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Thankfully, as I drift off, I don’t dream of David. And I have some hope that I’ll be able to forget about him, just as he forgot about me before I was even gone.
10
AMALIE
ONE MONTH LATER
“Amalie! I’ve been calling your name for fifteen minutes. How did you not hear me—”
My mother’s voice is interrupted by the sound of me gagging and throwing up into the toilet for the second time this morning. I wonder dimly if I’m ever going to be able to enjoy food again, fumbling for the handle to flush before more comes up. As my mother knocks heavily on the door, I grab for the plastic stick on the counter in a panic, clutching it in my hand.
I don’t look at the result yet. I can’t. I don’t want to know.
I’ve thrown up almost every morning for the last week. I told myself—and my mother—that it was a stomach flu. Claire came by with notes from class and my favorite Thai soup that always seems to settle my stomach, but it came right back up, too, and I’ve been too exhausted to do much more than give my schoolwork a cursory glance.
My mother hasn’t cared about the missed class—she thinks college is mostly a distraction, and something she was only talked into because she knows Gianna Mancini was allowed to go—but shedoescare about the fact that I was too sick to go to a charity gala she wanted me to attend with her last weekend, after she’d been gone to Boston again.
This time, when she left, I had double the security trailing my every move, making sure I didn’t run off again. What little freedom I had before has been heavily curtailed after I escaped to Ibiza. And when she came back—with nothing to say about whether she’d managed to broker the marriage that she’s been trying to put together for me—her mood was much, much worse than usual.
“Amalie!” The doorknob rattles. “Why is the door locked? What are you doing?” She rattles it again, and I wince, gagging once more with nothing left to throw up. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’m sick.” My hand flexes around the plastic stick in my palm.It’s just the flu, I tell myself, closing the toilet lid and resting my flushed cheek against the cool porcelain, but deep down, I think I know what I’m going to see when I look at the pregnancy test. I’ve been throwing up and exhausted, but I haven’t run a fever. I don’t have chills. My appetite is just fine—I just can’t keep any of it down.
It’s not the flu.
“Just give me a minute?” I hate the pleading note in my voice, but I can’t help it. “I just need a minute.”
My mother huffs out a breath on the other side of the door. “Fine,” she says curtly. “I have an appointment to get to. But you arenotto be late coming home today, if you go to class. Am I understood? No coffee with that little friend of yours, no going over to her house, no detour into the city to shop. You come straight home. I have someone I want you to meet.”
My stomach twists for an entirely different reason.This is it, I realize, the last of my hope that maybe no one would take my mother up on her desperate bargaining fading away.I’m going to end up married to a stranger. And now—
I sit back on the rug next to the bathtub as her footsteps fade away down the hall, willing myself to uncurl my fingers and look at the test result waiting in my hand. The possible consequence of my—and David’s—recklessness.
A man whose last name I don’t even know.
I squeeze my eyes shut as I open my hand. It takes everything in me to open them, to see what I already know is going to be the result.
Two pink lines look up at me from the little test window, and my entire world grinds to a halt.
For a moment, I can’t think. I can’t breathe. Panic wells up in me, and I fling the test across the room, the plastic striking the door with an ineffectual sound as I burst into tears.
One stupid mistake, and now I’m pregnant.
What am I going to do?My first thought is that Claire might help me. She might not let me off the hook easily for being so reckless, but I think she would help me find a way to take care of it.
The problem, of course, is my security, and how much more stringent they’ve been since I returned from Ibiza. I don’t think I’d be able to slip away to a clinic with Claire, the way I might have been able to before. And I can’t go to our family doctor—medical privacy might apply to most people, but not to me—not in this situation. The doctors who are trusted enough to treat members of mafia families know who their loyalties lie with—and it won’t be me, the daughter who got herself accidentally knocked up. There are consequences to keeping secrets like that.
I’ll figure it out. I have time.It’s only been a month—I can try to find a solution. I try to quell the panic as I peel myself off of the floor and go back to my room, intent on actually making it to class today. I want to avoid my mother when she gets home, if nothing else.
I get a text from Claire on the drive to campus telling me that she’s not feeling well, and I feel a small, guilty pang of relief. She knows me well enough to see that something is bothering me, and I don’t have the energy to dodge her questions—or come up with a convincing lie.
I hope you didn’t catch it from me, I text back quickly, feeling that small pang of guilt again—I know very well that she didn’t—and almost immediately see a text back.
Me too! You must be feeling better, though. Get notes for me, k?
Ok, I type back quickly, and shove my phone into my purse, leaning my head back against the cool leather seat. My stomach is still doing flips even though it’s empty, and I let out slow breaths, trying to keep the nausea under control. This day has been bad enough already, the last thing I need is to throw up in the middle of class.
It’s hard to focus. I manage to take halfway decent notes for Claire, I think, but my mind is constantly wandering, thinking about what my options are. Even with the proof of the test right in front of me this morning, it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel as if that one passionate slip-up, that one night, could have turned into this.
