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I sighed. “So you’ve heard?”
Sasha gave me a sad smile and a small nod. “We weren’t talking about you. I overheard Dom briefing the men. He didn’t mean anything by it…”
“I know,” I said. Dom might not have been my favorite person, but I knew that he wouldn’t gossip about my father needlessly.
“Have you not heard from him since you were a kid?” she asked.
I shook my head. “He left shortly after Mikey was born. He couldn’t handle having another kid to feed. At least, that’s what my mother said. One day, I came home, and his shit was gone. Mom never talked about it. She had her own demons she was dealing with…” I wasn’t normally in such a sharing mood, but I felt comfortable opening up to Sasha. Unlike our husbands, she too had family issues.
“I can’t believe that he’s been following you…” she trailed off and shook her head. “It’s crazy.”
I snorted. It was more than crazy. “I don’t even know how he found me. If he’d been in our neighborhood, someone would have said something to mom. A lot of the place is still people who she grew up with. They would have recognized him.” Frankly, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t recognized him. Sometimes I felt so stupid.
“I wonder if he saw the wedding announcement in the paper.”
“What?” I asked. “What announcement?”
Marco and I had been married a month ago. The engagement and ceremony had been over before I could even catch my breath, and I would have noticed if we had made any sort of announcement.
Sasha’s cheeks pinkened, and I immediately knew that neither Marco or myself were the ones who had anything to do with this announcement. “Someone from the Times contacted me when they caught word of the wedding. The Blanchi’s are one of the most prominent families in the city….”
I sighed. Sasha had grown up in this world, but sometimes I wondered if she really had been prepared for the reality of it. I couldn’t imagine that Marco wanted the entirety of Manhattan to know about us.
“I’m so sorry,” Sasha said. “I didn’t think…”
I shook my head. “It’s fine,” I told her. There was nothing that we could do about it now anyway. “I just wish I knew what he wanted.” The thing that bothered me the most was that my father hadn’t bothered to talk to me. He’d been trailing me for weeks, but he hadn’t come to talk to me once. I wondered if it was because he was worried about how I would react. After all, he’d abandoned me and Mikey.
“Have you said anything to your mother?”
I shook my head. “No,” I told her. “We haven’t spoken since before I married Marco.” My mother was sure that my new husband was the actual devil, and she was determined to keep that opinion.
Sasha sighed. “Mothers are difficult.” Her eyes took on a far away look, and I knew that she was thinking about her own mother. Mine might not have been great, but at least she hadn’t tried to kill me. I was grateful for that at least.
I didn’t know what to say to Sasha. Families were hard but hers took the cake. In some ways, I felt bad complaining about my own family considering that her family was either in prison or dead.
Her hand strayed to her belly, and I knew that she was thinking about her own daughter. “Sometimes I worry that my own daughter is going to hate me,” she whispered.
“She won’t,” I insisted. I was sure that Sasha and Dom’s little girl was going to adore both of her parents because they would adore her. “You were born to be a mother.” Sasha had the maternal thing down pat.
She smiled at me. “I hope so,” she said. “I know that Dom is going to be a fantastic father.”
I shrugged. “For all their baggage, the Blanchi’s sound like they were the Leave it to Beaver types.”
Sasha snorted and nodded. “You aren’t wrong.”
This conversation was making me think about what Sasha had suggested before. We’d changed the subject so quickly, that I’d allowed myself a few minutes to forget.
“Do you want me to make an appointment with my doctor?” Sasha asked. It was almost as though she were reading my thoughts.
I swallowed heavily, unsure of what to say. The last month had been insane, and I was sure that I’d just lost track of the specific date of my last period. I could almost remember getting it. I just couldn’t pinpoint when I had.
“It’s just a precaution,” Sasha said. “Just in case.”
She was trying to be nonchalant, but I knew that she thought that I was pregnant, and her certainty was freaking me out. Marco and I hadn’t talked about kids. Not once. We’d married in a whirlwind, and we’d been dealing with threat after threat since then. Being married was honestly super exhausting on its own.
“How would you feel about being pregnant?” Sasha asked.
I swallowed. I honestly didn’t know how I would feel. I’d never thought about having children or anything in my future. Mikey’s illness and our poverty meant that I was often living one day at a time. I didn’t have the luxuary of thinking about what came next. “I’ve never thought about it?”
