Prologue #4
“I love you too.” She started crying harder. “Jesus. That was supposed to help.”
She laughed, and then she grabbed my blazer and kissed me.
We stayed secret. At school she was O’Toole and I was Harrington. Sometimes I ignored her. Sometimes I was worse. We made it believable because Edgewood already expected me to be an asshole. Privately, I got her back.
And we held out. That was the part nobody watching would ever have believed about the two of us — that behind the locked doors and the stolen hours, we didn’t cross the one line that mattered.
Because now I knew what the line meant. Now I knew that her father had sold that line to a man twice her age, and that the day it stopped being true could be the day it got her hurt.
So we were careful in a way that had nothing to do with wanting each other less.
We wanted each other so much it was its own kind of danger.
We just also knew exactly what it would cost, and for a long time that knowledge held us in check.
We tried to hold out completely, at first. That lasted until Halloween. Then New Year’s changed everything.
Kaiden’s parents threw their annual party, and everybody came — enough people to disappear inside. Ally went upstairs before me. I waited, then followed, and she was sitting on the edge of the guest bed when I walked in.
“You took forever,” she said.
“It was four minutes.”
“Six.”
“You counted?”
“Obviously.”
I locked the door, and she smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi.” I crossed the room, and she wrapped her arms around my neck when I kissed her, and downstairs somebody started screaming about champagne, and neither of us cared.
We stayed upstairs longer than we should have. Then we went back down separately.
Neither of us understood yet that we’d just lit the fuse. That the promise she’d broken to take her own life back wasn’t the kind of promise you could break quietly. That somewhere in the weeks after, the whole thing had already started ticking.
By Valentine’s Day, Ally had been acting strange for almost two weeks.
She was tired. Quieter. Sometimes pale. Twice I’d watched her push food around a plate without eating.
I asked. She said she was fine. I didn’t believe her, and I also didn’t go digging — that was the part people misunderstood about knowing how to find anything.
You had to decide when you weren’t entitled to the answer. So I waited.
Valentine’s Day fell on a Friday. I got her to the guest house after nine. My parents were gone, and Roman thought Ally was with Bella, and for once we had hours instead of stolen minutes.
I’d been planning it for two weeks. I didn’t do flowers — flowers were what you bought a girl when you didn’t know what else she liked, and I knew Ally.
I’d found a first-edition copy of the memoir she’d read aloud to me at the lake over the summer, the one about the woman who’d left everything she’d known and built something for herself somewhere else, and I’d wrapped it in brown paper, no bow, because she hated bows.
I’d hung café lights across the guest house because she’d pointed at a picture of them once in July and said they made everything look warm.
It took me an hour and I nearly fell off the ladder twice.
She walked through the door and stopped. Her eyes moved over the lights, the blankets, the food, the wrapped book. Then me. “Ryan.”
I shoved my hands into my pockets. “What?”
“What did you do?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day.”
“I know what day it is.”
“Then this shouldn’t be confusing.” Her eyes filled, and that wasn’t the reaction I’d expected. “Hey.” I crossed the room, and she shook her head.
“Don’t.” I stopped, and my stomach dropped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Ally.”
She looked away. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Be nice right now.” That scared me more than anything else could have.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Roman?”
“No.”
“Tremblay?”
“No.”
“Did somebody find out?”
“No.”
“Are you leaving me?”
Her head snapped toward me. “No.”
“Then tell me.”
She started crying, and I closed the distance between us, and this time she didn’t back away. I took her face in my hands. “Baby, talk to me.”
“I don’t know how.”
“However it comes out.”
She shook her head.
“You’re scaring me,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then tell me.”
Her hands were shaking. I looked down as she shoved one into the pocket of her coat, and for one insane second I thought she was giving me the penny. Instead she pulled out something white. She took my hand, turned it over, put the plastic stick into my palm, and closed my fingers around it.
I looked down. Two pink lines.
I stopped breathing. My brain refused to understand what my eyes were looking at, and then it did, and I looked at Ally. She was crying silently.
“Ryan,” she whispered.
I looked down again. Two lines. Pregnant. Ally was pregnant.
“Say something.”
I couldn’t. Not yet. And I watched my silence start to destroy her.
She stepped back. “Okay.”
That brought me back immediately. “No.” I grabbed her. “No, no, no. Don’t do that.”
Her face crumpled. “You didn’t say anything.”
“Because I forgot how words work. Holy shit.” A laugh came out of me, completely wrong, half shock and half something else I couldn’t name. “Holy fucking shit.”
She stared at me. “Are you mad?”
“What?”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“You’re freaking out.”
“I’m eighteen and my girlfriend just handed me a positive pregnancy test. I think I’m allowed thirty seconds.” That got the tiniest laugh, and I pulled her closer. “How long have you known?”
“Eleven days.”
I stared at her. “Eleven?”
“I took the first one on the third.”
“First one?”
She sniffed. “There were four.”
Despite everything, I almost laughed. “Four?”
“I needed to be sure.”
“After three?”
“Shut up.”
“Not judging.”
“You are.”
“A little.” She smacked my chest, and I caught her hand and held it there. “When?”
She knew what I meant. “New Year’s.”
And I thought about Kaiden’s house, and the guest room, and the fireworks, and her laughing into my neck. “You’re sure?”
“The dates line up.”
I sat down. Not because I wanted to — because my legs suddenly felt unreliable.
Ally stood in front of me, and I looked at the test again, then at her stomach.
Nothing looked different. Of course it didn’t.
I reached for her, and she came between my knees, and I put both hands at her waist. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No. I didn’t know how without my father finding out.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been trying to figure it out.”
“Okay.”
“Can you stop saying okay?”
“No.”
She laughed, then cried again, and I rested my forehead against her stomach, and that made both of us go still.
There was a baby in there. Our baby. And under the shock, cutting up through it, was the thing I couldn’t say to her yet, the thing my find-everything brain had already understood before the rest of me caught up: this wasn’t just a baby.
This was proof.
Physical, growing, undeniable proof that Ally O’Toole was not what her father had promised Victor Tremblay she was.
The one term. The thing that made her worth it.
Gone — and not gone quietly, not gone in a way anybody could hide, but gone in a way that would announce itself to the whole world in a matter of months whether we were ready or not.
I wrapped my arms around her. “I’m scared,” I admitted.
Her fingers moved into my hair. “Me too. I’m really fucking scared.”
“I know.” I looked up at her. “But I’m not mad.” Her mouth trembled. “I’m not disappointed.” Another tear. “And I’m not leaving.”
“Ryan—“
“I’m not.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She nodded, and I stood and took her face in my hands. “I need you to know.”
“I do.”
I kissed her forehead, then both cheeks, then her mouth, and when I pulled back she was smiling through the tears. “I think I’m happy,” she said.
I laughed softly. “Yeah?”
“Is that horrible?”
“No.” I put my hand over her stomach. “So am I.”
Her eyes opened. “Really?”
“Yeah.” The fear was still there. So was everything else. But underneath it was something warm enough that I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t. Then I remembered. “Wait.” I grabbed the wrapped book off the table, and her eyes widened.
“You still got me something?”
“Obviously. Open it.”
She sat on the couch and I sat beside her, and she peeled the brown paper back carefully, because Ally couldn’t destroy wrapping paper like a normal person. When she saw the cover she stopped, her fingers moving over it. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Ryan. This is a first edition.”
“I know.”
“How did you find this?”
“I’m me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.” Her eyes filled again. “Stop crying. You’re making Valentine’s Day extremely stressful.”
“I’m pregnant, asshole.”
“Right.” She laughed, then leaned into me, and I wrapped my arm around her.
For a while we just sat there under the stupid café lights I’d nearly died hanging, Ally holding the book against her chest and the pregnancy test on the table in front of us. Eventually she said, “What do we do?”
I looked at her. There wasn’t an easy answer. Tobias was still in Roman’s house. Tremblay still existed. Roman still thought Ally belonged to him — and now there was a baby that proved, in the most permanent way possible, that she never had. I took her hand. “I don’t know.”
She swallowed. “I thought you’d have a plan.”
“I will.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.” I turned her hand over and traced my thumb across her palm. “I’m not sure of the how.” Her eyes met mine. “I’m sure of you.”
She leaned into me. I kissed her temple, then rested my hand over her stomach again, and neither of us spoke for a while. Ally put her hand over mine, and I turned mine beneath hers and laced our fingers together.
“I love you,” she whispered.
I kissed the side of her head. “I love you too.”
And that was enough for that night.