Chapter 31 Andrea
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Andrea
I spent the entire day not looking out the window.
I didn’t look once, except for the times I looked, which I wasn’t counting because they didn’t count if I didn’t mean to. Grandma had been giving updates whether I wanted them or not.
“Still there.”
“Still raining.”
“He moved his car to the other side of the street. I think his legs were cramping.”
“I don’t care.”
“I didn’t say you did. I’m just keeping you informed.”
At dinner I burned the rice because I was distracted by the fact that I was absolutely, definitely not thinking about the man sitting in a car across the street.
Grandma ate the burned rice without comment, which was how I knew she felt sorry for me, because under normal circumstances she would have made me start over.
Then she made a sandwich, put it on a plate, and headed for the front door.
“What are you doing?”
“Bringing him a sandwich.”
“Grandma, no.”
“Starving a person isn’t a punishment, Andy. It’s just mean.”
“He can feed himself.”
“He’s been in that car for ten hours in the rain.
I’m bringing him a sandwich. You can hate him on a full stomach.
” She was already out the door. I watched through the gap in the curtain I was not looking through as she crossed the street, set the plate on the roof of his car, said something I couldn’t hear, and walked back.
She didn’t look at me when she came inside. She didn’t need to.
It was after ten now. Grandma went to bed an hour ago with a pointed “goodnight, sweetheart” that carried every opinion she’d held back all day. The house was dark, quiet, and I was on the couch staring at the ceiling with the porch light on and his car still visible through the curtain.
Twelve hours. He’d been out there for twelve hours.
I stood up, put on my jacket, opened the front door and walked onto the porch. He was out of the car before I reached the bottom step, crossing the street, and I held up my hand.
“Stop. Right there.”
He stopped on the sidewalk. He looked worse than this morning, clothes damp, hair flat against his forehead, dark circles so deep they looked like bruises.
“Go home, Finneas.”
“No.”
“I’m serious. Get in your car and go home.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You’ve been sitting in a car for twelve hours. This is insane.”
“I’ll sit in it for twelve more. I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
I stared at him. He stared back. Rain was still dripping from the gutter between us, slow and rhythmic, and neither of us blinked.
“Fine.” I sat on the porch bench and crossed my arms. “You have until I decide you’re done.”
He walked to the bottom of the porch steps and sat on the lowest one, below me, looking up. I didn’t invite him higher.
“When you were in the hallway at the hospital,” he said, “waiting for me outside my mother’s room. She asked me to marry Lorraine.”
I went still. That night. I was sitting in a plastic chair staring at the door, worried sick about him, while Lorraine called me names and her mother smirked at me from across the hall. He was on the other side of that door and his mother was asking him to marry someone else.
“She was crying, begging, telling me it was her dying wish. That it was the last thing she talked about with my father before he died.” His hands were gripping each other between his knees.
“I said yes. And then I walked out and told you to go home because I couldn’t look at you knowing what I’d just agreed to. ”
That was why. That was why he wouldn’t meet my eyes, why he told me to leave, why he didn’t lean into the kiss. He’d already said yes.
“Without telling me. Without giving me a single goddamn word for three days while I was losing my mind.”
He didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
The anger surged so fast I had to grip the armrest to keep myself on the bench.
But underneath it, in the part of me that lost both parents at fifteen and would have given anything for one more conversation with either of them, I understood the pull of a dying wish.
If Grandma was in a hospital bed asking me for something with her last breath, could I say no?
Could I look at the woman who raised me and tell her no while she was dying?
I didn’t know. I hated that I didn’t know.
“Why didn’t you at least tell me what was happening?” I asked. “Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”
“Because I was a coward. Because I thought I had to carry it alone. Every time I thought about calling you, I pictured your face, and I couldn’t...” He trailed off, staring at the porch step between his feet.
“You couldn’t what?”
“I couldn’t be the one to put that look on your face. The one where you realize I’m choosing someone else.”
“So instead you let me find out from Lorraine. With a magazine. You thought that was the better option?”
He closed his eyes. “No. That was worse. I didn’t know she was going to do that. She told me in the car on the way to the office, and by the time I got to the floor she was already handing it to you.”
“Oh, that’s great. So your future wife surprised you too. What a team you make.”
The sarcasm came out sharper than I intended but I didn’t take it back. He deserved sharp. He deserved every edge I had.
“What changed?” I asked. “Why are you here now instead of picking out tablecloths for the spring ceremony?”
“Because I went to a wedding dress fitting.”
My chest seized. The image of him sitting in some bridal shop watching Lorraine twirl in white hit me harder than I expected, a hot ugly jealousy mixed with hurt that made my throat tighten. “You went to a fitting. For your wedding. To another woman.”
“Lorraine dragged me. She came out in a dress, asked me what I thought, and I sat there feeling nothing. Not a goddamn thing. She was standing in front of me in a wedding dress and all I could think about was you.”
“Am I supposed to be flattered by that? That you were thinking about me while you were shopping for a wedding dress with her?”
“No. I’m telling you it’s what made me realize how wrong everything was.”
“You needed a dress fitting to figure that out? The engagement photos didn’t do it? The magazine didn’t do it? Rejecting me at my desk didn’t do it? You needed to see her in white before it clicked?”
He took that without defending himself, his jaw tight, his hands gripping each other between his knees. I was being cruel and I knew it and I couldn’t stop because the image of him in a bridal shop was eating me alive.
“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I should have stopped it sooner. I should have stopped it before it started.”
“Yeah. You should have.”
We sat with that for a second, the anger still hot in my chest but losing some of its edge because he wasn’t arguing, wasn’t making excuses, just sitting on the bottom step taking every hit I threw.
“So what happened after the fitting?” I asked.
“I walked out. Drove to my mother’s estate to tell her I couldn’t go through with it.
” He rubbed his jaw, the muscle jumping under his hand.
“When I got there, her room looked like it hadn’t been used in days.
Everything was put away, clean, like a guest room.
And she was outside, in her garden, looking healthier than I’d seen her in weeks. ”
I stared at him. The words were there but my brain refused to assemble them into anything that made sense. “Are you telling me she wasn’t sick?”
“She faked everything. She found out about you and me through Lorraine and decided to get rid of you.”
I sat very still. The anger that rose in me was nothing like this morning’s slap.
This was cold, deep, settling into my bones.
I thought about sitting in that hospital hallway with Lorraine sneering at me, staring at the door, sick with worry, while behind it a perfectly healthy woman was performing dying so convincingly that her own son broke his life apart for her.
“I’m angry that she exists,” I said. “I’m angry that someone could do that to their own child. I’m angry that I sat in that hallway worrying about you while she was in there lying to your face.”
He looked at me and I could see gratitude in his expression, that I was angry at her instead of him.
“I’m still angry at you too,” I said. “Don’t get comfortable.”
We sat in the quiet. The dripping gutter, the distant dog, the porch light humming above my head. His hands were clasped between his knees, his eyes on the ground, waiting for whatever came next.
I looked at him on the bottom step. Soaked, exhausted, twelve hours on my lawn, taking every hit I threw without ducking.
He lied to me. He broke my heart. He let his mother pull the strings because he loved her too much to see what she was doing.
I understood that more than I wanted to, and hating him would have been so much easier if I didn’t.
He came here. He told me the truth. He sat in the rain all day even after I told him to leave and he chose to stay.
I put my hand on my stomach. The baby. Our baby.
He didn’t know. He was sitting on my grandmother’s porch step with no idea that the woman he was begging for forgiveness was carrying his child, and if I sent him away tonight without telling him, I’d be doing the same thing he did to me.
Making a choice that affected both of us without letting him be part of it.
I wasn’t going to be that person.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.
He looked up.
“I’m pregnant.”
His face went through something I’d never seen before.
Shock first, his eyes going wide, his lips parting.
Then something deeper, slower, spreading across his features like a crack letting light through.
His hands went still between his knees. He stared at me, eyes bright in the porch light, mouth open with no sound coming out.
“A baby,” he said. Barely a whisper.
“Yes.”
“You’re...” He stopped, swallowed, tried again. “We’re having a baby.”
“I’m having a baby. What we are remains to be determined.”
That landed. I watched him pull himself back from wherever he’d gone, the wonder fading behind the reality of where we stood.
“I’m not going back with you,” I said. “I’m not getting back together with you. The most I can offer right now is co-parenting. You can be in the baby’s life, but you and me, as a couple, that’s not on the table.”
He nodded. His jaw was tight but he nodded. “Whatever you want.”
“I want you to come back tomorrow, or the day after, when we’ve both slept. We can talk about how this is going to work.”
“Okay.”
“And Finneas?”
“Yeah?”
“Go get a hotel room. You look like you’re about to pass out and I’m not explaining to Grandma why there’s a man sleeping in a car on her street.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile but close. He stood up, his eyes moving from my face to my stomach that wasn’t showing yet, and the expression on his face was so open, so completely without armor, that I had to look away.
“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me.”
“Go sleep, Finneas.”
He crossed the street to his car, got in, drove away. I sat on the porch bench with my hand on my stomach, watching his taillights disappear around the corner.
Inside, I sat on the edge of my bed with the quilt under my hands. I told him co-parenting only and I meant it.
I thought about his face when I said “I’m pregnant.” The shock, then the wonder. The way he whispered “a baby” like it was something precious he was afraid of breaking.
I meant it when I said co-parenting only.
I was almost sure I meant it.