Finally I nodded. As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. If I couldn’t walk across the room, it was probably not a good idea to operate a 4000-lb car. So I allowed Oliver to walk me from my office, past a very confused Simon, down the hall and out to the parking garage. I slid into his comfortable car and gave him directions to my new home.
I really wanted to go home to Father’s estate, Petit Paradis in particular. Nothing depressed me more than staying in that luxury high-rise apartment without Devlin.
I could barely tolerate it when he was there.
But I knew going home to Father would only raise a lot of questions I didn’t want to answer. Maybe if Oliver had to drop me off at the home I now shared with my husband, he’d take a bit more mercy on me.
As it turned out, he had to walk me up to that apartment anyway. After going most of the day without eating anything, I was much too shaky to walk on my own. He kept an arm around me to assist me upstairs, and shadowed me inside so that he could help me to the couch. “Nice place,” he said with the appropriate amount of snark. “Everything I would have pictured for a man like Devlin.”
“Oliver, don’t start,” I warned as I sank against the soft leather cushion of the sofa.
“You need to eat, CC,” he admonished as he stared down at me. “You’re white as a ghost. You’re warm, too. Likely running a fever.”
I nodded. “Flu,” I dismissed again. It couldn’t be anything else.
He swung my legs up onto the sofa and fluffed a pillow for my back. “Let me see what you have here. Maybe I can make something.”
I nodded again, too worn out to care. I even dozed while he fiddled around in the kitchen, whipping up some chicken noodle soup from scratch. I was impressed as he set the steaming bowl on the table in front of me.
“When did you learn how to cook?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been taking classes. Had a lot of free time on my hands in the last few weeks.”
“Oliver.”
“Just eat,” he said as he held the bowl closer. I gingerly took a sip. It was very mildly spiced, which helped me choke it down, but my stomach still rumbled in protest. “Your kitchen looks like a health food store.”
“Devlin likes to eat healthy,” I dismissed with a shrug.
“Well, it’s certainly working. You look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I do not.”
“Haven’t you looked at yourself lately?” he asked. “Marriage agrees with you.”
I thought about Devlin’s vigorous workout regimen and our healthy diet. I guess he really did know what he was doing.
“You shouldn’t have any problem fitting into that maid of honor gown now,” Oliver continued. “You might even wear the fourteen.”
Yay, me.
The soup didn’t settle well on my stomach, so I ended up bolting off the couch and towards the bedroom. Oliver found me crumpled beside the toilet minutes later. “Let me call the doctor, CC,” he said softly as he squatted down to face me.
I shook my head. “It’s nothing serious, just the flu. I just need rest.”
He sighed and straightened to get me a wet washcloth, before helping me the few feet I could make it towards the bed. He pulled down the covers for me and I snuggled into my side of the large, empty bed. Oliver mercifully made no mention of it as he fluffed my pillows yet again to make me comfortable. “I don’t feel right leaving you,” he said.
“I don’t feel right with you staying,” I mumbled as I covered my eyes with one hand.
“Fair enough,” he conceded softly. “But do me a favor, okay? If you need me to come back, you’ll call me.”
Our eyes met. We had started out as friends a long time ago. Maybe we could be friends again. I nodded. He bent down to kiss my forehead, before cupping it with his palm to test my temperature. “Let me get you something for your fever,” he said.
When he brought me the pills, however, I found myself hesitant to take one. More and more it looked like I really was that word I didn’t want to say. That meant I was carrying Devlin’s baby, and that was precious cargo indeed. Could I take these pills? Would it be okay?
Why did I even care? If the entire duration of this ordeal proved to be this bad, why would I put myself through it at all?
The question chased me all the way into my dreams, where I was right in the throes of labor, screaming in agony and pain, with Devlin right beside me, encouraging me with words of love as he held me tight against his body.
“You can do this, Coralie,” my dream Devlin said. “You can do anything.”
I nodded and with another blinding wave of pain, I screamed loudly as I pushed.
I woke up before I could see what I had, whether it was a girl, a boy, or an alien from Mars.
Somehow that was more disturbing than the dream itself.
I lay awake for long minutes afterwards, feeling emptier and more alone than I had ever felt in my life, even after my mother died. I curled into a ball, nauseated and miserable, this tiny little lump on Devlin’s massive bed. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t move one aching muscle to fetch myself any food. Thankfully Oliver had left me with crackers and a bottle of water beside my bed, so I reached for my meager sustenance with one shaking hand.
I noticed that Oliver also left my phone beside my bed. I checked it, but no one had called. I sighed, again feeling all alone.
But I supposed I wasn’t really alone, was I? I’d never be alone again. More and more I was convinced that I was, in fact, pregnant. I had never been this late before. Devlin and I had had more sex in one month than I had ever had. Millions and millions and millions of little soldiers had gone looking for an egg. Thanks to a scant percent failure rate of birth control, they very likely could have found one.
And I never would have known.
I pulled up a symptom checker on my phone to tick off all the symptoms. Sore breasts, check. Nausea and vomiting, check and check. Exhaustion and moodiness, check-ety check check.
Again I put my hand on my tummy, thinking about my dream. “You can do this, Coralie,” dream Devlin had said. “You can do anything.”
Could I do this? Did I even want to?
I opened up the Cabot’s website, this time to the baby section. I’d never really looked at it before. There had never been a need. As I started to scroll through the clothes and the nursery décor, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly how my dream was supposed to end. Had I ended up with a daughter? I had given birth to Devlin’s son?
Had I had one of both, like he wanted?
Who had the baby looked like? Me? Devlin? Father or Mother? Darcy or Aileen? A unique mix of all the above?
I scrolled through the different nursery accessories and the cribs, trying to picture in my head what the nursery would look like. What color would I make it? Blue for a boy? Pink for a girl? Yellow and green, just in case we want to be surprised? Maybe I’d buck convention altogether and just make it purple, treating our child like royalty right from birth.
“Why not?” the devil on my shoulder whispered. “We have a castle.”
I closed my eyes and imagined which room I’d want to make a nursery in Chateau du Cabot. It would have to be one of the bedrooms close to ours, of course, at least at first. I could picture a little girl with jet black pigtails running through the meadow full of lavender, just like I used to do. I could imagine Devlin carrying a boy with black hair and green eyes on his shoulders as they followed behind.
This was what my life could look like in five years.
What the fuck was wrong with me? This had never been my dream. It certainly wasn’t my plan. Even when I was a kid, I abandoned my baby dolls by the age of six, when Lucy introduced me to the world of glamorous fashion dolls we could dress up in fabulous clothes and send on equally fabulous dates with our guy dolls.
I was clearly tired. I was obviously running some sort of fever. I tossed my phone onto the nightstand before snuggling down into the covers to get the
rest I so obviously needed.
I tried not to think about my baby dream, and yet I kind of hoped I’d return to it. Maybe if I could just see the baby–our baby–I could stop obsessing about it.
Instead I dropped off in a deep sleep where I didn’t dream about anything. I slept like a rock until seven o’clock the next morning. Before I could drag my butt out of bed to get ready to go to work, I spotted the text from Oliver. “Don’t even think about coming to work, CC. If you’re running a fever, you’re contagious. Stay home and get your rest so you can be healthy for the wedding tomorrow.”
I wanted to power through it simply because I had begun to suspect it wasn’t the flu at all, and I couldn’t take off every day for the next nine months. But I was too tired to argue. I dropped off yet again and slept hard till well after ten o’clock in the morning to a sweat-soaked pillow.
I finally crawled out of bed because I couldn’t stand to stay in that big lonely bed another minute. I managed to make it to the bathroom without vomiting, which I figured had more to do with the fact I hadn’t really eaten anything since the night before, and none of that had stayed down.
I was shaky and weak by the time I reached the kitchen, so I grabbed a banana for some quick energy. I finally collapsed on the sofa, where I curled into a miserable little ball. Exactly how long was I going to have to feel like this? I referred to a pregnancy due date calculator, which cheerfully calculated that, based on the first day of my last menstrual period, my baby was due on February 14th.
A Valentine’s Day baby. This meant that I probably ovulated any time after May 24th, our first Sunday in Las Vegas. That Monday was when he saved me from the drunk guy at the slots. “No one gets to fuck you but me,” he had told me as he staked his claim for himself. The next day we ditched the condoms, even though he had confessed that he had slept with another woman.
Was our baby created that very same day?
Of course it was, I thought to myself. There was no other way it could be. And now I was pregnant.
Pregnant.
Not just a wife… I was now a mommy-to-be.
I was still sobbing softly to myself when Oliver called. I didn’t answer him the first time, so he called me twice more. Finally I sucked it all up, dried my tears and caught my breath as much as I could, and answered the phone.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, and I could tell he was concerned. Despite it all, I supposed he really did care about me.
“Better,” I said. Physically that was true. Emotionally? My condition was critical.
“I just wanted you to know that I ordered you some lunch. It should be there in a half-hour.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“I know,” he replied. “I just feel bad thinking about you all alone in that big apartment. When is Devlin coming home?”
I closed my eyes. It was a moment I both looked forward to and dreaded. What would he do or say when he realized that he was about to become a father? Would he be happy? Would he be scared? Would he be able to talk me down from the ledge? Or would I have to rescue him? “Tomorrow,” I finally answered.
“I’d feel better if you went back home to stay with your dad.”
I shook my head, though he couldn’t see it. “I’ll be okay. I just needed to rest.” Lots of rest. Like nine months’ worth.
“Okay,” he conceded ever so begrudgingly. “But call me if you need me, okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed softly.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
It was a lie. I had no intention of calling anyone. I just wanted to be alone to sort everything out in my head. I had some big decisions to make, the first being if I really wanted to have a baby. I never thought I did before. I mean, of course I thought it would eventually part of the plan, but I thought it was a bridge I crossed well after I took over as CEO of Cabot’s, where I had done everything with the store that I had always wanted to do. Cabot’s was my real baby, and always had been.
Up until my impromptu visit to Las Vegas, I assumed that Oliver would be my husband, and neither of us was a romantic, dreaming about a future together that included a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog. We weren’t even in love. It was an understanding. More like a merger, one we’d enter years later when we were older and more settled, and we had conquered the world.
Now all I could think of was my stupid dream, when I was swollen with child, the man I loved at my side, tears in his eyes as he told me how much he loved me, how much he loved us, as he encouraged me to bring our child into the world–a child that our love created.
It was hard to get past that. Everything else paled in comparison, even for a pragmatic like me. Suddenly there was no other option. Nothing else mattered. Our love had created a person. That wasn’t magical. That was fucking miraculous. The first moment that we absolutely trusted each other and let our guards down, the universe had sparked new life into existence.
How on earth could I choose anything but that? We were wealthy. We were young, healthy and in love. And now we were going to have a baby, a baby that would bond us together forever.
I almost couldn’t wait to tell him about all these new possibilities, but I decided that I would. This wasn’t an over-the-phone conversation.
No, I thought with a smile. I knew just what to do.
After I ate the soup and bread that Oliver had delivered for me, I felt a little better. I finally left the apartment around two o’clock in the afternoon, after I trusted my feet were steady enough to carry me. I didn’t have to go very far, but I didn’t want to collapse in the middle of the street either. I headed downstairs to the little drug store at the end of the block, where I purchased a home pregnancy test, a gift box and some pink and blue ribbon.
I actually wore a smile as I walked back into our building. That smile quickly dissipated when I got into the elevator. Simone, the athletic goddess from our apartment gym, hollered at me to hold the elevator as she sprinted across the lobby.
She spared me a smile just as the doors shut behind us. “Thanks,” she said. “If I don’t get out of these heels soon, I’m going to have to saw my feet off at the ankles.” She proudly showed off her stilettos, which added six more inches to her already impressive height.
I simply nodded, feeling even frumpier standing next to her considering I wore a pair of sweats and a T-shirt.
“You look familiar. Have we met?”
What a perfect question, I thought. I shook my head as I held up my hand. “Coralie Masters.”
The name jogged her memory, though not in the way I would have hoped. “Right. You were with Devlin. It’s so lovely to meet you finally. My name’s Simone. I’m a friend of your brother’s.”
I gaped at her, speechless. She thought I was Darcy, which meant that even though he had shared such personal with her that he had a sister, he hadn’t quite seen fit to tell her that he had a wife. And of course, that wasn’t what she’d see when she met someone like me.
Instead she went on, completely oblivious. “He’s worked magic with me in the last six months I’ve lived here. I’m down to twelve percent body fat,” she beamed with pride.
It only made me feel frumpier. “He does work miracles,” was all I could say.
“Totally. I trust no one more,” she added with a grin. It chastised me at once. She could trust my husband, and yet I had been unable to. No wonder he was so mad. “I could probably squeeze something in tonight or tomorrow if he’s free.”
I shook my head. “He’s out of town.”
She just chuckled. “Ah, yes. He’s always out of town, isn’t he? That man has a jam-packed schedule. Pinning him down for anything is next to impossible.”
I unconsciously thumbed my wedding rings as I thought about the bun in my oven. “Yeah,” I conceded quietly. “Impossible.”
We stopped at floor seven, which was apparently her floor. “So nice to meet you at last,” she said again. “We should get together some time.�
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“Absolutely,” I lied through my teeth.
“Get my phone number from Devvy,” she grinned before she sashayed through the door and down the hallway to her apartment.
There was a lot less spring in my step as I exited the elevator on the fifteenth floor. The minute the door shut behind me, however, I had no time for a pity party. I had a test to take. Seeing as how I was nearly three weeks late, I expected to see a positive result. This confirmation would change my life in the three little minutes it took to take the test. In that time, I perused the nursery section of Cabot’s and thought about which names I might like for both a boy and a girl.
Because that was all that was left now, wasn’t it? That, and telling my husband. How he took it was anyone’s guess, but I supposed there was no better way to show how much I trusted him than having his baby.
I spent the last minute remaining on the test preparing the gift box. I would put it under the pillow and he could find it tomorrow night, when we both got home from the wedding.
I was so prepared to see that plus sign that I was stunned silent when the test showed a negative result instead. I blinked at it for a long minute, trying to comprehend what it meant. Clearly the result was wrong. I read about tests coming up negative, though I couldn’t imagine that I’d still get a negative result this many days after a missed period.
I let the test set for fifteen more minutes just to be sure it had taken long enough. That plus sign never came.
I was on the phone within minutes, calling my personal doctor. I begged for them to fit me in, and they gave me a four-thirty appointment. That afternoon time dragged slower than it had ever dragged. I couldn’t even stand to stay in the apartment. I got to the doctor’s office nearly a half-hour early.
Finally I was called back to the cheery examination room. “So what’s the problem?” the nurse asked as she took notes.
I cleared my throat. “I, um, am about three weeks late for my period. I started having symptoms a few days ago, nausea and fatigue, but a home pregnancy test came up negative.”
She nodded. “Let’s start with a urine sample, then.”
The doctor joined me about ten minutes after I took the test. “How are you feeling, CC?”
Masters for Life Page 13