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Her face falls when sees the test window. I think I even feel the frustration when her hand comes up to rest on her belly. “I-I think I need to lie down.”
I’m not a fool. I know that she feels out of her depth. This isn’t a situation any woman could be brought into and expected to handle with grace and dignity. I take a few steps toward her and press my lips to her forehead. “Take all the time you need. Let me know if you need anything.”
I don’t bother following her up the stairs or locking her bedroom door. I just give her some space while I sit on the bathroom floor and stare at the two pink lines.
It wasn’t until I was twenty-four years old that I really started thinking about having a family and settling down. But as the years passed, I seemed to get further and further from that dream. My father told me that family comes first; he didn’t mean the Valentis as a whole. He meant finding a woman to love and having children. He always said that having a family was the greatest thing that ever happened to him.
I know Calliope doesn’t see it now, but one day she’ll realize that I did her a favor. All this was for the two of us. It was meant to be.
Some might even call it fate.
14
CALLIOPE
Once upon a time, I wanted to be a teacher. It’s a foolish dream that every kid has when they come across a teacher that changes their life. But a lot of them grow up and go into other careers. They become mechanics, they run convenience stores or restaurants, they go into law or politics, or some other job that pays better than a teacher’s salary. Hell, even I waited tables and went into real estate instead of following my dreams.
But if I’d become a teacher, maybe I wouldn’t be locked up in an ivory tower belonging to a rich Villain Charming.
I can’t seem to make myself comfortable when I come back to my room. The bed feels too cushy, the taste of wealth making me nauseous again. When I switch to the windowsill, I feel restless looking out at the beautiful garden below when everything feels dark and heavy. The sitting area feels too stuffy and I don’t want to take a bath.
I settle for lying on the floor with my extremities splayed out in an X. The white ceiling is my only comfort.
Raniero’s house is everything I dreamt of as a kid. Bright white walls with picture frames acting as the only pop of color. Plenty of space for the family to stretch out in without ever feeling like they were crowding one another. Everything draped in comfort and blankets, beckoning friends and visitors to sit down and stay a while.
I thought that I’d wind up in a house like this because I’d married a man that I loved. I didn’t have a clear picture of what he looked like, but I knew that he worked hard. One of those guys that takes his forty hours a week seriously. When he came home at night, he’d leave the office at the front door. He wouldn’t sully our home with talk about corporate regulations and work stresses because he’d rather spend time with me and the children.
Children. Just thinking about kids makes me bring a hand up to my stomach.
I’ve been thin for as long as I could remember. First, it was because I was young and my metabolism burned off the calories within an hour. Then, it was because I couldn’t afford to eat. I physically cannot imagine what my body will look like swollen with a baby.
I know that a lot of women dream about being mothers when they’re twenty-five. I should feel lucky that it happened to me so quickly and with someone who can provide for me. But I just feel empty inside. I can’t process everything that’s happened.
My thoughts race the Daytona 500 around my head, ping-ponging off the walls of my brain as they crash into one another. What will my wedding be like? What will I tell my children about their father? Will I ever be allowed to leave this house again? Will Raniero allow me to have a career? What do I even want to do?
There are so many questions and the only answers that I can find are half-baked conclusions that don’t make any sense.
I take a deep breath and try to center myself.Breathe in peace, breathe out anger.I scream those words in my head over the thousands of questions I don’t have answers for. Eventually, the yells drown out the questions and all I’m left with is a little voice in my head telling me to breathe in peace and breathe out anger.
The room feels like it’s spinning so I shut my eyes. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” I whisper to no one in particular. The room is empty; I’m not talking to anyone except myself.
I was supposed to have a mom and a dad that loved one another. They were supposed to be together forever. My dad wasn’t supposed to hit my mom or scream at her for whatever perceived fault he could dream up. She wasn’t supposed to run away and leave me and my brothers to fend for ourselves.
Ares and Apollo were older than me and they protected me the best they could. But Ares was into sports and Apollo was in every club that would take him. When they were busy with practices and after-school meetings, I was listening to my father rant about how I looked like my mother and that I was just as worthless. Then while I was praying for my brothers to walk through the door and bust up the scene, my father would hit me. He said that it was repayment for my mother’s sins, that a woman is only as strong as the man she has in her life. “Your mother has no one and she is weak. You have me and you will be strong.” He drilled those words into me with a fist to the gut. “Pain only makes you stronger, sweetie. Remember that.”
Life wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. I was supposed to make it through high school with straight A’s taking honor classes and advanced placement English. The college credits that I earned from those classes would put me ahead when I finally started college. I was going to get my teaching degree and change lives.
I was going to do good things.
I went to a church once when I was sixteen. I had just finished up my junior year and a teacher sent a report home stating that I kept coming into class late. I know she thought that she was being helpful, but my dad didn’t see it that way. He fractured my wrist and stabilized it with a first aid wrap he found under the bathroom sink. He told me I needed to do better if I was going to make him proud, then he left for work.
I stumbled from the house with all the bones in my body aching. He’d pushed me into walls and shoved me to the floor. I felt battered and broken and I went to the only place that I could think of that treated battered and broken people without asking any questions.
The doors of the Methodist church were unlocked and there were arrows pointing me toward the pastor’s office. Instead, I took a seat in the back row of the pews and stared at the cross on the stage. There were no bibles for me to flip through, just a few different hymnals on the back of the pew in front of me. I skipped through the pages searching for answers, only finding music that worshipped Him.
“Miss, can I help you?” Someone asked after a while.
I don’t know when I started crying, but I guess somewhere between hymn 518 from one book and 1,024 in another, my eyes started leaking. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I asked the guy standing at the end of the pew.
