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“Again?” He honed in on her use of the word instantly, as she had known he would. He was too sharply analytical to let her slip of the tongue go unacknowledged. Certainly, to go unpunished.
She had to take it back. She waved a hand in the air in the hopes of seeming dismissive. “I just mean that you and I got divorced. The whole messy break up thing. I don’t want to do that again, and I don’t want to do it to a child.”
He wasn’t convinced. She could see doubt radiating from every line on his face. “You have not been pregnant before?”
Jane blanched. She felt as though she’d been slapped. “It’s none of your business. What happened between the moment I walked out of your house and now has nothing to do with you.”
Carlo could have roared like a wild beast, so fierce was the venomous fury within him. The panic and fear and anger and resentment all swirled inside him to form a whirlpool of sensation. “What are you not telling me?” He demanded, every inch of him coiled like a spring.
“Nothing. Everything.” Her heart was pounding from a combination of fear and stress. She lowered her eyes and stared at the plush carpet. Her heels were leaving dent marks in it, she noticed abstractly.
“Jane,” he spoke louder and more
harshly than he’d meant. But his whole being was on tenterhooks, waiting to comprehend what she’d meant. He tried to focus his mind, to find a degree of understanding in the mysterious statement. She had not been pregnant when she’d left him. He knew that if she had been, she would have stayed. Or at least would have told him. Jane Lang, the sweet woman he’d married, would never have kept such news from him. Not knowing how alone he was in the world.
Which meant what? That she’d been with someone else? Conceived a baby with someone else? It was too unpalatable to give his mind over to. Imagining her body moving for another man’s. Worse, imagining the seed of another man growing inside of her.
He pressed his hand against the wall to expel some of the built up emotions he was experiencing. The look of terror on her face washed him with remorse. He would never hurt her. He lived to protect her. He had failed her in that way, and he was failing her still.
“Please, Jane. Whatever happened to you, not knowing is worse for me than the truth.”
Only he did know something. He knew, for example, that there had not been a child. Nor a pregnancy.
So what had she meant? If she hadn’t visibly grown fat with child, yet she was hinting that she’d been pregnant, did it mean that she had lost the baby early on? Or ended the pregnancy by her choice?
He scanned her face, the very idea making him feel unsteady on his feet. “You know that I am an orphan. That I have no brothers. No sisters. That you and I are alike in that way. Two people, alone in the world, who found each other.”
She nodded, her anguish a physical force he could feel.
“If we had conceived a child, I know you would have felt obliged to tell me. Even once we were separated. You understand, as no one else can, what that child would have meant to me.”
Jane’s mouth was dry. She opened her mouth to speak but no words would form. The guilt at her body’s inability to do what it had been designed to do made her shake. Their baby would have been loved, even when they could no longer love one another.
“I know you will not lie to me now, Jane. Did we make a baby together?”
A hiss escaped Jane’s lips. She wanted to deny it. Wouldn’t it be easier if she could simply lie? Or at least hide the truth? Think of a vague way to cover over what they’d had within their hands, and not been able to grasp? She forced her eyes to meet his, and with that one look, she knew that he deserved to grieve as much as she had. As much as she still did.
“I didn’t…” She bit down on her lower lip. “I didn’t find out until it was too late.”
Carlo straightened, putting a little more distance between them. But he didn’t move away, and his eyes didn’t leave her face. The raw emotion she saw on his features made her stomach roll. “What do you mean?” He asked finally, his voice strained.
A tear slid down Jane’s cheek, and then another chased it. They splashed unchecked to the carpeted floor. “I fainted in the supermarket.” She toyed with the necklace she wore. The necklace that would always remind her of their child. “I knocked my shoulder on the edge of a fridge, and I guess they were worried enough to call an ambulance; maybe just being super cautious. There was a lot of blood.”
He was still. So many questions bounced through him but he wouldn’t ask them. He had learned, long ago, that the best way to get information was to let people talk themselves out.
Her throat lifted as she swallowed hard and fast. “I was having a miscarriage. In the shop. The pain made me lose consciousness.” She gripped the wall for support, and stared blankly ahead. “I just thought I had a stomach flu, at first. My neighbour Liz had been sick. It made sense.”
At the mention of her neighbour, he felt a jab of compunction.
“But it was the baby.” She shook her head. “I was almost four months pregnant.” Her eyes were hollow. “It must have been my birthday…” Her voice trailed off, as her fingers gripped the necklace more tightly. His eyes dropped to it, and he remembered that night. Remembered how perfect he had thought things were for them. How much he’d loved her.
“By the time I reached the hospital, I was vomiting and in a lot of pain.” Unconsciously, her hands dropped to her abdomen, and then fell to her sides. “I was taken straight into surgery. I didn’t know what had happened until I came to afterwards.”
Carlo was besieged by a torrent of feelings he had no way of processing. He cautiously tamped down on the seething tangle of emotions within.
Jane wasn’t finished, though. “That’s why the hospital called you. I wrote your information down, as I was going into surgery.”
“They never called me. Not then.”
