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My eyes narrowed at her last worried words, but I didn’t comment on it. As much as I wanted to put this off because this seemed like the worst time to finally do this, I wouldn’t. I lazily traced shapes onto Harlow’s bare stomach to keep myself calm, and said, “Right; you never told me what happened on Monday.”
Her face pinched in worry and pain, and my body tensed in preparation for whatever she was about to tell me. “I thought I was pregnant,” she said after a few silent moments.
I nodded slowly. “You bought yourself a week.”
She shook her head. “On Friday he made me take a test. It was positive.”
My face and arm fell, but I didn’t try to move away from her. I just didn’t know how to keep it up anymore. I hadn’t missed the word thought, but it was hard to think about her having a positive pregnancy test at all with another man when I’d just finished making her mine.
“I didn’t know how to tell you. I’ve always been careful so I wouldn’t get pregnant with him. On Monday I was waiting at the doctor’s office when you and I talked on the phone. I wanted to tell you in person after, but then Collin showed up at the appointment.”
Harlow’s body started shaking. It took all my strength to move my arm to pull her close again, but I didn’t comment on the near-violent trembling.
“He’s never missed work, or left early, a day that we’ve been married. But he went, and that’s when we found out that there was no baby. There hadn’t been a baby. Collin was . . . Collin was . . .” She trailed off, and her head shook slowly as one hand came up to rest on her throat. Her eyes weren’t focused, and I knew she wasn’t seeing me, or the room we were in. She choked out a sob and turned onto her side to press her forehead into my chest.
I ran my hand over her back and tried not to think of the way her shoulder blades and spine felt against my palm, or the way her hip felt digging into my stomach.
“He’s changed,” she murmured. “He’s changed, and it’s terrifying.”
“Wasn’t he terrifying before?”
I hardly breathed for minutes as Harlow whispered about things Collin had done to her; she described them in a way that suggested she’d done something wrong—dirty even. I’d seen every bruise by that point, but I hadn’t imagined anything half as bad as what she’d described. “Oh my God,” I finally said. “I’m taking you from here. I need to—”
“No, that was before,” she said, and lifted her head to look into my eyes. Her eyes were round with understanding and worry. “He—he’s not doing that now. Some ways it’s better, I guess. But it really is so much worse.”
My mouth opened, but no sound came out. All I could think was, How can anything be worse? Then I looked down to her throat, and I thought I might understand.
It wasn’t until she told me about the shower on Monday, and what had happened with the eggs that morning, that I realized I didn’t.
“Now you know,” she said with fresh tears in her eyes. “Now you know everything. I swore I would never tell anyone what was happening, or what had happened, but I know with this change, each day my monster comes out is only going to get worse and worse until there isn’t another day for me.”
A sob hitched in my throat, but I choked it back down. I knew that if she was saying those words, then she meant them. Harlow wouldn’t say them for sympathy
or dramatic effect. Not after she’d endured years of what she’d just explained to me, and had tried before to tell me she was fine and could handle it.
“Why?” I finally asked. “Why did you choose him? There had to have been some sign that he was this guy.”
“None. I look back and still don’t see it. But, Knox, I’d thought I’d lost you before my eighteenth birthday ever came.” My brow furrowed, but she continued before I could ask. “I know what was going on back then because my dad told me, but when I left Seattle and you pulled away from me, I was so sure that you were pulling away for good—that you were done waiting for me. My heart broke every day until Collin had healed it enough that it finally stopped.”
It felt like I was back at that day. It felt like my heart was being ripped out all over again. “You thought I was pulling away from you?” I asked, horror coating my words. “Harlow, no, I was pushing you to go have a life, and giving you time to know exactly what you wanted because your dad made me promise I would!”
“I know,” she said. Tears fell from her eyes, and she brought a hand up to cover my cheek. “I was so confused when you called me on my birthday. Confused in my feelings and why you were calling at all. I was sure you only called for the same reason you sporadically called in the months before—out of obligation. But even though I thought you were done with me, I still was so worried that I’d made a mistake in choosing him. I’m so sorry,” she choked out. “Not waiting for you was the biggest mistake of my life, Knox Alexander.”
I shook my head, unable to grasp how badly everything had gotten fucked-up back then. I’d blamed Harlow . . . I’d blamed her dad . . . and now I knew I had to blame myself. I’d unintentionally broken her heart and sent her into Collin’s arms while I wrecked myself just trying to give her a few months of freedom. “How long did it take you to realize that?”
Her face twisted with grief. “What difference will it make?” The words were so soft, even with her pressed this close to me I could barely hear them.
“I want to know,” I assured her.
“It will only hurt you mo—”
“Harlow.”
She sighed, and her eyes drifted to the side, like she was remembering things from those years apart. “I always wondered. I dream of you most nights, and it started right after that phone call on my eighteenth birthday. I’d wake up in the middle of the night from the dreams crying, and would cry until I fell asleep again. But I kept telling myself that I was in love with Collin—well, I was in love with Collin. I think I told myself I wasn’t in love with you anymore because I knew you weren’t in love with me.” Her head shook once. “The day he asked me to marry him was when I first thought I’d made the wrong choice.
“When he asked, I had this flashback to the night you told me you were going to marry me—that night we planned our whole future—and all I could see was you when I told him ‘yes.’ Collin started changing that night. Just subtle things, but I think I just loved him enough that I kept excusing what he did, or making myself believe that it hadn’t really happened. Then somehow time kept passing. Right before the wedding, every time I woke from a dream of you, I had this deep sense of longing and loss. That’s when I knew that I’d chosen the wrong man. But it didn’t matter; it was too late for us. Too much time had passed, and I was getting married to a man I loved, even if I could never love him the way I loved you. I just kept telling myself that even if I had chosen you, so much had changed and there had been so much heartbreak in those months after I’d left that we never would’ve been able to go back to how we had been.”
“It never would’ve been too late for us,” I insisted.
