Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty Four
Ben
I wear a path in the living room rug, past the couch, past the window, out to the porch, back again. The boards complain in the same few spots. I try sitting. I try leaning on the kitchen counter. I open the fridge, stare at a shelf like it’s going to offer me something, shut it again.
Jason’s at his parents’ for dinner.
I can see it like a movie—from the outside looking in: Gwen’s voice floating from the kitchen, Don taste-testing, Jason teasing Paige about something. The river outside those big windows.
That table’s fed me more meals than my own family ever did.
There were weeks, years ago, when I ate there three nights running because my dad was “working late,” which meant I was on my own and the fridge at home had half a lemon and a beer.
Gwen would press a plate into my hands and say, “Sit.” Don would nod at the chair next to Jason’s as if it had my name on it.
Now there’s a dent at that table that should be me, and it’s empty.
I make another circuit—front window, porch, back to the kitchen—like I can outpace the thought. The sky’s gone that deep late-summer blue that makes the maples look almost black. I can’t hear the river tonight, but the crickets are in full force, singing their songs.
Somewhere, a dog barks twice and then stops.
Paige came by the Pint a couple of hours ago, slid into a corner booth after lunch rush, and told me about the gym. Told me about Jason. Told me he listened. That he didn’t yell. That he didn’t forgive, either. That he’s… trying. She told me she was going to dinner.
“He said he’d come by the house tonight,” she said in a careful voice. She touched my wrist under the table, and then she left because the bakery needed her and, honestly, because I couldn’t follow where she was going.
At first, I was mad she went without me. I had a whole speech in my head ready for him. All the things you don’t say with your face in your best friend’s fist. But she was right. Jason would’ve shut down if I were in the room. He would’ve walked out before a single word landed. So, she went.
And I’m here, pacing.
I can’t help but feel like the outsider I am now. The unwanted factor in this situation.
I wasn’t wanted by my mother or father, so why should this be any different?
It just took longer to get here, is all.
Jason has been my family for fourteen years, and I’ve always been welcome at the Richards’ home.
Until now.
The thought is suffocating me. It’s making me sick.
It makes me feel exactly like I did when I came home from my first break at Harvard to find a new family living in our condo.
But the Richards had opened their door to me then, and it had been open to me ever since.
For fourteen years, I’ve known what that house sounds like at dinner. For fourteen years, I’ve heard, “Ben, grab plates,” and “Ben, did you eat?”
Fourteen years, and now I’m pacing my own kitchen because the only thing I can do that doesn’t make anything worse is nothing.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again. Type “I’m sorry” into a text to Jason, delete it, type “When you’re ready,” and delete that too.
There’s no string of words that can fix this. There’s no sentence that makes Jason’s best friend not be the guy who knocked up his sister.
My eye itches—still a faint yellow bloom at the edge of my socket—and it’s almost a relief. Something visible to match the bruise I keep feeling under my ribs. He hit me once. I’ve hit myself with that moment a hundred times.
I try the porch because the walls in here are starting to close in on me.
The boards are warm under my feet. The hanging baskets Gwen insisted I hang this spring sway a little in the late breeze.
I lean on the railing and try to focus on the details like they’ll help get my mind off everything else.
It doesn’t help.
“You threw away something amazing,” my brain says, and I stop moving because the words ring true.
Maybe I did.
If the story ended there, it would be neat and clean and exactly the kind of punishment I’ve always secretly suspected I deserve: you screw up, you lose the good thing. The end.
Except the story doesn’t end there. There’s a new chapter: a baby on the way.
A person who didn’t ask for any of this and gets all of it anyway. I picture the ultrasound and the little comma-shaped thing in the center of it.
My hands stop shaking when I let that image fill my head. It hushes the panic for a second.
I go inside and take the printout from the drawer where I tucked it so it wouldn’t crease. The glossy paper is already soft on the edges from too much handling.
I set it on the counter and make myself look. Fear floods my throat. Right behind it comes something else I don’t have the words for yet.
A… vow, maybe?
I think of my dad leaving the moment he was free of me, like he was closing his tab. A line item. “Pack everything. Move.”
No mention of “Call Ben.”
I think of that same kid checking the mail obsessively, waiting for something, or jumping at the phone when it rang.
But it never did.
I will not be that kind of dad. I won’t.
In my mental checklist, I add one item: BE THERE, and I underline it three times.
It’s corny as hell, I know that, but it’s the one thing I won’t ever stop trying to do.
I will be there. If I am nothing else, if I mess up everything else, I will be there.
I think about knocking on the Richards’ door, just like old times—Jason scowling then relenting, Gwen in an apron, Don with that little corner smile.
I think about how it’s never going to be just like old times again. I run a thumb along the edge of the ultrasound and try to make my peace with that.
But making peace with that feels too big. I decide to shoot for just not making it worse.
I pick up my phone and scowl at it. Paige said she’d call me as soon as dinner was over, but she hasn’t yet.
Is dinner still going on?
Did she forget to call?
I should call her.
I take the ultrasound and carefully place a magnet over it against the fridge. Who am I hiding it from now?
Then I grab my phone and find my way back out to the porch because the night’s deepened, and sometimes the dark helps. I sit on one of the chairs I put out there and breathe past the lump in my throat.
I mess with my black eye again, gently, like an idiot poking a bruise. I replay the look on Jason’s face in the office—not the punch itself, the second before it.
Hurt like a bloodless wound. There isn’t a version of this where I don’t have to sit with that for a while. If I push in too soon, I just turn hurt into rage and start the whole thing all over again.
“Coward,” part of me mutters.
“No,” I tell it out loud, surprising myself with the force of it. “Waiting isn’t the same thing.”
To give myself something to do, I think about all the huge changes that are about to enter my life: cribs and car seats and midnight fevers; first steps, first falls; Christmas morning; the day when a teenager glares at me and says I don’t understand anything and slams a door in a house she doesn’t pay for.
I think about how none of it scares me as much as the thought of that kid scanning a room looking for me and not finding anyone.
I flip the phone over, thumb hovering on her contact. Call. Don’t call. Call. Be a grown man and—
Headlights wash the maples white, then blue, as a truck noses into my drive.
I go cold and stand before I know I’ve moved, sliding the phone into my pocket. The engine cuts.
Jason swings out of the driver’s seat and shuts the door softly. He doesn’t slam. He doesn’t stalk. He just… walks across the lawn, hands empty, jaw set, the porch light making shadows under his eyes.
I make myself stay on the step. If he wants the yard, he can have the yard. If he wants the distance, he can keep it. He stops at the bottom like a silent agreement.
“Hey,” I say, because somebody has to start.
“Hey,” he says back, voice flat.
We look at each other for a second, the crickets doing all the talking. My eye still carries the faint yellow of last week, and he notices—of course, he notices—and his mouth tightens.
“I’m not here to hit you,” he says.
“Good,” I say, because humor’s the only tool I trust not to misfire right now. My voice comes out a little rough. “I bruise ugly.”
One corner of his mouth twitches like it wants to spread into a smile, but thinks better of it. He glances past me at the porch, at the house he’s been in a thousand times, and then back. “Can we talk?”
“Yeah,” I say, and step aside. “Out here’s probably better.”
He climbs the two steps and stands next to me, not exactly shoulder to shoulder, but both looking out over the yard.
He exhales, slowly. “Paige came by.”
“She told me.” I keep my hands at my sides because folding them makes me look defensive, and I don’t want to be anything but open, even if my body is bracing for another blow. “Thank you for hearing her.”
“It’s not about thanking me,” he says, but it’s not sharp. “She’s my sister.”
I nod and wait for him to continue.
He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m still pissed,” he says, simply. “I don’t know what the timeline is on me not being pissed.”
“Me either,” I say. “I’m sorry. For all of it. For not telling you. For the office.” The word tastes like a rusty nail. “For having you find out like that.”
He blows a breath through his nose that might be a laugh if our lives were different. “Yeah. The office.”
Silence again. I can feel the speech I wrote in my head trying to muscle its way up my throat—childhood, loyalty, panic, all the things that sound like excuses when you put them together. I push it down.
“I’m not going to give you a story,” I say. “Or an explanation that makes it neat. It isn’t neat. I screwed up. I hurt you. I hurt her.” My voice goes low. “And I’m going to be a dad.”
He flinches a fraction when I say it out loud, but he nods.
“I saw the picture,” he says finally.
I smile without meaning to, quick and gone. “Yeah?”