Page 15 of The Best Worst Thing

Hovering

For the next couple of days, Nicole did nothing.

Midweek, the clinic confirmed Valerie’s pregnancy—news Nicole still hadn’t shared with anyone but Gabe, Mari, and Paige. Her podcast, her very concerned mother, her need for real food and water? She ignored them all.

And every time Gabe called or texted or showed up after work with his tail between his legs, Nicole grew a little more numb.

She could barely manage to brush her teeth or change her clothes or feed her dog.

What was she supposed to do? Talk to her husband calmly, and face-to-face?

Sift through the evidence of her failed marriage, of all the signs she’d missed?

Sort through her finances? Come to terms with the fact that, according to a miscarriage odds calculator she’d found online, the likelihood she’d become a mother was hovering somewhere around seventy-five percent?

Higher, really, when you factored in that the embryos they’d transferred had already been genetically screened?

Search for a job she’d been warned not to take?

Find another place to live when she’d been told to stay put?

Figure out a way to support herself and start her life over, when that awful-but-spot-on attorney had been crystal clear that a premature attempt at independence would only screw Nicole and her maybe-babies over a million times more?

When Mari’s divorce attorney, a day later, practically recited the same counsel but in much kinder words?

No. Absolutely not. She was trapped, and all she could do was fall apart. All she could do was push Gabe—and the rest of the mess they’d made—very far away.

And so, by Wednesday evening, when Nicole had finally convinced her husband to disappear for good, she did just that.

She crawled back into bed, stared at the half-empty bottles of whiskey and orange juice and wine on her nightstand, and cried.

And then, when she ran out of tears, Nicole decided to torture herself a little bit more.

She rolled over, reached for her phone, and scrolled through her old text messages with Logan. Their plans for that coming Saturday, floating there, suspended between what Nicole had promised on her stoop last weekend and what she now knew to be true.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then sent this:

Are you back in town? Can we maybe talk?