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“Is that…isthat my best friend?”
I roll my eyes as I step into Simone’s house. “Ha. Very funny.”
Simone wraps me in a bear hug. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. I almost forgot what you look like.”
“Let me look at you.” I hold her shoulders out in front of me and set my gaze on her belly bump. “You’re the cutest pregnant woman ever.”
“Pretty sure all best friends are supposed to say that, but I won’t complain if you want to give me a compliment.” She gestures to her couch. “The pizza should be here in fifteen minutes.”
I flop onto her couch and kick off my shoes. “Where’s Randall?”
“He met up with the guys to watch the Giants game.”
“How have you been feeling? Has the nausea subsided?”
“It’s so much better than it was. After living on saltine crackers for days on end, I’m looking forward to pizza tonight.” She waves a dismissive hand. “But I don’t want to talk about morning sickness. How are you?”
“I’m fine.”
She shoots me a dubious look. “Grant tries to hook you up with his friend and you haven’t spoken in a week. Want to try again and tell me how you’re really feeling?”
I heave a sigh. “I’m shitty. But I don’t want to talk about it because there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Simone chews the inside of her cheek.
“What? What’s that look for?”
“Look, you know I’m your best friend, and I’ll support you through anything. But I wouldn’t be your best friend if I didn’t tell you my opinion.”
I square my shoulders. “Which is…?”
“I think you’re being a little too hard on him, given the situation.”
My eyes widen. “What?”
“Yes, he was an idiot for trying to convince you to be with Jason. But his heart was in the right place, Len. He was pushing you away because he didn’t want to stand in your way.” She shrugs. “That sounds pretty damn romantic to me.”
“Romantic?” My mouth hangs open for a moment as my brain tries to process. “How is it romantic that he didn’t communicate with me or ask me what I wanted?”
Simone waves a dismissive hand. “Men don’t communicate. Hell, half the women I know don’t communicate either. But you have a fight, and then you learn how to communicate. You can’t shut him out the second things get real.”
“I’m not shutting him out. He shut me out. He made a decision on my life without even talking to me about how he felt or what he was thinking. He just decided I should be with Jason, as if I’m not a person with a brain in my head.” I press my palm against my chest. “I’m not some damsel he can sell to the highest bidder.”
“Or maybe he didn’t want to put you in a position to choose between being with him or having a family, so he made the decision for you—a selfless act by a man who loves you.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this right now.”
“Is it so crazy?” Her head tilts as she challenges me. “Grant has spent the last decade trying to protect Noah, and in turn, he has created this isolated life for himself. He finally meets someone he can fall in love with, but you’re in a different stage of life than he is. To him, you don’t have a family and you’re still young enough to create one. Sure, he didn’t know that you can’t physically have children, but you’re young enough to explore other options. If you two fell in love and started dating, only to find out that you both wanted different things later on, how would that affect Noah? All three of you would be heartbroken. So once again, he's putting your and Noah’s needs before his own, and that makes me feel sad for him.”
Tears burn my eyes as Simone’s words set in. I don’t want to hear her but I do. I understand what she’s saying, and I didn’t see it from her perspective before because I was too angry and too hurt.
“I just wish he would’ve talked to me about it before pushing me away,” I whisper.
Simone reaches over and clasps my hand. “So, tell him that.”
When the pizza arrives, we talk and we laugh, and it heals a small part of me inside the way a girls’ night often does. But throughout the night, Simone’s words bounce off the walls of my mind.
Is she right?
