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I haven’t told anyone. I’ve kept this a total secret from my friends, from my employers, from absolutely everyone in my life. Nobody knows, not even Angelo, the father.
Except Dad.
“How?” I whisper, and I feel like I’m going to fall apart.
He sneers at me and shakes his head. “I ran into Dr. Bernetti at a conference a week ago, and you know what she said? She said, congratulations on your grandchild, you must be so excited. I pretended like I knew what she was talking about, but can you imagine how I felt? I thought she must be wrong, she must be confused, but she wasn’t, was she? My own daughter, pregnant. And I didn’t know.”
Dr. Bernetti. Oh, god. My OB. And if my father wasn’t sure before, I just confirmed it for him. She was the only other person in the entire world that knows. She happened to run into my father and one small comment, one tiny breach of ethics and trust, and now—
I feel like I’m falling into a pit.
Dad comes closer. He looks like he’s ten feet tall and growing bigger. “Your life is going to end, Sara, and any freedom you once had is finished. You can’t take care of a child and still work at Klein and Houndson, and forget about meeting with friends for drinks or going out to dinner or any of the other minor pleasures you might have in your life. That’s all gone now. You have no clue what you’ve done. How far along are you?”
“About ten weeks now,” I whisper.
He groans. “Ten weeks. My god. You’re almost at the end of your first trimester for fuck’s—But no, it’s not too late. You can still take care of this. You can solve this problem and you can still have the life you’ve always wanted, if only—”
The door to the bedroom slams open and Angelo storms out. He’s in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt, his hair soaking wet. “No,” he roars, and his eyes are wild as he advances on my dad. “No, no, no, that’s my fucking baby, that’s my child, and you’re not going to make her solve anything you sick, twisted piece of shit.”
Angelo looks like a crazed rhino ready to charge.
My father stands his ground.
I stagger back, heart racing. Angelo stands seething near the bedroom door while my father tilts his chin up, his eyes gleaming horribly, an awful smile on his lips. I look between the two men, from beautiful and terrible Angelo to my father, the man I’ve always looked up to, always respected, my rock.
“Your baby?” Dad asks quietly, and Angelo steps forward, hands curled into fists. “Do you really think you can claim ownership to something you accidentally squirted into my daughter? You have no rights to her and no rights to this baby. You’ll only drag them down to your pathetic level at best, killed at worst. Or perhaps dying now would be a mercy over letting you anywhere near my grandchild.”
“You piece of shit,” Angelo snarls. “You motherfucking—”
“Please,” I choke out. Tears roll down my cheeks, fat and hot. I don’t remember starting to cry, but I can’t stop it now. I manage to keep the sobbing under control, but the tears won’t stop flowing. “I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
Dad seems surprised. His mouth opens, and he looks from me to Angelo and back again—and he laughs, a bitter and ugly sound. “He didn’t know,” he says. “She kept it from you.”
Angelo’s jaw works. He stares at me now, eyes beseeching, pleading for something, but I don’t know what.
“I didn’t want to get you involved,” I say and wipe my face but it doesn’t help. More tears replace whatever I manage to push aside. “I didn’t think you’d want anything to do with—this.” I put my hands over my stomach.
“How could you have known that?” he asks quietly. “That’s my baby, how could you have thought I wouldn’t want to be in your life?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Dad says before I can reply. “Look at you, boy. You’re a walking disaster. You’re a criminal and you’re basically one misstep away from being thrown in jail for the rest of your worthless life. Can you really blame her for want to protect her baby from you? Do you want your child to grow up with a father behind bars?”
“My baby,” Angelo whispers. He’s staring at me, ignoring my father, and it’s killing me, it’s like a knife’s jammed down my throat and I want to scream it out but I can’t. “You’ve known all this time, haven’t you?”
I nod, lip trembling. “I thought I was doing the right thing. Not for me, but… for the baby.”
“Of course she did,” Dad says, coming closer. “She wants to protect her child from you. Can you really stand there and say you’d make a good parent? Do you really think you’d be the father my grandchild deserves? You know what you are, Angelo. Why make things harder for her?”
