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I should have offered her this kind of comfort when she was pregnant. We’d both been a couple of terrified kids—no older than my daughter Maddy was now. We should have supported each other through it instead of turning on one another.
Tess sniffled into my shirt. “I’m just feeling too many things right now, and it’s all so overwhelming.”
“You’re allowed to feel overwhelmed under the circumstances.”
Every difficult emotion I was having right now, Tess had to be feeling ten times more. Maybe even a hundred times. She’d not only been the one to carry Erin and give birth to her, she’d been the one who made the decision to give her up. As much as I’d hated being shut out, it meant I wasn’t the one carrying the responsibility for that choice. I stillfeltresponsible, but not as much as if the decision had actually been up to me.
“I thought I didn’t have any regrets, but…” She exhaled an unsteady breath. “Meeting her today and seeing the amazing woman she grew up to be, it made me realize how much I’ve missed out on. I thought I’d be relieved to see she was safe and healthy—and I am—but now I know exactly what I gave away.”
Before I could say anything, she pushed out of my arms as if she suddenly felt the need to distance herself from me.
She sat on the edge of the couch, leaning forward to press her fists against her eyes. “Shit. I didn’t mean to dump all this on you.”
“Tess—”
“Don’t.” She jerked away when I tried to touch her. “Don’t say anything, okay? I don’t expectyouto understand.”
I reared back, stung. “Why do you think I wouldn’t understand?”
“I know you never wanted to deal with any of this.”
“It’s not something any teenager wants to deal with, but it happened anyway.”
“Yeah, tooneof us,” she shot back, her tone scathing.
“Jesus, really?” A flare of anger roughened my voice. This was the problem with being around Tess. Every time I let my defenses down, she used the opportunity to stick a knife between my ribs. Just in case I needed a reminder that my feelings had always been irrelevant to her. “You’re the one that pushedmeaway, Tess.”
She’d cut me out of her life after she found out she was pregnant. I’d cared about her, and she hadn’t cared about me back. Not enough to want my help when things got hard.
She exhaled a dark laugh that twisted the knife a little more. “Oh, please. You were only too happy to be left out of it so you could go live your life like nothing had ever happened.”
“You didn’t give me a choice! You made it clear I wasn’t entitled to have a say in what happened.”
Her eyes burned with indignation as she glared at me. “Youweren’tentitled to have a say in what happened. It wasmybody.”
I threw my hands up in frustration. “I fucking know that, Tess! I wasn’t trying to tell you what to do. But it was as much my responsibility as yours, and you shut me out completely. You wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“I tried to talk to you! Do you remember what you said when I told you I was pregnant? Because I do. ‘This is a fucking nightmare.’ Those were the first words out of your mouth. Then you started babbling about how you were supposed to go to Yale and this was going to ruin your life.”
“I panicked. I was eighteen and terrified. Of course I was thinking about how it would affect my future. You can’t tell me you weren’t thinking the exact same thing.”
“The difference is that I didn’t have the option to walk away.”
“It wasn’t my choice to walk away,” I ground out, fighting to keep my temper in check. “You made that decision for me. Or did you conveniently forget about the part where you said you didn’t want to see me anymore?”
“You couldn’t get away from me fast enough! You said you needed time to process or whatever, and I gave it to you like you asked, but you never showed up. Younevershow up, because that’s who you are—the guy who dodges responsibility and bails when he doesn’t want to do something. I knew I was totally on my own, so no, I didn’t want to fucking see you anymore!”
I battled to keep my voice even. “I was going to come talk to you just as soon as—”
“Three days,” she cut in. “That’s how long I waited for you to be ready to talk. I told you I was pregnant, and you disappeared on me. You left me sitting around my house waiting on you and wondering what you were thinking.”
“I fucked up, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I admit it. My head was spinning and I didn’t know what to do. When I said I’d come see you, I forgot we had a family reunion that weekend. I was in Lake Geneva with my mom and my sister and about a hundred other relatives.”
“You couldn’t have picked up the phone and told me that? Taken thirty seconds to let me know before you left so I didn’t feel abandoned?”
“I should have.” I dragged a guilty hand through my hair. “My mom wouldn’t even leave me alone for five minutes, and it seemed easier to put it off and talk to you when I had more time. I shouldn’t have. I get that it was an inconsiderate thing to do to you, but I was going to talk to you on Monday, I swear to God. I had a whole speech planned out about how I’d be there to support you no matter what you wanted to do.”
It had been seriously shitty of me, leaving Tess hanging like that. I hadn’t appreciated how shitty at the time. I hadn’t appreciated a lot of things. Selfishly, I’d been focused on my own feelings and hadn’t given enough thought to what Tess must have been going through. She’d seemed so calm and collected when she told me she was pregnant, I’d assumed she was coping better than me. But of course she wasn’t. How could she have been? She was just better at pretending.
