Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Autumn
“So you were hoping you were pregnant?” Shayla asks, sitting cross-legged beside me with her right arm around my back, my head resting on her shoulder.
“No,” I say quietly, my eyes as raw as my emotions.
“At least, I didn’t think so until I got my period.
Now all I want to do is cry.” It’s as if I’m swallowing glass when I tell her, “I found a box of Bailey’s pregnancy tests in her bathroom yesterday.
I wanted to take one after the party, but then Dad—” I have to clap a hand over my mouth as I think of my father’s ashen face.
Shayla strokes my cheek and kisses the top of my head, her shoulders starting to shake as she begins crying.
Every part of me aches when I tell her, “I was so scared, and you had James. Bailey had Isaiah. And then Forest came with me, and I thought, ‘This feels right. Natural.’ Even though it was stupid. But now… It’s for the best that I got my period.”
Shayla tries to finger-comb the tangles out of my hair. “Why do you think that?”
“Forest explicitly told me he’s not sure if he wants more kids, especially now that he has Sebby and Benny.”
Shayla’s jaw drops, and she leans away. “Yet he still had sex with you without protection multiple times?”
“Essentially, yeah,” I say with a shrug, since I’m just as guilty of not taking proper precautions.
“That bastard. I’m going to tell James to kick his ass.”
I try to imagine the two nerds duking it out, but I just can’t picture it.
“I knew better than to start anything with him, but I…” I sigh and shrug as if I’m not withering inside.
“I started falling for him, hard, even though I didn’t want to.
I’m not saying I want to have a million kids like you, but I want to experience it at least once.
I always have. I thought that if I did end up getting pregnant, he’d maybe, I don’t know, come around and be happy.
I even started thinking up baby names and nicknames that would go with Josephine, Sebastian, and Benjamin. ”
“Like what?”
“Abigail or Madelyn—Abby, Maddy—for a girl.” I swallow past the glass in my throat. “Nicholas or Oliver—Nicky, Ollie—for a boy.”
Shayla hums as we sit with that. Any visions of what could have been my future start to fade. When I get my phone back, the first thing I’ll do is delete the baby names list I made in my Notes app since I won’t need it anymore.
“I’m so sorry, Autumn,” Shayla says after a while. “What are you going to do now?”
I chew the inside of my lip as I think it over, hating what I have to do.
“Try to force myself to get over Forest and move on, I guess. But the kids—” I press my hands to my heart, curling in on myself.
“I don’t know what we’re going to say to them.
I don’t want to leave them or…or try to forget about them. ”
Shayla clutches my hand, blinking back tears. “You won’t be able to. Trust me.”
“But I have to,” I nearly wail. “I already have to remind myself all the time that his kids are not my kids, and it hurts so much. It’ll kill me if Forest finds someone else and gets married.
” For more reasons than I’d have admitted before today.
“His wife definitely won’t want me around, and it’ll only confuse the kids even more.
But I’m scared that, if I try to have a real relationship with Forest, wait around, hoping he’ll eventually decide he wants to have more kids—which he might never do—then I’ll grow to resent him.
That’s not fair to either of us. So I have to cut ties now, and I want to die just thinking about it. ”
Shayla rolls her lips and nods. “I felt the exact same way about James and Grayson. I don’t know how I would have survived it if James and I couldn’t be together.”
We’re back to hugging, trying to comfort one another until we’re spent of tears,
“When are you going to break things off with Forest?” Shayla asks.
My chest hurts just thinking about it. “Tonight, after the kids go to bed.”
“And then?”
“Try not to fall for anyone else whose future doesn’t align with mine.”
We take a few more minutes to sit in the closet, since I’m not ready to face anyone just yet, and Shayla nudges my shoulder. “The silver lining in all this is that now you won’t become ‘Mr. and Mrs. Forest and Autumn Woods’. That’s something, at least.”
“Oh yeah, because ‘Autumn Fischer’ really rolls off the tongue,” I say, then snort. “Imagine if he’d taken our last name. ‘Forest Fischer’.”
“I don’t know which is worse,” Shayla says with a small chuckle. She pats the floor, then wipes her hand on her white tennis skirt. “Why is the carpet wet?”
“You don’t want to know,” I say, pushing her shoulder so she’ll scoot away from the wet spot.
Her mouth twists like she’s sucked on a sour wedge of lemon, and she shakes her hand out. “Please tell me it’s not what I think it is,” she says with a little squeal.
“Sorry, sis. It’s exactly what you think it is,” I say, cracking a genuine smile. Leave it to one of my sisters to make me want to laugh at a depressing time like this. “You might want to wash your hands.”
Shayla flings herself out of the closet and races to Forest’s en suite, chanting, “Ew, ew, ew,” repeatedly. “Eden!” she yells when she leaves the bedroom after scrubbing her hands clean. “Can you watch the kids? I need to run home to change my skirt.” I hear the front door slam a moment later.
Okay, so she did lift my mood somewhat. I crawl out of the closet and nab two of Forest’s boxer-briefs to slip on when I get cleaned up and redressed, then rifle through his medicine cabinet. I don’t have any cramps yet, but I shake out and swallow two Ibuprofen just in case.
After an awkward, silent drive with me staring out the passenger window on the way to the hospital, our group stands in the hallway outside Dad’s new room, since he’s been moved out of the ICU.
We play rock-paper-scissors to decide which family gets to see Dad first, so we don’t overwhelm him by visiting all at once.
Forest nervously shifts closer to me when Shayla scowls at him, which only makes her scowl harder, and James thumbs his nose at him.
I’ve never seen my brother-in-law so pissed off, so I have no doubt Shayla told him everything on the ride over.
Though his voice is weaker than I’ve ever heard it, we don’t make it past two rounds before Dad shouts, “If you girls don’t quit messing around and let me see my grandkids right now”—he takes an audibly raspy breath—“you’re all grounded to your houses for the next six months.”
“Sherman, please, stop all that yelling and breathe,” Mom chides. “The doctor said you need to keep your stress levels down.”
“I don’t care what the doctor said, angel,” he says with a grumpy huff. “You tell them they can all go to H-E-double-hockey-sticks if they try to stop me from seeing my family.”
Forest and I hang back to allow Shayla and Eden to go inside with their families, the kids bursting with excitement to show their grandpa their poster.
Forest gently clasps Josephine by the shoulders when she tries to follow Bailey, Isaiah, and Brady inside.
Bless her precious little heart, she looks up at her dad with her face drawn, questioning why she’s not allowed inside yet.
I have to turn away so she doesn’t see the tears welling in my eyes.
It’s painful listening to Dad greet each child by name, the hospital bed squeaking as multiples are surely climbing onto it to hug him.
“Where’s Autumn?” Dad asks loudly afterward, though he’s breathing harder. “Is she running late?”
Standing just outside the doorway, I call out, “I’m here.”
Dad says, “Get your butt in here, young lady, and come give me a hug.”
I can’t look at Forest when I pass Benjamin to him, then drag my feet inside, where there’s hardly an inch of standing room. “Hi, Daddy.”
Dad wrinkles his brow, patting my arm after we hug. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, honey, but where’s the rest of them?”
“The rest of who?”
“Who do you think?” He tsks, craning his neck to peer around me. “Forest and the kids.” Mom helps him take a sip of water from his plastic tumbler. “If you left them at home, well, you turn right around and go get them.”
“They’re here, waiting.” I motion to the door, which is blocked from his view by the hanging privacy curtain pulled halfway across the room.
“Hurry up and tell them to come in,” he says crossly.
Josephine is much more solemn when she steps quietly into the room, her chin tucked to her chest. It breaks my fucking heart, and I didn’t know it could hurt any more than it already does.
“There’s my girl. Come here, Josie,” Dad says, holding his arms open.
Josephine flies toward him with a sob. When he tries to lift her onto the bed himself, his face goes white as a sheet, and Isaiah jumps forward to help her up. Dad grunts, pulling Forest’s daughter into a sideways bear hug that must pain him greatly, but he tries not to show it.
“I was so scared!” Josephine cries, burrowing her face into his thick shoulder, his beard unusually scruffy since he wasn’t able to shave this morning.
“Oh, honey, I’m fine,” Dad says, though he’s anything but. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be out of here lickety-split, and then you can show me all your new masterpieces.” Over her shoulder, he asks, “Sebby, Benny, where are they?”
Forest clears his throat when he steps past the privacy curtain, guiding Sebastian ahead of him.
“Somebody, help him up,” Dad says when Josephine slides off the bed with Mom’s help so the IV doesn’t get torn loose from Dad’s arm.
I lift Sebastian over the hospital bed’s railing so he can give Dad a loud, smacking kiss on the cheek. Forest does the same with Benjamin, then passes the baby to Bailey when she asks to hold him, propping him up on her large belly.
“Thanks for including her,” Forest tells Dad, cutting his eyes to Josephine.