Chapter 2
It couldn’t be. It was impossible.
And yet…
I stared at the white plastic strip perched on the edge of my bathroom counter, hoping that if I stared hard enough, the result would change.
“Fuck, Liv!” Ashley groaned through the phone. “Are you sure? I thought you had an IUD?”
I walked over to the bathroom counter and peered down. I stifled a groan as the word “PREGNANT” burned into my eyes.
The test might as well have read, “PREGNANT…you dumb bitch.”
I rested the back of my head against the wall as I held my phone up. “I do, but…I got so focused on the Herringbone case last year that I forgot to track the expiration date.”
“How do you just forget that your IUD expired?” Ashley exclaimed. “I thought you had your shit together!”
“I did have my shit together!” I pushed myself off the wall. “How else do you think I earned that $98 million verdict?”
She sighed. “The verdict was badass, Liv, but you can’t forget to take care of yourself. You are more important than your job.”
“I’m only important because of my job.” My slippered feet paced across the black hexagonal tile of my bathroom.
“Fine, I neglected my self-care to take on the largest oil company on the planet. Hell, I even neglected my other cases to make sure I secured that verdict when it went up on appeal! I was busy playing catch-up all month but then I got sick and made everything worse.”
Just before Halloween, I started the most violent spells of vomiting I had ever experienced. I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. I could barely walk. I couldn’t think. When I wasn’t at the office, I alternated between hiding in bed and clinging to the toilet.
When I collapsed while crawling toward my front door to go to work, I finally forced myself to call in sick for a week and a half. I had thought the illness was just the worst stomach flu known to man, but then Ashley told me to take a damn pregnancy test.
“And…you’re sure the baby is his?” Ashley quietly asked.
I sighed. “Couldn’t be anybody else. I didn’t hook up with anyone while the Herringbone case went up on appeal and that started months ago. And after the reunion…” I shrugged, letting the neck of my sweatshirt slide down my shoulder. “…I don’t know, I just haven’t wanted anybody since.”
Though I usually told Ashley all the sordid details of my hookups, I was too embarrassed to admit that I was still pining after my old high school rival.
I hadn’t even opened my dating apps because I was too busy thinking about that night in the attic.
Why go on another mediocre date when I had a vibrating arsenal in my nightstand drawer and a good memory?
I bit my lip at the thought of that egotistical rich boy buckling as I made him finish. Damn, what a sight to behold.
“So, Beau Fontaine is your baby daddy,” Ashley said a little too loudly.
“WHAT?” Tyson exclaimed in the background.
I retched, holding my fist to my mouth to stop the vomit.
“Hey, I’m still in denial,” I croaked. “Let me enjoy it a little while longer. Also—hey, Tyson.”
“Heyyy, Liv,” Tyson responded sheepishly. “So...I guess congratulations are in order?”
“That depends,” Ashley said. “Are you keeping the pregnancy?”
I pursed my lips and stepped out of the bathroom. Being “Aunt Livvy” to Ashley’s kids made me want my own baby eventually. My plan had been to go to a sperm bank once my career was settled and established…but I wasn’t there just yet.
My shoulder rested against the wall as I stared out my big windows that framed a perfect view of the cityscape.
I had made it into an apartment on the twentieth floor, clawed and scraped for an office at Parker & Hill, and had just scored the highest-value verdict the firm had seen all year.
My career was finally kicking off and a child would kneecap me before I could start a full sprint toward true stability.
I bit my lip as I looked across my apartment. My spindly-legged chairs weren’t exactly child friendly. My granite counters had sharp corners that I could just imagine a toddler running head-first into. I didn’t even have a bathtub...was my kitchen sink big enough to clean a baby in?
Though I’d need to do some major child-proofing, I did have a spare bedroom and enough floorspace for a playpen and a high chair and all the other baby stuff Ashley and Tyson had for their kids. My mom didn’t have any of that when I was born.
My eyes drifted up to the shelf with my mom’s photo—she was bright-eyed and smiling at my college graduation, right after her cancer diagnosis.
Then my eyes fell to the small pewter canister containing her ashes.
The “Dead Mom” club was the shittiest club in all of human existence.
I had never needed to talk to her more than I did now.
I pictured a teenage Mom crying in my grandma’s pink bathroom as she held a positive test in her own hands.
She raised me on a small-business owner’s meager earnings, then on government assistance as she hunted for jobs, and we still made it through.
It was a childhood full of hand-me-downs, shared beds, and afternoons spent window-shopping downtown with our hands stuffed into our empty pockets—but it made me into the woman who held the world’s largest oil company accountable at only twenty-seven years old.
Staring at her ashes triggered the memory of me sobbing in her living room because I was ready to quit law school. She was bald as an egg and had deep purple bags beneath her eyes, but she gripped me by the shoulders and told me to look at her as we recited, “I can do hard things.”
I rested my hand on my lower belly as my mother’s brave words repeated in my head.
“Yeah,” I said into the phone. “I’m keeping my baby.”
I pushed off the wall and walked over to Mom’s shelf.
I picked up a framed photo of her beaming with pride next to me at my third grade history fair.
I wore a creative interpretation of a flapper dress fashioned out of old rags and gave a partially-toothless smile as I held my “First Place” certificate in my little hands.
“And this changes nothing about our plans,” I said as I stared down at the photo. “I’m still all-in.”
“No, Liv,” Ashley argued, “I am not asking you to fund the renovation of Miss Kaye’s house while you’re pregnant!”
I frowned. “I get my bonus from the Herringbone case at the end of the year. According to my contract with the firm, my cut out of the attorney’s fees is going to be $2.9 million. I’m going to be fine. My baby is going to be fine. And you know Miss Kaye’s house is personal for me.”
I set the photo back on the shelf. Miss Kaye had been Elren’s original business woman.
She owned the downtown department store, invented a patent for sewing machine parts that’s still in use more than a century later, and never married.
After she died, all her money went into an endowment for the betterment of Elren’s up-and-coming young women.
The endowment paid for my entire education at Plains State University for my bachelor’s degree and law school.
Miss Kaye reminded me of what Mom could have been…had she never let my dad into her life.
After she got pregnant with me, Mom and my dad opened a successful restaurant downtown.
She did the cooking and the serving while he handled the business.
“Handling the business,” I later learned, really meant committing tax fraud, swindling other vendors in town, and then cleaning out the registers and disappearing without a word.
I had just started preschool. Mom went bankrupt and her reputation in town never recovered.
Even though the faded memories of my dad haunted me, I stared lovingly at my mom in the portrait—still in her twenties and holding us together.
The eight-year-old dressed as Miss Katherine Kaye smiled back at me through the glass frame.
I had once promised myself that if I ever made it big, I would give back to the people, just like Miss Kaye did.
I’d do it for Mom.
“Call the city and sign the contract for the house,” I told Ashley. “It’s time we showed Elren the power of an independent woman again.”
“OK,” Ashley replied lightly, but with commitment. “But don’t change the subject. When are you going to tell Beau about the baby? I’ll come with you for support!”
I turned from my mom’s shelf and scoffed. “Why would I tell him? I’m about to be a multi-millionaire, I don’t need him.”
“You have to tell him,” Tyson said. Their infant son quietly babbled in the brief silence. “He needs to know.”
“Beau is not a family man like you,” I replied. “He doesn’t want to see me, and frankly, I never want to see him again either.”
Baby Tarik clapped his chubby hands and giggled as if Tyson had bounced him.
“Come on, Liv,” Tyson scolded. “You can’t do that to a man and you know it.”
In the background, I swore I heard Tarik babble “Dada.” I held my breath as my stomach tightened into a knot.
“He’s right,” Ashley said. “You have to tell him.”
If the pregnancy wasn’t making me queasy, their guilt trip definitely was. What was the point of having friends if they didn’t let you run away from your problems?
I bit my lip. “I don’t have his contact information.”
“We do, from his reunion registration,” Ashley replied. “I’ll send it right now so you don’t have an excuse.”
My hand trembled as it gripped my phone. Telling Beau about the pregnancy didn’t mean involving him. I could still raise my baby myself, on my own terms. I wasn’t beholden to him.
I didn’t need him. I didn’t need anyone. I just…needed to enter this new phase of my life with a clear conscience.
I blew out my breath and suddenly my knees felt weak. “OK, just…send it now and I’ll do it before I fall back into denial again.”
“Give me two minutes,” Ashley said. “And good luck—tell me what happens.”
“Nothing has to happen!” I stressed. “I can tell him, he blocks me, and then we live happily ever after!”
“Oh...you are in denial,” Ashley said with a smile in her voice. “See you at Thanksgiving! Love you!”
My stomach filled with dread. “Love you too.”
“You’re doing the right thin–!” Tyson called as Ashley hung up.
With a groan, I fell backward onto my bed. I rested my sleeve over my glasses to block out the light, but my head still spun. My trashcan was beside the edge of the bed, but somehow I was too sick to even vomit.
I was pregnant. A baby was growing inside me. Beau fucking Fontaine was the father. How was I supposed to tell him? What was I going to say?
My phone vibrated and a shock raced down my spine. I slowly lowered my sleeve from my eyes and peeked at my phone screen—there was the fateful text from Ashley with the number of my child’s father.
I swiped to open the message. Sure enough, there was the contact information for…Beau Louis Fontaine III. Of course that douchebag had registered with his full fucking name!
And those douchebag genes were inside me, building a whole person.
The thought of packing everything and moving to the woods crossed my mind, but I shook the thought away and started a message to Beau’s number. I held my breath, forcing myself to type out the message before I let myself breathe again.
The time crunch made me decide what I was going to say, and fast. My fingers quickly typed out the message and then I gave myself a cleansing gulp of air.
As I read the message over again, my thumb hovered over the “delete” button—my way out of the mess I was about to throw myself into. As I almost gave into the temptation, my mom’s voice crept through my mind again.
“I can do hard things,” I whispered.
And I hit send.