect, freckled nose wrinkling. “Beau will be ecstatic.”

“I know that,” I sigh, rubbing my forehead, trying to quell the ache forming there. “But I’m just starting to work on myself, and I’m not ready for him to come home yet. If we lose this one too, it might ruin me, and I’ll ruin us. And I can’t do that to him, Jade. I can’t do it again.”

I almost broke us when I collapsed in on myself the last time. I pushed him away and I knew it was killing him, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong, how he could fix it. So I sent him away, told him I needed space and time to figure things out.

I know he thinks I meant us, but I really meant me . I needed to figure myself out. Figure out how to be okay in this new reality. Then he could come back and I would be better for him.

But now…

I let go of her and grip the bathroom counter, the stone cutting into my fingers. A welcome, grounding sort of pain. “He’s going to want to come home.”

Terror grips me as I say it. I’m still too messed up, too confused, too broken. I can’t be who he needs me to be, not yet, and I can’t let him know that. He’s been so patient, but it can only stretch so far.

Jade nods like she expected this. “Yeah, but you don’t have to say yes.”

My eyes snap to hers, the bubble of anxiety in my stomach popping at the words. “I don’t?”

She leans back against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “No, Els. You don’t have to if you don’t want him to yet.”

My head starts bobbing, reassuring myself. “Okay, okay. We could…”

“You could date again,” she supplies.

I try to focus on what she’s saying. Try to make sense of it, of how that would help.

I haven’t told even Jade why I asked Beau to leave, not the real reason, not that I think I’m too broken for him.

I know she would try to tell me all the reasons I’m not, but she doesn’t know what it’s been like.

How good Beau has been, and how uneven things have become between us.

How I was once a functioning member of society and an equal part of our marriage and how I became a shell of who I once was.

She thinks we were having issues, and that’s part of the truth. She doesn’t know that they were all caused by me.

“Date?”

“You’re married, but that doesn’t mean you have to start living like it right away. You could ease into it.”

The idea takes shape in my mind, and I latch on to it like a lifeline, an inflatable being thrown out into the raging sea that is my life. Maybe I could date Beau while I try to figure this out. Try to figure myself out. Try to figure out how to bring another person into this world.

I can let Beau in just a little, and I can hide the parts of myself I still don’t want him to see. I can have a piece of him and give him a piece of me. Just for now. I have nine months to get my shit together.

Surely that will be enough time. I’ll be better then. I can be better for him. For our baby.

I just need time, and then I’ll be better.