29. AVA
AVA
Nothing Left to Hide
I’ve never seen Kai's hands shake.
Not while he was in the hospital with amnesia. Not when he had to undergo all the hurdles to play hockey for his team again.
But they're shaking now as they hold my phone.
I'm standing in the doorway of the bathroom, towel wrapped around me, hair dripping cold lines down my back. Steam curls past my shoulders into the cooler air.
His brown eyes lift to mine and everything inside me seizes.
They’re filled with hurt. Raw, disbelieving hurt on the face of a man who trusted me with the parts of himself he couldn't remember.
"Your phone rang." His voice is so controlled it sounds rehearsed, except for the slight fracture on the last syllable. "Dr. Fernandez's office. They left a voicemail confirming your prenatal appointment on Thursday."
This is it. The moment you've been running from since you peed on three sticks in your mother's bathroom and watched them all turn positive.
"How far along are you, Ava?"
"Kai, let me explain."
"How far along, Ava?"
"Almost five months."
He absorbs this the way he absorbs a hit on the ice. Full body. No flinch. Just the impact registering somewhere behind his eyes before he processes it.
"Did you get pregnant before the accident?"
"Yes."
“Whose baby is it?”
“How can you ask me that question?”
“Just answer me!”
“Yours, Kai. It’s always been yours.”
"The condom." His voice drops. "I remember a torn condom and your voice telling me to relax because you were on the pill."
My stomach lurches. I press my hand flat against the wall to keep myself vertical. The plaster is cool and slightly damp from the shower steam.
"I missed a few pills that week. I didn't realize it mattered until my period never came."
"When did you know?"
"Five weeks after the gala."
“Did you ever plan to tell me?”
"I was going to tell you. " But the excuse sounds weak even in my own ears.
“No, you were not.”
“I was, Kai. Please, believe me.”
"You didn’t tell me in the lake house. No. Not in my apartment or in yours the night you showed up in lingerie and crawled onto my lap."
"At the lake house, you were still recovering. Your memory was in pieces. You didn't even know Wyatt's name three weeks before that."
"I knew yours."
Two words. Quiet. Devastating.
I wrap my arms around my ribcage. The towel shifts. I've messed up because now that it’s time to tell Kai, I don’t know how to justify five months of silence.
"I wanted to tell you so many times that I used to practice the words in my car, in the shower." My throat closes and I swallow through it. "But every time the moment came, something stopped me."
"What stopped you?"
"You."
His chin pulls back. A flash of something scorched crosses his face.
"Not like that. Not you doing anything wrong."
I step forward and the water from my hair drips onto the hardwood. "I started falling in love with you. And I was terrified that if I told you about the baby, you'd look at me and see an obligation instead of a choice."
"You decided what I'd feel before I had a chance to feel it."
"I know how men react when a woman they barely know tells them she's pregnant. My father taught me that. You show up, you say the right things, you kiss your daughter's forehead, and then you leave because staying is harder than arriving."
"I’m not your fucking father. You should know that by now."
There’s heavy silence after that.
Kai puts my phone down on the coffee table, presses his thumbs into his waistband and stares at the ceiling.
"Were you ever going to let me find out on my own or were you planning to keep lying until it showed?"
"It's already showing."
I drop my arms. The towel shifts enough to reveal the slight curve beneath it, the roundness above my hips that I've been hiding under his hoodies and loose shirts and sex positions that kept his hands away from my belly.
"You touched it tonight. You've been touching it for weeks. You just didn't know what you were touching."
His eyes drop to my midsection. Something passes over his face that is so unguarded, so stripped of strategy, that I almost reach for him.
Don't. You don't get to comfort him right now. You're the reason he needs comforting.
“It’s so small. I never suspected you were pregnant.” Then his eyes harden. “Were you lying about the blood transfusion also?”
"It was for the baby. I have a blood condition. My antibodies are attacking the baby's blood cells. I couldn't tell you about the transfusion without telling you about the baby."
His expression changes instantly. “Is the baby okay?”
“Yes.” My throat tightens. “The transfusion worked. The doctors are monitoring everything closely, but the baby’s okay. We should only need one more transfusion, and then we should be in the clear.”
Some of the tension leaves his shoulders, but only for a second.
Then his eyes come back to mine. “You could have told me about the baby.”
"I tried. That night I called you and passed out."
"After months of not trying."
I flinch. Physically, full body, the way an animal flinches when the hand it trusted moves too fast.
"Why did you fall in love with me?" he asks.
The question comes from a different place than the others.
Lower. Rawer.
"Because you see me. You see the real thing and you stay anyway."
"How would I know what's real? Everything I know about you sits on top of a lie."
"Not everything."
"Name one thing."
"I told you about my father. I gave you the worst thing about me and I didn't hide a word of it."
"Just because you told me one thing doesn't mean you trust me. You didn't even trust me enough to tell me about the baby."
He's right. I don't trust him despite all he’s done. I’ve tried my best but sometimes I wonder if he’ll leave.
"I need space." He says it to the floor.
"You think I'm lying about the baby being sick?"
"I don't know what you're lying about anymore, Ava. That's the point."
The words suck out all the air in my chest.
This is what you earned. This is the price of every almost-told, every practiced speech you swallowed, every time you chose silence over the terrifying possibility that he might stay.
"The guest room is yours," he says.
"I want to go home."
"Fine. Give me your keys."
"I can drive."
"You had an emergency blood transfusion for a baby I didn't know existed until ten minutes ago. Give me the keys."
I change in the bathroom with the door shut, pull on my own clothes. Avoid his shirt on the floor because touching it will break whatever is holding me upright.
The elevator ride is silent. He opens the passenger door and waits until I'm seated before walking around to the driver's side and adjusting the seat.
We drive through the city as I watch the streets pass by and try to figure out exactly when we crossed the point of no return.
The hospital? The lake house? The first night I let him inside me, knowing full well whose baby I was carrying?
All of them. None of them.
Every single moment was the point of no return and I kept choosing one more day of his smile over the conversation that would end it.
He pulls into my driveway, cuts the engine, and sits there.
I reach for the door.
He's staring through the windshield. "Take your prenatals."
The tenderness inside the demand folds me in half.
I bend forward, my forehead nearly touching my own dashboard, a sound coming out of me that I can't control because this man just found out I've been lying about his child for five months and his first response is to make sure I take my vitamins.
I press my fist against my mouth. Nod. Open the door.
Inside, I shut the door behind me and stand in my dark hallway, both palms against the wood, forehead pressed to the frame.
I slide down to the floor. Pull my shirt up and place both hands on the curve of my belly.
The baby rolls. A slow, deliberate turn beneath my palms.
"It's just us tonight," I whisper.
But the word just catches in my throat and stays there, sharp-edged, because just us is exactly what I built with every secret I kept, and I have no one to blame for this silence but me.