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She shakes her head. “Bullshit. I saw your face when I pulled up. You’re pregnant. You should be glowing. But you looked pale. You still look pale.”
“I think the ‘glowing pregnant woman’ thing is a myth. I’ve been barfing for three months straight.”
“Has Yakov even taken you to see a doctor yet?” she asks, no small amount of judgment in her voice.
“He actually called in a favor with the best OB-GYN in the country. He’s on call twenty-four hours per day in case I need him.”
Her lips purse. “That’s nice of Yakov.”
“It’s not like he’s doing it as a favor to me. This is his baby, too.” I cradle my stomach. “It’s our baby.”
“How many kids does Yakov already have?”
I barely manage to swallow my water without doing a spit-take. “Excuse me?”
“Well, I mean… I don’t know. He seems like the kind of guy who might get around. And isn’t creating little mafia bosses a big deal for men like him? He’ll need someone to carry on the proud criminal tradition or whatever.”
“It’s not like that, Kayla. He wasn’t trying to get me pregnant. It just… happened.”
She arches her brow. “I don’t believe anything in that man’s life ‘just happens.’ He controls everything, Luna.”
“Not me,” I say confidently. “You just don’t know Yakov well enough. He’s a good man. I’m happy here.”
“You were happy with Benjy once, too,” she says softly. My thoughts must be written plainly on my face because she rushes to explain. “I tried to talk to you about Benjy, but you didn’t want to hear it. I knew you weren’t happy, but you didn’t seem to realize it. I’m just afraid this is a repeat of history.”
“Denial and ignorance are two different things,” I say softly. “I knew I wasn’t happy with Benjy. I just… I didn’t want to admit I’d wasted years of my life with him. Things with Yakov aren’t like that.”
“Agreed,” she says. “Things with Yakov are way, way different. Because you’re isolated in this house and your relationship timeline is on overdrive. You’ve known this man for a few months and you’re already living together and starting a family. It feels like I walked through that front door into some alternate dimension.”
Kayla cares about me. I know that. So I have to wrestle down the urge to defend Yakov. Being mad at her won’t solve anything. The only thing I can do is let her see how happy I am here.
“You’re the one who was always setting me up on endless blind dates,” I say. “You and all the girls talked nonstop about wanting me to find a guy. You all acted like I wasn’t complete without a boyfriend. Now, I have one and you’re still not happy.”
Calling Yakov my “boyfriend” feels juvenile, somehow. He’s so much more than that.
“Loon,” she breathes, “I never thought you were incomplete without a man. Fuck men! You don’t need a man. You certainly don’t need one to make me happy. The only thing I ever wanted was for you to be happy. And I could tell you weren’t. That’s why I tried to set you up. I didn’t want you to be lonely anymore.”
I blink back tears. “I am happy, Kayla. I’m happy with Yakov.”
She studies me, her eyes trailing over my face. Then she nods. “Okay.”
“Okay? Just like that?”
There’s a reason I went on blind dates even when I was beyond done with them; Kayla is not easy to appease. She is determined and she fights for what she believes in. I’ve never seen her give up a fight this easily.
“Okay,” she repeats, biting back a smile. “It’s going to take me some time to get on board with all of this. But if you tell me you’re happy, I’ll believe it until I have evidence to the contrary.”
“There won’t be evidence to the contrary. I’m really happy here. This is what I want. Yakov is what I want.”
“I hope you’re right. That’s all I want for you, Loon.” Without warning, Kayla swats her discarded carrot stick across the countertop and looks up at me under mischievously lowered lashes. “Now, where are you hiding the caramel ice cream cones?”
We take our ice cream out onto the patio. The moment the door opens, Gregory darts between my feet and saunters outside like he owns the place.
“He won’t escape?” Kayla asks, gesturing to where Gregory is curling up on the sun-warmed bricks.
“There was only one spot in the fence that was low enough for him to climb and Yakov had it taken out and replaced with a taller fence.”
She whistles. “He’s even taking care of your cat? You should have started with that. The man is obviously obsessed with you.”
