And I’d been…tired. Queasy. Not feeling much like myself. They were familiar symptoms, bringing up memories from five years prior, though that scary, exciting whirlwind time before Daphne had been born felt far enough away that it hadn’t crossed my mind when I first felt icky at the zoo.
Oh my God. The zoo. I’d been close to passing out, and it hadn’t even crossed my mind that I could be pregnant.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I checked the time, swore quietly, and got back out into the dining room. One more hour. I had one more hour of my shift, and then I could actually think about this.
I picked up a test on the way home, stowing it safely into my purse as I nabbed Daphne for fear that she’d see the box and ask questions. Then I got to not think about it for a little while. I had dinner with my little girl, enjoyed hearing about her shenanigans at daycare and watching her work on her zoo play set for a while before it was time for a bath and then bed. It wasn’t until Daphne was tucked in and zonked out that I allowed myself to panic again.
I hadn’t taken a pregnancy test in five years, and I felt just as freaked out and out of my depth taking it this time, though I didn’t have to look at the instructions until after I’d done the deed. I set a timer on my phone for the recommended number of minutes, then promptly left the bathroom, flopping face-first onto my bed.
The darkness helped me think. It would be unlucky, though not impossible, if I’d gotten pregnant by Gavin, Cade, or Luca again. We hadn’t used condoms, and though I had my own usual methods of birth control, I knew it was recommended that you use two forms. Nothing was foolproof, and I was still scatterbrained and a little messy, the type who would fuck up like this again, no matter how much motherhood had helped me mature.
I was still me. The return of my libido and my thriving, exciting sex life had been proof enough of that. An incredible reminder of who I was before I was Daphne’s mom, and a return to the parts of myself I’d neglected for all these years. But this uncertainty was a different kind of reminder of who I was. A less pleasant one, maybe. Even if the thought of another baby, of sharing the experience of motherhood with the men I now thought of as my guys, had a sweet flutter of magic to it.
My phone timer went off, making me jump a little. The moment of truth. Fuck, my heart was racing.
And it skipped a beat—maybe a few beats—when I picked up the test and saw two lines, clear as day.
I was pregnant again.
Daphne was going to be a big sister.Iwas going to be a mom of two, which I’d never really thought would happen, even though I’d fantasized hopelessly about Daphne having a sibling to grow up with more than once over the years.
And once again, I had no idea which of the three guys I was falling for—the guys Ihadfallen for, I realized then, another complicated joy striking my heart at the idea of loving them—was the father.
32
CADE
It had been days since any of us—Gavin, Luca, and me—had heard a peep from Allie, and I was about ready to crawl out of my skin. So ready, in fact, that I was calling a meeting with my friends.
I opened our group text, making sure to pick the one we had to ourselves and not the one where we’d been text-flirting with Allie for weeks before this radio silence descended. She didn’t need to know about our plans. Part of me worried she was avoiding us on purpose, even if the simpler explanation would be that her life was busy. But if that was the case, Gavin, Luca, and I needed to figure out what we’d done wrong. That way, we could strategize on how to get her back.
Cade:We need to talk about Allie.
Gavin:Normally I’d say you’re being dramatic…but yeah, I’m a little freaked by the silence. Hope she’s ok.
Luca gave a thumbs-up reaction to my message in lieu of responding. He had been weird and quiet since the annulment meeting too, and though we were still living in the same house—having trouble letting go—he seemed to be going out of hisway to avoid running into me. Even eye contact was sparse, and the energy in the beach house was completely off. I’d been trying to work on my art and make plans on the business side of things, but it was hard to focus with all of these weird emotional distractions.
Before I noticed how he was avoiding me in particular, I figured it was just because he didn’t want us witnessing his complicated feelings about no longer being married to the girl we’d all stumbled into love with. That was what it was, I knew. Maybe my friends wouldn’t be able to admit it, but I knew how I felt, and I knew that loving Allie meant not giving up without a fight.
I didn’t even know what we possibly could have done to make her want to run away from us. She said the night of our meeting with Daphne that we’d done a good job with her at the zoo, right? Surely I hadn’t made that up. A sick, heavy dread in the pit of my stomach told me there was something else, something bigger and more world-shaking than any small slight we may have committed by accident. There were a million worst-case scenarios vying for attention in my head, and at least half of them had something to do with Daphne and the still unknown variable of which of us shared half of her DNA.
Gavin had meetings for most of the morning, which gave me plenty of time to work on the small, detailed piece I’d started carving on our infamous zoo day before our agreed-upon meeting on the beach house balcony midafternoon. That night, the night I’d met the little girl who made up almost all of Allie Tate’s heart, while I struggled to fall asleep in the bed that wasn’t mine, an idea had formed. The kind of artistic inspiration I couldn’t ignore. When I finally realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that Allie didn’t feel well and was in her own bed alone, without me, I ended up starting the small carving that night. I hunched over a piece of wood that was originally meantto become a spoon rest in the near dark, working by the light of the small lamp on the very desk where I’d first lost my battle against the urge to touch Allie. It felt fitting.
The little wooden giraffes—two adult giraffes cradling a baby between them, their long necks entwined—were close to done now. I still wanted to polish it up, bring out the gorgeous colors in the wood grain, and there were some small details I needed to hone before I gave it to Daphne like I planned.
But fuck, if Allie was running from us again, I might not ever get the chance to do it. I wanted to see the smile on that little girl’s face when she got the gift. At least, I hoped Daphne would smile. She looked just like a mini-Allie when she did, and it made my heart swell.
Impatience started to creep up when Gavin got delayed by another fucking meeting. By the time he finally got back to the house, I had a new idea. When the guys met me on the balcony, it was early evening, and I didn’t waste any more time bullshitting about our feelings.
“We need to go check on her,” I practically barked at my friends.
It fixed two problems: the mysterious silence, and the need to see her, to check on her after she’d been sick. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing and attempts at logic-ing me out of it, and Luca was still being cagey as hell, but the guys eventually agreed with me, and I felt a little relieved just by getting in the car and heading toward Allie’s apartment.
Love really was some kind of madness. This felt deeper, more certain than my past connection with Jordyn. But that was all the more reason to go out on a limb. To try harder to keep our girl happy and in our lives.
I knocked a little harder than I meant to on Allie’s door, following it up with a gentler tap in hopes of softening the effect. Luca was looking at me with some strange intensity, and while Ihad the urge to tell him to spit it out, Allie was my first priority at the moment. When she opened the door and looked at us, eyes wide, something loosened in my chest.
