10. Kayla
Time really did fly when you kept yourself so busy that you didn’t get a chance to breathe. A lot of people might have thought Kayla was insane, or at least having some sort of early mid-life crisis, when she stepped off the plane from Italy and announced immediately that she was quitting her stable job in order to start from scratch and go get an accreditation at culinary school. Her mom, however, had just said “about time,” given her a hug, and that was it. The start of her new life.
Kayla had just been able to squeeze into a culinary course at her local community college before the cut-off date, which would have had her waiting for the next semester, and within the week, she was back to studying. It hadn’t left a whole lot of time to process being stuck on an island with a billionaire… and then sleeping with him… then leaving the next morning. Already, it was starting to feel like a fever dream.
Six weeks passed before Kayla even realized that they were gone. Standing in her kitchen, it felt like some sort of disconcerting time travel, looking around and realizing that a month and a half ago she was miserable in a job she hated. Well, very technically, a month and a half ago she’d been on a private island in Italy, sitting in a vineyard with a billionaire who was being sued over an olive pit, but who had turned out to actually be kind of a good guy. A great guy. But she’d been trying not to think about that; she wasn’t always successful, but she was definitely trying. She was back in reality where she belonged, eating dry toast.
No one had told her that international travel would screw up your stomach so bad. And even though the food in Italy had been the best she’d ever eaten, no matter how simple it had been, Kayla felt like her digestive system would never recover. She’d also consumed a lot of wine in a very short period of time. That probably wasn’t helping matters. Oh, and then she’d turned her whole life upside down.
Whatever had kicked it off, Kayla was sick of being sick. It had been over a month, and as soon as one thing got better, another would kick off. It wasn’t enough to get her running to the doctor, and she’d never been one to go for medical care unless she had a broken bone anyway, so mostly she’d dealt with it by complaining to her mom and then getting on with things. Venting was a powerful tool, and so far, it had seemed to do the trick. But today she was well and truly over it, with nausea hitting her like waves of toxic waste. Even this late in the afternoon, she hadn’t eaten anything all day and was forcing herself to take bites of dry toast. At this point, trying to keep going with a completely empty stomach seemed like a bad idea.
Unfortunately, lying on the sofa and bemoaning her existence wasn’t an option, not with the whole diving headfirst into studying for a new career thing. So here she was, standing at the kitchen counter, eating toast and reading through coursework when her mother walked in and found her.
“Aren’t you a chef now?” Liz asked, eyeing the dry toast that Kayla was nibbling at. “Or are you eating like a peasant for fun these days?”
“Uh, no, and also no, not a chef yet. This assignment on food safety and cross-contamination is proof that I’m definitely not a chef. Yet. But let me read more about what makes a place gluten-free versus gluten-friendly, then there’s no stopping me.”
Liz just frowned and continued staring at the toast in her hand like she had a personal vendetta against it.
“That was a joke,” Kayla said. “You should laugh. Not about gluten free, though. Apparently, that definition holds legal weight.”
Liz still didn’t laugh, didn’t react at all. Instead, she just sighed and put her handbag down, pushing up her sleeves as if she was here on serious business.
“Now, Kayla…” Liz said and pushed her glasses up her nose. Even at thirty-two, the tone in her mom’s voice had Kayla sagging against the kitchen counter in despair. That specific tone meant she was gearing up to say something she felt was very important and also probably awkward.
“Ma,” Kayla said, continuing to nibble around the edge of her toast, determined to get something in her stomach. “You sound like you’re about to make a speech. Now think about it, do we need the speech? Or can this all remain an inside thought?”
Liz pursed her lips in defiant annoyance. “I have something to say,” she said pertly.
“Oh God, okay.” Kayla rubbed her face with her free hand and resigned herself to one of her mom’s weird conspiracy theories. Maybe she needed to watch out for the neighbor because he’d trimmed his hedges lower, which meant that he was definitely spying on her.
“Now I don’t need to know what shenanigans you get up to,” Liz said.
“Did you just say shenanigans?”
“It’s a perfectly good word.”
“It sure is.”
“But I’ve been around the block once or twice, myself.”
“Ah-huh.”
“And I’ve noticed you’ve been real tired the last few weeks,” her mom continued.
“Yeah, Ma, I’ve turned my whole life upside down.”
“And for the last couple days, you’ve been unwell.”
Kayla suppressed a sigh. Her mom liked to hedge around a topic and get it good and prepared before coming out and saying whatever it was that she wanted to say.
“Yes, Ma. I’ve been unwell for a bit now.”
“So you do admit it?”
“It’s pretty obvious. And it’s lucky I don’t have practical classes or I wouldn’t be allowed through the door.”
“Well, I was thinking…”
“Yes?”
“That you should maybe go take a pregnancy test.”
Kayla choked on toast crumbs and spent a full minute coughing, trying to get her airways clear. Liz not so helpfully slapped her repeatedly between the shoulder blades with a little bit too much enthusiasm. After a prolonged fit and a glass of water, Kayla was able to breathe again.
“Are you trying to be funny?” she asked. “Because it’s falling pretty flat.”
Liz said nothing, just raised her eyebrows.
“Ma… c’mon.”
Nothing. Silence.
Oh, God.
“You don’t really think…”
Liz raised her eyebrows because it was apparent that she certainly did think that Kayla was pregnant, and the realization of it all was coming towards Kayla like a tsunami on the horizon and the impact was really, really going to hurt.
Being pregnant wasn’t necessarily the problem. The problem was that she hadn’t been with anyone since Elio… The guy who was on the other side of the world. That was a really big problem. Right now, denial seemed to be the best strategy moving forward.
“I don’t really feel like driving across town to get a pregnancy test right now,” Kayla said, setting about cleaning her already clean kitchen as a distraction. “So your curiosity is going to have to remain unsated, sorry.”
“Lucky for you,” Liz said, breaking her unnerving silence and rummaging through her purse. “I happen to work at a hospital, so…”
And like some twisted, very unfunny magician, she pulled not one but two pregnancy test boxes out of the bag and placed them on the countertop. Kayla stared at them like they might grow fangs and start wriggling forward to bite her.
But despite that, her hand reached out without her permission and she picked up one of the tests. Unable to take in any of the text on the box, she just stared at it blindly.
Her heart was thudding in her chest; surely her mom could hear it. She stared at the package, her feet frozen to the floor. Because part of her already knew what the test was going to say. It made too much sense…
“Kayla,” Liz prompted gently.
Kayla was suddenly able to move again, feeling like a frozen-over lake cracking at the first signs of spring, and gripped the test tighter in her fist to stop her hands from shaking.
“No point in procrastinating, right?” she asked, with just the smallest waver in her voice.
“Nope,” said Liz, shuffling her off in the direction of the bathroom. “And I’ll be right here when you come back out, kid. No matter what the result is.”
* * *
It read positive. Plain as day. But these things weren’t a hundred percent accurate. False positives were a thing, and even Liz had hedged their bets and bought two of the things. But then Kayla did the second test, waited another excruciatingly long three minutes, and the result was the same. Positive. Pregnant. Expecting. With child… Whatever you called it, it was life-changing. Kayla had had quite enough life-changing experiences in the last couple of months, thank you very much.
She sat on the edge of the bathtub, with the two very positive pregnancy tests lined up on the basin, and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. This all seemed easier to process if she could just reduce the amount of information coming into her brain at any one time. Was the human body actually meant to process this many emotions at once? It didn’t feel like it because Kayla thought her heart might give out at any given moment.
A baby was great, objectively. She’d always wanted to be a mom at some point in her life. But the idea had been to find the right guy, settle down and, you know, plan a pregnancy. Kayla wasn’t all that keen on surprises at the best of times. So, yeah, a baby was amazing. Unfortunately, the practicalities came rushing in and dampened the mood.
She had just quit her very stable, very normal job to go and start from scratch in a very not-stable line of work. A line of work that she wasn’t even qualified for yet. She was living off her savings currently, looking around for serving jobs, thinking that it might get her into the industry from the ground floor. She was doing the math on all of the things you needed to buy in order to take care of an infant, all of the things she would need to buy before it was even born, not to mention the medical bills and… oh, God. Now she didn’t know if she was sick from the pregnancy or from panic.
There was a knock on the door and Kayla jumped, her hands flying from her eyes and returning her to the rest of reality, blinking from the brightness.
“Considering you’ve been in there for about twenty minutes now,” came her mom’s voice through the door, “I’m going to hazard a guess that I’m officially going to be a grandmother?”
Kayla stood and opened the door, and Liz was right there with a sympathetic smile on her face. She knew what to do, surging forward and sweeping Kayla up into a hug.
“Congrats,” Kayla said in a dry voice. “You’re officially going to be a grandma.”
“And you,” said Liz, pulling back and smoothing some curls away from Kayla’s face. “You’re going to be a mom!”
“Yeah, well, there’s the matter of the father that needs to be dealt with.”
Kayla needed to sit back down, but she’d spent more than enough time in the bathroom for one day. She walked around her mom and made her way to the living room, perching on the edge of the couch and trying to take some deep breaths.
“So you’re going to tell him?”
“I should, shouldn’t I?”
“I mean, you don’t have to do anything. You set the rules. You do what’s best for you.”
“Is this you giving me an out just to make me feel better?”
“Yup.”
Kayla rubbed her forehead. “That’ll sure be a fun conversation.”
“You said he was nice?” Liz asked, following along, unconsciously tidying things as she went. “This guy was a good one, didn’t you say?”
“Yeah, for a fling. He was nice for not throwing me to the sharks when that storm rolled in and I was stuck. In the end, it doesn’t matter how nice he is, because if I tell him, ‘hey, mister billionaire who’s already in the middle of one lawsuit, I’m having your baby.’ Tell me something that sounds more like entrapment than that.”
Liz just pursed her lips again for a moment, thinking, because there wasn’t any real arguing with that.
“So you are… having it, then?” Liz asked with an impressive amount of tact, given her reputation.
Kayla stilled and realized that, yes, she was. It wasn’t even a decision really, just a fact. She sighed and put her head back in her hands. She felt the couch cushions shift as Liz sat beside her and put a warm hand on her back, moving in soothing circles.
“I’m not crying, by the way,” Kayla said without looking up. “I’m just despairing.”
“And that”s different?”
“Completely.”
“No need to do either, you know. This is happy news.”
Kayla sighed through her nose, still refusing to leave the safety of her hands. This all seemed easier with her palms pressed against her eyes.
“It can be a lot of things, Ma, as well as happy.”
Liz’s hands started stroking her hair, and Kayla eased back into the feeling of it. Then her mom’s hands were tugging her own away from her eyes, lifting her chin up so that she was looking her in the face.
“I figured it out,” Liz said with a shrug and a small smile. “And you turned out to be the best kid I could have asked for.”
That was what started the tears, the silent sort that filled up and ran over Kayla’s cheeks without her permission, dripping off her chin as she blinked. She had nothing else to say, not right now. Talking wouldn’t change anything. She was just going to have to dive headfirst, straight into the deep end and figure this all out as she went along. And no matter what ended up happening with Elio, however he reacted, she’d have her mom. That was more than enough.
Still silent, Kayla leaned over against Liz, who immediately wrapped her arms around her and pecked a kiss on top of her head.
“Decisions don’t need to be made this second,” Liz said. “Take a break, have some more dry toast, and go to bed. Everything will be better in the morning.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Positive.”
* * *
It took less than twenty-four hours for Kayla to come to the unshakable conviction that Elio needed to know about the pregnancy. She hadn’t slept at all, spending most of the night staring up at the dark ceiling of her bedroom before giving up on sleep altogether and getting out her computer to do some sleuthing. Semi-legal sleuthing, considering she was no longer employed by lawyers to give out court summons, but kind of, maybe, still had access to a certain Italian billionaire’s contact information in her notes.
She tried not to think about how this was definitely in some way a little bit illegal, found the number in her files, and typed it into her phone before she could chicken out. It would be early in Italy right now, but still a reasonable time to get a phone call. Especially for a businessman. But after just a single dial tone, an automated voice spoke up and dashed Kayla’s plans.
“The person you have tried to contact is unavailable.”
The call ended with a click, without even the opportunity to leave a voicemail. Kayla groaned and ran her fingers through her hair in frustration, which was a bad idea as they got knotted in her curls, making things worse.
She didn’t have any other contact information for Elio. That phone number was her one shot. She didn’t have an email, a postal address… The only reason she’d known about the island residence in the first place was because of the information she’d scrounged from the lawyers hiring her. Great. She’d just have to try again later. Maybe his phone was just off or out of charge. That’s all. She could call again later. She would call again later.
She snapped her laptop shut and fell back on the bed with a huff, back to staring at the ceiling like some sort of sadistic meditation.
She needed to keep trying. It was the right thing to do. She knew all too well what it was like to grow up with a single mom, with no contact from her dad, a dad who had a different nationality, a different heritage, that Kayla was forever severed from. So if there was even the smallest glimmer of a chance that Elio would want to be involved with his child, then she was going to take it. No matter how awkward it would be to have that conversation. He was absolutely going to think it was about money. Was she stressed out of her mind doing all the math for having a baby? Absolutely. Was that Elio’s problem? No. She would figure it out, just like her mom had said. She just needed to know that she’d tried to give everyone the information they needed, for her future child to have their father in their life, and for Elio to have his child in his.
And what was the other option? Keep her mouth shut and make it all some weird secret? She screwed her nose up at the thought. No, that wasn’t right. It made her feel dirty for one thing, like she’d done something wrong, which wasn’t the case. And she could just imagine fast-forwarding twenty years when the kid, in a bid to get more information, turned up on Elio’s doorstep and told him that he was their father. That would go down like a lead balloon.
So every option kind of sucked. But just calling Elio and telling him outright was the least sucky version she could come up with. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, do it fast and firm and she wouldn’t even notice the sting.
Now, the only thing she had to do was hope and pray that Elio would, at some point, answer the phone.