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The waiting room is conveniently empty today. The sales associate says it’s because most Kansas City high school proms happened the weekend before. We have the whole dressing room to ourselves, and I watch Danielle try on outfit after outfit. She discards each with a frustrated sigh. Either they’re too big, too small, or make her baby bump seem too noticeable.
“We did not think this through,” she says from her enclosed room. She’s on the last dress, a little black number that she already decided wouldn’t work. “I should have gotten on the pill.”
“I should have worn a condom,” I offer.
“Why?” Danielle pulls the curtain back enough to show her face. She wears an angry look. “Do you not want to be a dad anymore?”
Her hormones have sent her on a roller coaster lately. Everything I say is wrong and upsetting. “I want nothing more than to be the father of your children, Dani. You are the love of my life.”
This soothes her temper. She returns to fitting herself into the gown and zipping it up in the back. “Oh, god,” Danielle mumbles, “I look like a sausage.”
She’s said that about every dress. To quell her self-conscious rage, I ask her to step out and let me see.
“You’re biased,” she announces as she swings the curtain open. “You’d think I was beautiful in anything.”
She’s not wrong. But in truth, shedoeslook beautiful.
The dress has a sweetheart neckline and a loose, flowing bodice that hides her stomach. It’s black, but the silky fabric has flecks of white and swirls of silver and gray. Strands of silver beads are scattered like shooting stars accented against the dark fabric. The skirt flares out, almost like wings, and is made up of tiers. She looks like Cinderella, but she is a dark beauty compared to the blonde Disney princess.
“Do you know what you look like right now?” She takes my breath away.
Danielle steps in front of the large dressing room mirror to look at herself more closely. I think she sees what I see because she’s stunned into silence.
I come up behind her and place my hands on her hips, feeling like the luckiest man alive to be with a woman so gorgeous. “You look like every dream I’ve ever had coming true.”
She twists in my arms and places her hands on my chest. “I wish I were going to prom with you,” Danielle admits in a small whisper. “All my friends have dates. I wish I could show off my boyfriend.”
I pull her as close as her swollen belly will allow. “We have the rest of our lives to be together, Dani. And I’ll be at prom.”
“But we won’t get to dance together,” she says with a pretty little pout.
I kiss it away. “But at least we’ll be there together.” It won’t be the same, but I hope it’ll be enough.
The sales rep packs up the dress and runs Danielle’s card. She warily eyes the pregnant belly beneath Danielle’s shirt but wisely says nothing. Still, her silence is deafening.
“Where to, now?” I ask as we exit, carrying her prom dress box for her.
Danielle runs through a list of places we could go for lunch or to shop. She even mentions the zoo. “It’s not as big as the Omaha Zoo,” she adds, “but it’s huge. There’s so much to see, so many animals. I follow them on Facebook, and their tiger just had babies.”
“The zoo it is,” I grin.
Everywhere in Kansas City feels like a thirty-minute drive from everywhere else. We have to get back on the highway and cross from the far south side of the city to get to the zoo. “God, I hate driving in Kansas City traffic,” I grumpily announce when we finally get onto a side street. “There’s no reason they need five lanes on the highway.”
Danielle chuckles and keeps her eyes on the phone. It is directing us turn-by-turn to the Kansas City Zoo’s parking lot. “At the next stoplight, turn left,” she says a few seconds before the generic computer voice says the same thing.
“I’m glad we live in Manhattan,” I continue. “The worst traffic is when there’s construction and the students are in town. You might spend ten minutes waiting for a light because the road is backed up, but at least you don’t have to merge four times to—”
I’m cut off before I get to finish the sentence. The light has a green arrow summoning me forward, and as I turn left, we’re t-boned. A truck rams right into the passenger side of Danielle’s Jeep.
My head slams into the glass window from the sudden impact, and I stomp on the brakes out of muscle memory. The sound of metal on metal crushing will be stuck in my memories forever. Luke Bryan sings about margaritas on the radio as the Jeep crashes into a car stopped in the oncoming traffic lane. When we make it to a halt, there’s glass everywhere and people screaming—everyone but Danielle, who is slumped over with blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.
The driver of the oncoming truck steps out of his vehicle with a rattled look on his face. He has his arms up as if to surrender, but the damage has been done. Danielle sits unmoving beside me, her head propped up by the airbag.
Instinctively, I want to jump out of the car and rush to the other side to ensure she’s okay, but I can’t move. My head is singing with pain, and every limb in my body feels like it weighs a ton. Witnesses in the surrounding cars start getting out and rushing toward us. Someone opens my door. I hear someone else say they’re calling 911. Another person opens Danielle’s door and swears under their breath.
“She’s. Pregnant.” I struggle to get the words out. My chest hurts for some reason.
The man on Danielle’s side of the car starts frantically working to free her from the wreckage. Someone reaches across me to brush her hair back, revealing a gash on her forehead.
