Natalie freezes at my question, and then slowly lifts her head to look at me. There’s guilt in her eyes, guilt that does not belong there.
“Natalie?” I kneel before her on the worn bench, forcing her to look at me. The late September weather wraps around us like a blanket. “Tell me.”
“I found out last week,” she whispers. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I didn’t want you to think—I didn’t want you to think the worst.”
“The worst?” I breathe, trying to process this piece of information.
“We should have used protection.” She closes her eyes, burying her face in her hands. “This wasn’t planned.”
“No, I don’t believe it was,” I murmur, watching her, my heart soaring. “A child. You’re carrying my child. I’m going to be a father.”
She peeks at me through her fingers. “Are you okay?”
I give her a dazed look. “I don’t think so.”
Getting up, I sit down beside her, staring at her stomach. After a moment, I look at her. “I don’t know how to change a diaper.”
I see the way her cheeks crease in a bewildered laugh. “Neither do I. And why is that the first thought to pop into your head?”
“Babies wear diapers, don’t they? I’ll have to learn.”
Natalie looks incredulous. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you like this before. It’s just a baby.”
“It’s our baby,” I correct her. “We have to buy a crib and—What things do babies need?”
“For now, we don’t need anything. And your mother already got some baby clothes.”
“My mother?”
She gives me a sheepish look. “She was the one who took me to the gynecologist. She suspected I might be pregnant.”
Baffled, I try to connect the dots. “You’ve been meeting my mother?”
Natalie leans back against the park bench. “I have a feeling she tracked me down. I was helping out with Sarah’s parents at their cafe. They’ve been letting me stay there.”
“I heard your mother visited you. Your friend was quite vocal about it.”
I see the faint red lines on her left cheek, and I tilt her chin, touching them. She doesn’t stop me, a dark look forming in her eyes. “I guess she left a parting gift.”
Natalie’s cheeks flush red, and she pushes my hand away. The cold, hard anger that burns inside me needs some place to go. “Are you still going to continue paying off her debts? This was just her reaction to seeing our photographs, wasn’t it?”
She lets out a gust of air. “You know, your mother was so excited. She was making all these plans, talking about schools and nurseries. I was scared she was going to buy the whole shop when she took me shopping for baby clothes. She got me some prenatal vitamins. She even wanted to give me her credit card so I could order food from a select few places she considered healthy for the baby. And me.”
Natalie’s smile is defeated, and I see the sheen of tears in her eyes.
It wrenches my heart.
“She was trying to take care of me. And it wasn’t just the baby she was concerned about. It was me. I-I would have given anything for my mother to have reacted that way, you know.”
She turns to look at me, weariness in her eyes. “But the more time I spent with your mother, Ethan, the more I began to realize that my mother will only hate this child because it is an extension of me. I don’t want my child growing up knowingthat it is disliked. I don’t want him or her to hear the things I spent my whole childhood listening to. I don’t want our child to be told that they don’t deserve love.”
Natalie has only ever talked about her mother once. Everything else I found out through Jake. But to hear her tell me what her life was like fills me with a fury I have difficulty controlling.
“I want my mother’s love, but I also want to protect this baby. And I can’t have both.”
She gives me a serious look. “I’m planning to move out of my apartment. My building is co-op, so I’m going to sell it and look for another place. She found out where I live. I can’t have her coming by again. Since you seem to know everything already, you should also know my finances aren’t the best. But I’ll build them back up. I’ve done it once. I can do it again. And I don’t need your money.”
Her voice is firm now, her eyes steady. “I don’t want anything from you. Not your money, and not your help.”
