Molly spoke again, her voice calmer.
“Look, I can assure you that my personal situation will have absolutely no impact on my professional work. I’m sorry I got dizzy for a moment there, but it is rather hot in here,” she continued. Her voice was shaking, and she cleared her throat. Maybe if she could just pretend the last two minutes hadn’t happened, no one would remember them by the time they got to their computers tomorrow.
“Anyway, my focus is on introducing you to some of the most powerful people in Philadelphia business development. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be tonight than here, celebrating the success we’ve had.” She turned to Stevens’ wife. “Susan, don’t you agree that this is wonderful?”
Molly smiled wide until she saw Stevens relax and begin to grin, too. He nodded, as if coming to an agreement with himself, and stuck out his thick hand.
“Well, congratulations, Molly. A new baby is always exciting, even with your, uh, predicament there.” Molly bit the inside of her cheek.
“Hell, the old lady and I made four of them ourselves.” He nudged Susan with his elbow. Yeah, Molly thought. But you didn’t have to rely on people like you to make sure you could afford them.
“Thanks, Mark. I appreciate that.” Tucking her bag under one arm, Molly looked around the room again, surveying the business leaders in attendance. She drew in a breath of air and took Stevens by the elbow.
“Look, I see Mary Keefer, the president of Stolton Materials, over there. I worked with her a while back, and she could probably help you with that grocery chain project. Shall I introduce you?”
She gestured toward the other woman and directed the couple across the room.
Thunder was rumbling across the dark sky when Molly emerged from a taxi much later, even though the spring evening had been mild. The city air felt heavy in its humidity, laden with damp and strangely quiet. The lone sound of the taxi’s tires faded away, and Molly stood on the sidewalk with her keys in one hand, listening. She heard no televisions, no car radios. The usual traffic seemed to have disappeared from her street. There was no one else roaming the neighborhood this late at night. A sudden rustling sound from her left made Molly turn and jump just as a rat skittered out from under a car. It brushed the tips of Molly’s toes as it ran by. She shuddered in revulsion, smoothing down the hair that now stood on end on her arms.
She walked up the stairs to her house with care. Even though she knew it was because of the coming storm, the absence of bird calls, of pigeons warbling, unsettled her, and she realized her heart was beating more quickly than usual. Molly reached the top of the steps just as a single flash of lightning ripped through the sky. Molly placed her key in the door, pushing the knob as she turned it. The door swung open too easily, and Molly had crossed the threshold before she realized that it hadn’t been locked at all. She could sense a presence in the house. A roar of thunder rolled over the city, shaking the air with its threat.
She was not alone.
In the dark of her living room, Molly slowly set her bag down on the floor, freeing her hand, her fingers quivering, to slide a letter opener off of the entranceway table. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she discerned the silhouette of a man sitting on her couch. Molly’s heart began thumping in her chest. Her knees started shaking, almost giving way beneath her. Her breath was coming fast and hard, and she ran her finger over the point of the opener, testing its sharpness as she reached for the lamp. She thought about her phone, deep in the recesses of her bag, and debated opening the door and running for help. But before she could move, the figure on the couch rose, the form tall and broad, its sheer size looming over the room like the storm now pounding at her windows.
“Relax, Nikita. Before you go all ninja on my ass.”
“Scott?” Molly heard the letter opener clatter to the floor, and switched on the lamp. Her voice shook. “What are you doing in my house? And why are you in the dark?”
“I—I still have my key. I—well, you never asked for it back. And I was afraid that if you saw me, you’d leave.” Scott moved around the coffee table, bracing the small piece of metal on his palm as if testing its weight. He had an unsteady smile on his face as he watched Molly shiver beside the door.
“Well, this doesn’t really make me want you to hang around, you know.” Molly tried to keep her voice calm. “And about that key—” She stuck out her chin and set her jaw to stop it from trembling. All she’d wanted was to change into pajamas and fall into bed. “I think I’d like that back now.”
“No, please.” Scott pushed the key deep into the front pocket of his jeans. He was wearing a hooded sweater, so painstaking in its casualness it had to have been expensive. It hung from his muscled shoulders like a superhero cape worn by a child at play. His hair was carefully swept away from his face, and for once he didn’t brush an absentminded hand through it. But an uncharacteristic stubble marred Scott’s jawline, extending down his throat, and he scratched at it, as if unused to its presence on his face. The scrape of his fingernails against his skin was the only sound in the house, the muffled noise of the squall beating at the door outside.
“I need to talk to you, baby. We have to”—he looked around the room, as if waiting for the walls to complete his thought—“talk.”
He paused, silent, watching her. He was waiting for her reaction.
“What do you want, Scott?” Molly’s voice caught, her mouth suddenly parched. “It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m sure whatever it is could’ve waited until there’s daylight.” And witnesses, she thought. It felt too weird to have him there. Scott cocked his head and walked over to where Molly stood. His green eyes took in her entire face, stopping to rest on her hair and lips before looking directly at her again. She was still shivering.
“I couldn’t wait until then. I need you to let me back in, Molly. Let me be with you. I want you to let me be a, a”—he took his time with the word—“dad.”
“Well, glad to see you’ve come around, Scott,” Molly said, and the words came spitting out of her mouth. “You’ve got a few months’ worth of ultrasounds and doctors’ appointments to help pay for, then.”
“I know,” he said, and his voice was soft. He reached up with his free hand to smooth her hair over her shoulders. “I screwed up by avoiding you.”
Molly looked up at him, her face wrinkled in confusion.
“But I was hurt, Molly. First you dump me in front of fifty people, then you come out of nowhere with news that you’re carrying my baby? What guy can handle that all at once?” Scott looked at the floor, then took a deep lungful of air. “Listen, and please just hear me out. Do you remember how I told you about my mom taking on that new job at the firm she’s at now?”
“Yeah.” Molly said the word with distaste. Midnight visits from ex-boyfriends weren’t exactly on her bucket list. “That was back when you were little. What does that have to do with us?”
“I told you that life changed for my family after that,” Scott said. “How we suddenly had more money than we knew what to do with. How there were all these new toys piling up in my room, and all of a sudden I was in that . . . that Friends school in Jenkintown.”
Molly knew that Scott’s parents had paid almost thirty thousand dollars a year for his education there. What’s more, they’d cut a check for much more than that to Penn State right around the time Scott was applying to colleges. He’d shown her a picture once of a wing in the business building that bore their names. He’d never known what it was like to take on a second job just to pay his student loans.
“But I never told you that I never made real friends once I transferred into that school, Molly, because I didn’t know how. I never told you that for years I walked to class alone, ate by myself at lunch, then came home to sit in front of the TV while the cook got dinner ready.”
“Okay . . .” Molly shifted her weight from one swollen foot to the other.
“Molly, my parents were so busy working to make a great life for me that they forgot to actually live a life with me. I had a tutor help me with my homework. Our housekeeper took me to karate. I was lonely and probably depressed, and nobody ever said a word.”
Molly couldn’t read any expression in Scott’s face other than an uncharacteristic pleading in his eyes. He looked at her without blinking, the pupils shifting back and forth, his green eyes wet and imploring. Molly was aware that the baby had grown still inside her belly.
“I’m ready to be responsible for my own child, Molly. I want to try to be a father. I want a family—a good family.” Scott shook his head. “Molly, I can’t lose you.”
Molly didn’t answer right away. Panic gripped her chest, squeezing, forcing the air to move too quickly out of her lungs. She spoke her next words with care.
“Scott, this baby is the reason why I decided to not be with you. You think fifty-dollar bills are something to be given away like Tic Tacs. You act like appointments and deadlines are just suggestions. God, Scott. You think scrambled eggs come that way.” The sound of Molly swallowing echoed in the room. “And you get mean. You get snappy when you get angry, and speak before you think, and lash out before you even know what you’re hitting at. I just . . .” Molly shook her head. “I just can’t.”
Scott took a step closer. Molly moved backward. The front wall of her house pressed against her back.
“But you’re wrong, Molly.” She felt her breath coming in slow, shallow gasps. “That’s why I’m here. That’s what couldn’t wait. I need you to realize that you were wrong.”
“But you showing up at one a.m. doesn’t change my mind, Scott,” Molly said. “Something in my gut tells me it’s just not right. That you and me together isn’t good for any of us.”
Molly saw Scott watch her as she placed her hand on her belly. She summoned up the rest of the courage that was still balled up inside her. “I don’t want to be with you anymore.” She hoped she was telling him the truth.
Scott dropped his hand from the wall. “So what are you going to do, Mol? Huh?”
Molly shook her head. She didn’t have an answer for him. She didn’t even have an answer for herself.
“I don’t get it,” Scott said, and the tone of his voice climbed higher. “You act like such a hipster, with your weird music and reusable grocery bags. You’re in this empty house, all high and mighty because you’re living by yourself, but sometimes it makes me think that maybe you think you’re too good for me. That you think you’re too good for any man.”
Molly sputtered in surprise. She looked at the tall man standing in front of her, so at ease in his expensive clothes, the angles of his square face even more defined in the shadows dancing through the room.
“Me? Too good for you?”
Scott backed away from Molly. She stood straight from where she’d been leaning against the wall and squinted at Scott. He was pacing across the living room rug.
“Maybe that’s what our problem was, Molly. You think you’re better than me. That you don’t need me or my money or my family, right?” He held his arms out wide. “Is that your MO, to prove that? That you’re better off alone?”
Molly could feel tears prick at the backs of her aching eyes. She stared at Scott, a numb kind of shock now joining the adrenaline in her bloodstream.
Scott stopped to face her, and his next words felt like the cold gusts hitting the windowpanes behind her. “Do you really want to end up as alone as you’re trying to be?”
Molly had to fight an immediate urge to throw open the door and race back out into the rain, into the squall, to get away from Scott, from the doubt. But this was her home. This was her life, and the happiness of her baby, and she had to defend it. So she remained standing where she was, shaking. Breathing.
“Is that all, Scott?” Molly willed the tears to stay where they were. “You just wanted to drop by with some kind words and a casserole?”
Scott sighed. “I’m sorry, Molly. I didn’t mean to make you upset.”
He planted his feet a little wider on the living room floor, nearly blocking Molly’s view of anything else but him.
“But, Molly, you can’t do this.” Scott looked at her, waiting for a reaction she refused to give him. “You’re my second chance.” He let his words sink in. “I can’t be left behind again.”
Molly’s legs felt as if they were liquefying beneath her. She put one hand on the door to open it, then stopped.
“Does Monica have anything to do with this?” Molly’s voice sounded too high, too shaky behind the tears.
“What?” Scott stepped back, the surprise on his face genuine. “What does my mom have to do with this? She doesn’t even know you’re pregnant. I can’t tell her.”
Molly inhaled in one sharp breath. When she spoke, she said the words slowly, evenly.
“Scott, I think you need to go.” She opened the door and stepped clear out of Scott’s path. “And please don’t show up here like this again.”
Any swagger he had left fell away from Scott’s tall frame, and his shoulders slumped, making him seem like the hurt little boy he must have been decades earlier.
“Molly, please don’t do this.”
“Scott,” Molly said, “I have to.”
Scott moved past her. Molly couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eyes. He stopped, just inches in front of her.
“Please don’t do this to me, Molly.” His eyes sought out hers until she met them. “You can’t leave me alone sitting in an empty house again. Not when we could be together. Not when we could have a family.” He picked up Molly’s left hand and touched her bare ring finger before looking back up at her. “Not when I haven’t had enough of a chance to prove that I can be worth it.”
Molly pressed her lips together to keep from speaking.
Scott tried to laugh, but the sound fell flat in the quiet room. His mouth hardened into a straight line above the angular set of his jaw, and he looked over her body, his gaze stopping at her swollen belly. “I miss my old Molly.”
He brushed past her into the rain, bumping her shoulder into the door frame as he walked out of her house, and took each stair to the walk with such measured strength she could hear the reverberation of his footsteps.
Molly shut the door and checked the dead bolt twice to make sure it was in place. She rested there for a moment, waiting for her heartbeat to slow down, for the quaking in her muscles to quiet. Scott had told her everything tonight she wished he’d said months ago, but Molly didn’t know if it was possible for a grown man to achieve in weeks the maturity he’d avoided for years. She moved toward the couch like she was walking through muddy water and sank into the cushions, avoiding the space where Scott had been just moments ago. Only then, alone on the sofa, did Molly allow herself to cry.
CHAPTER SEVEN
June
Yes
Molly used the heavy box in her arms to help push open the thick door to her townhome, then dropped the carton with a thud onto the mopped wood floors. She opened the closet door, carefully kicked her flip-flops off so that they landed squarely on a mat inside, then placed her bag in its designated cubbyhole underneath the entranceway table. A tidy pile of mail sat on top of the table, but Molly ignored it, choosing instead to look around at the casual grace of her little home: the dark beams of the ceiling, the light paint over the original crown molding and baseboards, the tall windows that illuminated her simple furnishings. In the quiet of the day, the air of her home was so still the sound of the door shutting didn’t even make its usual echo around her empty dining room. The calm of the space around Molly was at complete odds with the turmoil roiling inside her swollen belly.
It was a miserable time to get the month’s bills. She tucked the stack of envelopes inside the box on the floor. The container held the last of her personal possessions f
rom her former office at Shulzster & Grace, and she’d refused any help carrying it as she trudged through the heavy glass lobby doors for the last time. These were her most precious items: her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr and her master’s—of which she was so proud—from UPenn, a letter of praise from the very first client she’d ever represented, and a copy of the last letter Bill wrote in recommendation of her promotion. The other two items she’d saved were a framed photo from her first ultrasound appointment and a trophy given to her by her goddaughter, Kailey: a gold-colored plastic woman with pom-poms cheering atop a pedestal that read “Girls Rule!” Kailey had given it to her for Christmas years ago and Molly had kept it on her desk at every position she’d had since. Eight years of PR success now lay in a cardboard carton at her feet.
Molly walked into the kitchen to pour a glass of water, groaning when she saw that, as usual, Scott had left the sink full of dirty dishes. She’d worn a tank top and shorts for the day’s mission, and even with her thick hair pulled back into a high ponytail, she was too aware that she was sweating like a pig on a spit. She was glad she’d gotten permission to enter the office on a Saturday to empty out her belongings. At least this was one humiliation she hadn’t had to suffer in front of everyone who used to respect her.
From her bag, Molly’s phone whistled a tweeting sound. She fished it out while taking a sip of water.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How goes it, sweetheart?”
Molly blew air out through her nose, shaking her head at no one in particular. “Well, I’m officially unemployed. I got all my stuff out of the office today.”
Emily made a tsking sound. “That fiancé of yours is going to love this.”
“You’re telling me.” Molly felt a lump gather in her throat, making it difficult for her to talk. “This is like a dream come true for him.
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