Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Ava
My heart is thundering when I check my messages after the morning rush and see an email from Dr. Russo’s office telling me some test results are in and I should log onto the portal.
“Jason, I’m taking a short break.”
“Got it covered,” he says.
I don’t go into the office. Trevor is there. He’s been spending all his time on the computer either doing his paramedic stuff, or trying to learn more about our business. I’m proud that he’s taking initiative, but sometimes I worry he’s taking on too much.
I don’t even bother with a coat. It’s still pretty chilly around here in early March, but the sun is shining and there’s been no snow for days.
Heading out the front door, I turn right, go past Regan’s old boutique that her brother Ryder is re-opening as a cannabis shop, past the hardware store, and sit on the bench just outside Maddie’s flower shop.
I open the email, tap on the link to the portal, and type in my credentials.
Two things immediately catch my eye. A big green checkmark in a circle with the bold words LOW RISK right above. And then… then I see a large purple gender symbol with one word above it: FEMALE.
My eyes tear up. Not only because it’s a girl, which I’d truly hoped for, but because of all the fears I didn’t even allow myself to think about.
I’m a woman in my thirties, which can increase the risk of certain chromosomal anomalies, and that was never even a blip of concern on my radar until now.
But it’s a girl.
And she’s healthy.
My hand goes to my stomach, still flat at eleven weeks, and I hold it there as I scan the results page. Seeing words like Trisomy has me thinking of my friend, Allie, and what she went through.
My mouth goes dry when I realize what this means. It means today is the day I’m going to tell Trevor he’s going to be a father. I knew it was coming. I’ve been mentally preparing myself for it.
I just hope it doesn’t ruin what we have going.
The past few days with him have been nothing less than magical.
Not only have I seen glimpses of the old Trevor, but I’ve really been enjoying the new one.
It’s a thought that still amazes me. A week ago, if you’d told me I’d be sleeping with, reading to, and laughing alongside the man who didn’t even remember me, I’d have called you crazy.
But now… now I think I might be falling for him. The new him.
Yeah… crazy.
I’ll tell him tonight. After dinner. When we’re relaxing on the couch.
After he’s told me about what he did for his training and what new tidbits he learned about the coffee house.
After he’s kissed me a few times and told me I’m beautiful.
After we’ve gazed deeply into each other’s eyes, trying to learn more about each other from sheer osmosis.
I tuck my phone away, wipe my eyes, and go back to work for the next four hours with an easy, carefree smile.
Everything’s going to work out just the way it’s supposed to.
“Ava.”
My name is being called from the office while I’m cleaning up the back room.
“Be there in a minute.”
I finish scrubbing out the sink and wiping down the counter. When I’m drying my hands, I turn and see Trevor perched against the doorframe, sifting through a stack of papers, his brow wrinkled.
“What’s up?” I ask.
He holds something out. “I was going through the mail earlier. What’s this twenty-five-thousand-dollar loan against the business for?”
I stiffen. I’m not quite prepared for this yet.
He shuffles through the papers again. “I’ve been trying to piece it all together.
It doesn’t look like it was used for anything at the shop as there weren’t any unusual business expenditures over the past six months.
” He holds up a second wad of papers. “I printed off all our personal bank statements for the past year. And it looks like starting last summer there was a six-thousand-dollar transaction to ‘brownmd—White Plains’ that recurred almost every six weeks. It happened four times, the last time in early January.” He looks up, brows scrunched. “What was that for?”
“Umm…” I look around to see if Jason has gone for the day. He hasn’t. “Can we talk about this later? I have to lock up.”
“Yeah, I guess. But why can’t you just tell me?”
I blow out a long breath, mostly to try and quell my anxiety. “I can. I will. But upstairs, okay? Just let me go tell Jason I’m done cleaning the back and that he can lock up.”
He nods absently, turning his attention back to the thick stack of papers as he heads for the apartment stairs, carrying the evidence of my deceit with him.
How could I have been so na?ve? I knew he’d been going over the business books. Why didn’t I think he’d be going through the mail and looking at our personal accounts?
I meander in the shop longer than necessary, waiting for Jason to leave and then wasting a few minutes doing menial tasks out front.
Maybe I should be relieved Trevor happened across it. It means I can’t chicken out and postpone telling him the inevitable.
It’s going to be fine, I tell myself. He’s been told we were battling infertility. He knows we tried IVF. Surely he’ll be able to understand that I only withheld the pregnancy from him because he asked me to take baby steps.
Additionally, what he doesn’t know can’t hurt him, right? We were trying to have a baby. Me using up the last of our embryos seems logical. He doesn’t have to know he wasn’t part of that little decision.
I sit in our booth and stare at the table knowing it wasn’t a little decision.
But I contemplate which is worse—telling him I got pregnant without his permission and dealing with the consequences, or lying about it then him getting his memory back and being pissed at me.
But would he be pissed if that happened? I’m just not sure. I’m not sure about any of it.
“Ava?”
Trevor is standing behind the counter.
“I’m starting to get concerned. The way you reacted when I asked about the loan… And now you’re down here sitting in a booth, stalling. It’s clear something has you tied up in knots. You can tell me. Did we get into debt?” His face falls into a guilty expression. “Was it me? Did I do something?”
When I don’t answer, he comes around the counter and slips onto the bench next to me. Not across from me, as he would have before last Friday. He takes my hand, another thing he wouldn’t have done a mere week ago. Yet here he is, comforting me, thinking the worst of himself.
“Ava, remember what we promised the other night? That we wouldn’t keep things from each other?”
I nod as a truckload of guilt assaults me from head to toe.
“Then what is it? It’s okay to tell me, I can take it.”
I close my eyes and swallow what feels like shards of glass, making a split-second decision to come clean about everything. Because if I want this to work—really work—whether or not he gets his memory back, we need to be truthful. Work as a team. Go forward together without any secrets between us.
“It wasn’t you, it was me.”
He squeezes my hand. “It’s okay, Ava.” His eyes rake over my face, examining every feature from my forehead to my chin. Then his gaze sweeps across my chest. “Did you um… have some work done? Plastic surgery or something?”
Why am I so scared to tell him the news that should be the greatest revelation of our lives?
Probably because this new version of him has never, not once, expressed an interest in children.
In fact, I overheard him talking with his father that he was relieved we didn’t have kids.
Maybe this Trevor, the one who doesn’t remember our history and how desperately we wanted to start a family, will be the opposite of excited.
I take a breath, reminding myself that to him, this is a brand new relationship, and why would he mention kids. To him, it would be too soon to bring it up when we’re still testing the waters with each other.
But the past few days have been wonderful. We’re somehow finding our way back to each other. Maybe the baby will speed up the process. Make us the family we’d always dreamed of.
“Ava, you’re kind of freaking me the fuck out here. Are you sick? Was that for cancer treatment? What aren’t you telling me?”
I shake my head and stare blankly at the table. “I’m not sick. And, no, I didn’t get anything ‘done.’ But it was me who took out the loan.” I close my eyes, not wanting to see his expression when I say it. “You’re aware of how we tried IVF early last year.”
“Yes.”
“Well, what you don’t know is that we ended up with a lot more viable embryos than normal. After the failed attempt, there were still quite a few left. But we couldn’t afford more embryo transfers as we’d drained our savings for the one round of IVF.”
He gives my hand a squeeze. “Yeah, those can be super expensive. But if we had savings to cover it, what were all those other payments for?”
I look up at him. His eyes are soft and warm and so, so blue.
I pretend I’m looking into the eyes of the old Trevor, because those eyes wouldn’t be judgmental or accusing.
“We, um… didn’t want to destroy the embryos, so we paid for cold storage.
We’d tried for so many years to get pregnant.
You got tested. I got tested. We were told we both had issues and that it could happen, but our chances were low.
They said IVF was our best option. We agreed to one round, and if that failed, we were going to look into sperm donation and adoption once you got back home. ”
“You still haven’t gotten to the point. None of this is adding up. Storing embryos would not cost anywhere near the amount of the loan.”
“You need to understand how devastated I was when the IVF didn’t work. I blamed myself. I thought I had failed you. Failed us. And I couldn’t bear the thought of all those embryos going to waste. So…” I inhale a shaky breath and hope what I tell him will not have him pulling away. “So I used them.”
He doesn’t respond right away. But his hand doesn’t move either.