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“Besides...” Susan shot a glance outside her window, to the tepid March day. She could empathize with the weak ray of sun trying to burn its way through the haze. “It’s not enough, anyway. The surgery will solve part of his problem. But he won’t have a life without physical therapy and there are no funds for that.”
“This is really getting to you, isn’t it?” Jill asked, still standing in front of Susan’s desk.
“Yeah.” Along with everything else. For once in her life, Susan wondered if she’d taken on more than she could handle.
So she rationalized. Her period was late because she was tense. She hadn’t gone this long without talking to Michael since the first year after their divorce. And she’d been late then, too. Of course, that could have been because she’d gone off birth control pills and her cycle was messed up.
However, not having seen or heard from Michael in six weeks, she knew she couldn’t stall any longer. She was well and truly on her own. Or rather, well and truly without Michael. It was time to find out if she was alone or not—a single woman or a mother-to-be.
She’d bought the home pregnancy test weeks ago. The time had come to use it.
If nothing else, she rationalized as she drove home from work, once she knew, she’d have an excuse to call Michael. Maybe even get him to make love to her once more...
She remained calm until she actually had to go and see the test result. Trembling, she started to cry even before she was in the bathroom door. Either way, the news was terrible.
Either way, she needed to find out.
She’d give anything to know she could have Michael back, return to the way things had been.
And she’d give just as much to know that she did indeed have a baby, one she and Michael had created together, growing right there inside her.
Like a child fighting the inevitable, she shut her eyes the second she stepped through the door. But not before she’d seen. Shaking, moving a little closer in her self-imposed darkness, she counted to three and quickly flashed her eyes open, then shut them again.
The result was the same. She didn’t need to look a third time. Tears squeezed out of her tightly closed lids, slid down her cheeks and off her chin. Susan sank weakly to the floor, her legs no longer capable of supporting her.
And yet, as she sat there, propped against the bathroom door, a small burst of joy exploded within her, spreading until it touched her face, her lips. She was grinning like an idiot. And crying, too.
She was pregnant.
“HELLO?” Home for the first time in weeks, Michael had a premonition as soon as he heard the telephone ring.
“Michael?”
He knew he shouldn’t have answered the damn thing. “Hello, Susan.” What else was there to say? I’ve been waiting to hear from you? He’d been avoiding her like the plague. It’s good to hear your voice? It wasn’t. He felt panicked.
“How are you?” He asked the innocuous question only when the silence had dragged on so long he couldn’t stand that, either.
“Pregnant.”
Oh. God. She wasn’t supposed to just blurt it out like that!
“Well, goodbye...” she said—and hung up.
Stunned, Michael pulled the phone away from his ear, looked at it a moment before dropping it back in its cradle. She’d never given him a chance to think, let alone speak.
He’d been on his way out to buy some groceries, but took off his jacket and threw it on the couch instead. Pouring himself a drink, he downed it in one gulp. Then, for want of anything else to do, he poured another. And paced. His living room. His kitchen. His office. The bedroom. And when he ran out of rooms, he took a hike around the complex.
Everything looked exactly the same as it had when he’d arrived a couple of hours before. Hell, it all looked exactly as he’d left it two weeks ago, when he’d made a quick trip home to pay some bills.
Why, suddenly did it all feel so different? Nothing had changed. His life was no different from the way it had been an hour before, a year before, five years before. He was single. Married to his job. He lived alone. Was responsible for no one. Not even a pet.
Nothing had changed.
“There’s absolutely no reason to go,” he told himself as he rounded the corner of his building.
“What was that, Mr. Kennedy?” the elderly widow who lived next door to him called out.
She was pruning her rose bushes—and his, too.
