My lips and fingers trembled, and I almost dropped the phone as I tried to make my throat work.
“I waited for you” played over and over again like a broken record. A broken record with the most beautiful music still coming from it.
Turning my head just enough to look over my shoulder, I eyed the guy shrugging into his shirt, and my chest ached when I faced forward again. Three months ago I would’ve been certain this phone call would go completely differently, but then I’d met Collin . . .
Now I needed to choose between the two.
The guy I’d waited years for and knew I would always love, or the guy I’d given myself to and was falling so in love with.
Part of me screamed that the answer was obvious . . . but Knox still only called once every other week, if that. They were always short calls, and nothing like what I’d grown used to. He was always distracted . . . distant, even. For the first time in more than two years, there’d been no monthly flowers. I was so sure that my leaving had started something that had been unavoidable—that maybe he’d even been waiting for. A time where I was gone so he could feel free of me. As my heart had slowly broken, Collin had been there, piecing together what he could. Something I would never forget and would always be grateful for.
No longer seeing the dorm room I was standing in, I let my memories with Knox consume me. All the good—and there were so many good—followed by the recent bad. “I—” I took a shaky breath in, and my voice came out as a strained whisper. “I didn’t wait for you.”
There was nothing. No sound, no response—only the most heartbreaking silence I’ve ever endured.
I wondered how many times my heart could break over a man I’d thought would have it forever.
“Knox, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I whispered into the phone, and tried to mask the way my voice broke with emotion.
Then again, how did either of us expect it not to happen when lately he’d made me feel as though I was only an obligation? How could he have expected me to wait for him when I’d been so sure he’d stopped waiting for me?
“Say something,” I begged when another half minute passed without a word.
Knox cleared his throat, and a few more seconds passed before he said, “I will always love you. Nothing can change that. Happy birthday, Harlow.”
He ended the call abruptly after, and I stood there staring at the wall in my dark room, listening to the rain beat against the windows, and holding the phone against my chest. I didn’t know how to feel when my heart felt like it had just shattered because of my own actions, but still seemed full because of the person just a few feet behind me.
“I gotta go, baby,” Collin said into my ear, then pressed a kiss to my neck. “See you tonight.” He took a few steps away, then stopped and asked, “Hey, are you okay?”
I turned to look at him, and forced a smile on my face. “Of course.”
“Who was on the phone?”
I looked down at the phone and smiled sadly. “Uh, just someone I needed to say goodbye to.”
He nodded slowly as he took a step back, but tilted his head as he stared just below my throat. “Didn’t you mention liking stars?”
“What?” I asked breathlessly, sure I’d heard him wrong.
“Stars . . . didn’t you say you liked them?”
Loved them, something inside of me whispered. “Yes.”
“I didn’t notice before, but now that you’re wearing it, the diamonds on the necklace look like little stars.”
My breath caught in my throat, and my hand reached up to touch the present as Collin called out a goodbye and left my dorm room. The tears in my eyes barely waited until the door shut before they began to fall. I prayed I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life.
Present Day—Richland
“WHAT DID HE do?” Knox asked, his voice dark.
“Nothing, I told you I’m fine.”
His relieved breath filled the phone. “I’ve been going out of my mind thinking of everything he could’ve done to you this weekend.”
“He’s not going to do anything, Knox, but I need to talk to you, just not over the phone. Can you meet me in an hour at the Starbucks where we ran into each other? Or are you working?”
“No, I’m home, and yeah, I’ll be there.”
The door leading back to the rooms opened, and a woman called my name. I stood and whispered into the phone, “I have to go, but I’ll see you in an hour.”
I hung up and followed the nurse through the office, each step harder than the last. I wanted this to be only a nightmare, but each passing second made it more obvious it wasn’t.
After I finished peeing in a cup, I was led back to a room where the doctor was already waiting for me.
“Harlow, take a seat up here for me.” Once I was seated on the exam table, she continued. “I’ll need to go back out to get the results and look over some things, but I wanted to talk to you for a minute first.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know you were trying to get pregnant.”
“I wasn’t! I have that implant; I thought it lasted for three years!” I said quickly, and a little too urgently. I tried to calm myself, but my body was shaking again.
She nodded and sent me a sympathetic smile. “Well, like everything, it’s not one hundred percent effective. Now, Harlow,” she said in a softer voice as she pulled up a chair next to where I was sitting, “there are a couple of reasons why I wanted to see you right away when you called us this morning to let us know you had a positive test. You said you don’t know when your last menstrual cycle was since yours have been very light and don’t come as often with the implant, which is common, but it means we don’t know how far along you are.”
I nodded and waited for the rest of what she would say.
“The second is, when you were here getting the implant, you were very . . . well, you appeared to be very nervous about getting it done. You made sure it was something no one would be able to find out about, and that isn’t a common request we get with married women. With that visit, the way you seem to drop weight you don’t have to spare between each yearly exam, and what you just said about not trying to get pregnant . . .” She paused and leaned close. “Do you need me to get you help?”
“What?” I asked, horrified.
“We can get you help if you need it.”
No, no you can’t. No one can help me. Collin knows people everywhere! “No! No, I don’t want help. I-I don’t need it.” I laughed uneasily and shrugged. “I just don’t want a, uh, baby, you know? I don’t think I’m one of those women cut out to be mothers, but my husband, he wants this baby, he really wants a baby. He’s so excited.”
She wore a fake smile, one I knew well because I wore it when I was out with Collin, and waited to see if I would change my mind. But I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. I knew I wasn’t doing a good job of convincing anyone lately, but it was hard when my entire world had flipped within the span of a week and a half. Knox showing up, then me finding out I was pregnant after doing everything to prevent it for years.
“Okay then, well I—” She was cut off by a knock on the door, and a nurse came in.
“Hi, I’m sorry. Mrs. Doherty? Your husband is here, and he wants to come in. Is that okay with you?”
“Of course,” I said faintly after a beat of silence. I couldn’t stop the way my body noticeably locked up and my eyes widened, and from the look on the doctor’s face when I turned back toward her, she’d seen it.
The first day Collin had ever left work early in his life, I was with a woman who was trying to see if I needed help getting away from him, knew about my birth control implant, and I’d made plans to meet Knox afterward. And that’s when I realized: Oh my God I have the secret phone in my purse. I quickly reached into my purse and shut the secret phone off, just in case Knox called or texted again, and was waiting for Collin with a bright smile when he walked in.
“Hey, baby.” He gave
me a quick kiss, then shook the doctor’s hand and gave her his million-dollar smile as he introduced himself. “Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to be here for the first appointment.”
Of course, I thought, and held back a defeated laugh when it all made sense. Collin wasn’t here simply because he was excited. He was here because he didn’t trust me to be with the doctor alone. It was the same reason he wouldn’t force me into seeing a fertility specialist even though there was seemingly no reason that I never got pregnant. He was afraid they would find evidence of our home life—of the toll my body took as a result of my husband turning into a monster.
My doctor glanced at me before giving Collin her attention again. “Not a problem. I was just telling Harlow that we needed to get her in now since we had no way of knowing how far along she is.”
My arms tightened around my body at where this conversation was already going, and if Collin noticed from where he was rubbing my back, he didn’t make any indication.
“Harlow has very irregular menstrual cycles, but that is common with young women like her. Her metabolism is so high that she can’t keep weight on, and then it starts messing with her cycle.”
“Ah, of course!” Collin said, as if her explanation made complete sense.
Another knock sounded on the door. This time the nurse came in, handed something to the doctor, and walked back out.
Collin and I both stilled at her expression.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked her.
Her eyes flicked up to mine, and in the brief second that they met, I could’ve sworn that I saw worry, but didn’t understand why. “Yes, I need to do an ultrasound, though. So if you could follow me down the hall.” Halfway to the room, she said, “It will be internal, so it’s up to you, Harlow, if you want your husband in there.”
Collin’s fingers dug into my elbow, so I quickly said, “Of course . . . I want him in there.”
The doctor held her arm out to show us into the room, and again that fake smile was on her face. “Okay then. Undress from the waist down, and I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Weird woman,” Collin said once we were in the room and I was undressing. He didn’t seem happy, as he had the entire last week; he was just staring at the closed door with a confused look—like he was trying to figure the doctor out. When I was up on the exam table and covered with the sheet left there, he looked back at me and smiled. “Are you excited?”
“I am,” I lied, trying to pass off my fear as the good kind of nervousness. “I was starting to worry we’d never get here.”
“I’m back,” the doctor said as she peeked in. “You ready?”
“We are,” Collin answered, and stepped back so she could come in. With a cold glance in her direction, he came to my side and took my hand as he asked her, “Are you sure you’re okay? You looked worried in the room back there.”
The doctor quickly explained how the ultrasound was going to work, then looked at Collin as she began. “The results from Harlow’s urine came back, and her levels looked low. What we would consider a negative pregnancy test, low. But I was planning on doing an ultrasound anyway to get a good idea of where we were at, so I didn’t want to scare anyone since tests can always be weird.”
My eyes shot over to Collin, and I watched as his chest stopped moving and his body quickly locked up. Long moments passed before he started breathing again, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the screen on the wall, where he’d been expecting a baby . . . where there was nothing. Collin’s hand started squeezing mine harder and harder, but he never moved to touch me anywhere else, and his eyes never left the screen.
After another few minutes, the doctor stopped the ultrasound and sighed sadly when I sat up.
“She lost the baby?” Collin asked softly, a hint of darkness in his tone.
“No, I’m sorry. It uh . . . it looks like Harlow was never pregnant. The test must have been a false positive. Not as common as a false negative, but it can happen. Old tests, defective tests, prescriptions you may be taking, that sort of thing.”
A high-pitched ringing filled my ears, and I didn’t hear anything else the doctor or Collin said after that. Collin continued to dig his fingers into spots along the inside of my wrist, forearm, and elbow, but I’m not sure I was even reacting to them. All I could think about was what was to come.
Maybe if I had been pregnant and lost the baby, Collin would have gone easy—well, easier—on me. But to not have been pregnant at all? To get his hopes up even more than I’d planned to with my original lie? It didn’t matter that I didn’t take prescriptions. It didn’t matter that Collin bought all the tests, gave them to me, and watched me take them; I knew he would see this as my fault—as something I’d done.
I was suddenly slammed back onto the table, and Collin’s finger was digging into a pressure point on the bottom of my abdomen. My mouth opened and a soft gasp escaped my throat before his face was directly above mine.
“Shut up, Harlow,” he gritted out.
My eyes darted around the room, but I didn’t see the doctor. I hadn’t even realized she’d left.
“Where’s the baby?” he asked in a soft, dark voice.
My head shook quickly, and I tried to repeat the words that the doctor had said, but all that was coming out were squeaks of pain.
“Do not show your pain.” He emphasized his demand by digging in harder, and moved his other hand down my leg to press his fingers into the inside of my thigh. “Where is the baby?”
“C-Collin, p-please. I-I-I”
He removed his hands and paced away from me. “Get dressed,” he ordered without looking at me. As I dressed, he spoke. “We’re going to go home. You’ll drive in front of me, and you will stay in front of me. I don’t think I need to tell you what could happen if you tried to get away from me, do I?”
“No!”
“Good; dress faster.” He continued pacing and clenched his hands into fists over and over again. “I will use that time to calm down, and you will use that time to come up with a damn good explanation for what happened Friday night and today, you understand me?”
“Collin, how can—”
He closed the distance between us so fast, I started falling back. “Do you understand me?” he seethed.
“Yes! Yes, of course I do!” I whispered frantically.
Collin nodded and gave me a once-over, then brushed back my hair, which must have gotten messed up when he slammed me down. “Good. Let’s go.” We walked quickly out of the office and the building, but just before we got to my car, he stopped me and held out his hand. “Give me your purse.”
I knew better than to question him when he asked for something, and normally I wouldn’t have thought twice, but now all I could think of was the secret phone. On shaky legs, I handed over the purse and tried not to gasp out loud when he reached inside.
“You won’t need this. I don’t need you making any calls, and you shouldn’t be driving stupid enough to get pulled over.” He handed over my keys and stalked away from me.
I blew out a ragged breath once I was in my car, but the fear only grew with each passing moment on the drive home. I was supposed to be meeting Knox in half an hour, and not only would that not be happening, but I wouldn’t able to let him know that I wouldn’t be there, or why.
By the time we got home I was doing everything not to throw up, but thank God Collin didn’t seem to be any angrier than when we’d left, which hopefully meant he hadn’t found the other phone.
Collin put his arm around me as we walked up to the house, but I knew it was all a ruse for anyone who might be watching us, as everything was. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that the drive home had actually given him time to calm down. Collin only calmed down when he was done teaching me a lesson.
As soon as the front door was shut behind us, Collin grabbed my hair and flung me back against the door.
Putting a hand on either side of my head so he was caging me in, he leaned close
. “Where is the baby?”
“You heard her, there was no—”
“Then how the fuck did you get that test to say positive? How have you been magically feeling like this may be our time, Harlow?” he screamed.
“I don’t know why it said that. You heard her!”
Collin grabbed my shoulders and shook me once before slamming me back, making my head smash against the door. “Not good enough, Harlow!” When my head rolled forward, he grabbed the top of my hair and yanked my head back. “You are worthless,” he spit out. “You mess up time and time again, I’m constantly having to correct you, and you can’t give me what a wife should. After two and a half years, we should at the very least be past me having to correct you, don’t you think? Shit, we should have been past that after the first month!”
“I try,” I whimpered, and attempted to blink away the darkening in my vision. “I don’t want to mess up, I—” My slurred words stopped, and my head rolled forward again.
“Jesus Christ,” he scoffed, and yanked my head back up, but this time his other hand wrapped around my throat and began squeezing. “I’ve looked every time and I’ve never found any birth control pills, which means you hide things better than I thought, or there’s something else going on. But I know there is something going on, Harlow.”
I tried desperately to bring in air, but there was nothing, and he didn’t seem too affected by the fact that I wasn’t breathing or that I was gripping and scratching at his hand and arm, trying to get him to release me.
“So let’s do this differently. Are you going to try to get pregnant now?”
Nothing but choking sounds left my mouth as I continued clawing at his arm.
Collin made an annoyed face and sighed. “Poor, poor Hadley. She’ll never get married, or have children. All because her big sister didn’t care enough to try to protect her.”
My arms and body hung uselessly, and my vision was almost completely black by the time Collin let me slowly slide to the ground, but his grip on my throat never loosened.