Everything went okay, and I wasn’t even nervous. She sat me down in a comfortable chair after Peg told her I was mute. Fucking mute? I just didn’t talk. It wasn’t like I couldn’t.
Of course I didn’t correct her. It wasn’t until she went into her whole little spiel that I finally had the urge to speak. No, that’s not quite right. I didn’t have the urge to talk, I just wanted to scream bloody murder. It was six words. Just six words left me screaming inside my head.
“Any chance you might be pregnant?”
She glanced between Peg and I, knowing I wouldn’t answer, but just as Peg opened her mouth to speak…
I nodded.
It was one sharp jerk, an almost involuntary movement, but it changed so much.
The acupuncturist rambled on about different parts of my body she wouldn’t touch in case I was pregnant, and I met Peg’s eyes, seeing in them the same fear I was feeling. We were both counting back, trying to pinpoint when and how long.
It was silly. I knew when. I knew exactly when.
The acupuncture had actually helped a little, and I think it might have helped a lot if I hadn’t had such a devastating realization right there in the office. I nodded in agreement to coming back for another appointment, and attempted a noncommittal smile as the lady gave me a list of times she taught yoga at the local YMCA. There was no way I’d go to a public place like that, but it was nice for her to offer.
Peg didn’t say anything about it after we left. It was as if we’d both agreed to ignore it, at least until we wrapped our brains around it.
Two days later, I heard Peg talking in the living room while I lay on my bed. She did that a lot—talked even if I wasn’t in the room. I think sometimes she just got sick and tired of the quiet and had to do something to fill it. It was a feeling I could completely understand. I was sick of the quiet too, but I had no idea how to change it.
My lack of period was a solid indication that I was indeed pregnant, but I didn’t have any other symptoms. I wasn’t sick, or hungry, or peeing all the time. I just hadn’t had a period. For a few hours, I’d tried to pretend that the stress had just messed up my cycle, but I couldn’t let my mind linger on that scenario for long. I’d become a realist sometime between getting married and being abandoned in Ireland, and I knew deep in my gut that I was carrying a child.
Peg’s voice got closer to my bedroom door, and I was startled to hear another voice as she opened it. A familiar voice.
“Yer hair,” he gasped in confusion, looking between his mom and me for an explanation. “What did ye do?”
“I don’t know what to do anymore, Patrick,” Peg said quietly, looking at me in apology. “I know I told ye to wait, and I still think that was the right thing, but… it’s good yer here now.”
She patted him on the back before stepping out of the room and closing the bedroom door quietly behind her.
“I’ve missed ye so much, me love,” he said sweetly, moving toward me only to come to an abrupt stop as my hand flew up between us. I only wanted to stop him so I could get a handle on the emotions battling for supremacy in my brain, but the movement was so sharp it almost looked like I was trying to hit him.
It was so good to see him. He looked great. He was letting his beard grow out and his hair had gotten longer, too. But he barely looked like the man I’d married, and that made me nervous, even though it shouldn’t.
As I was cataloguing all of the changes in his appearance, he seemed to be doing the same thing because I watched as his eyebrows drew down into a frown and he gently reached out to touch my still taped-up fingers.
“What happened to yer hand?” he asked quietly. “What de hell is goin’ on?”
I didn’t answer. Of course I didn’t. Any thought of doing so had been erased with the glaring reminder of my injuries… and the reason for them.
“Answer me,” he said, jamming his hands into his pockets like he didn’t know what to do with them. “Amy? What de fuck?”
I didn’t look away from him as his worry turned to frustration and then anger.
“Mum!” he called, watching me closely. “Get in here, Mum!”
The door opened quickly, and there was Peg, with tears in her eyes.
“I thought for sure—”
“What de fuck is goin’ on?” he asked incredulously.
“Ye need to tell him,” she ordered, her eyes full of sympathy. “He deserves to know.”
“What do I deserve to know?”
“I’m pregnant,” I said, the words scratchy and a bit wobbly.
He looked back and forth between Peg and I as if he was trying to gauge our sincerity, and then I watched as the most beautiful little grin spilt his lips. He lifted a hand to run his fingers over his beard, and it was evident that he was trying to keep a handle on his excitement. As much as I loved watching the transformation come over his face, I couldn’t let it continue.
“It’s not yours,” I said flatly.
Peg let out a pained gasp and fled the room, but it took Patrick a little longer to fully comprehend my words.
“What a horrible t’ing to say,” he rasped in disbelief.
I laughed bitterly. “Horrible, yes, but also true.”
“Why would ye—”
“We didn’t have sex after Robbie died,” I cut him off. “I had my period after that.”
He gaped at me for what seemed like forever, and I knew he was trying to come to terms with the information I’d just given him. I saw the exact moment he realized the full extent of my announcement because his face morphed into an expression I’d never seen before.
“If ye were attemptin’ to pay me back,” he said, “Ye could not have done a better job of it.”
I laughed. For the first time in months, I laughed, and I did it so hard that my whole body was shaking and my breath was wheezing in and out of my chest. I was hysterical, unable to curb the noise even as he stared at me in disbelief and disgust.
“Filthy slapper,” he said, his hands coming out of his pockets. He stepped forward menacingly, and my laughter finally cut off in shock as he leaned forward.
Then he spit in my face.
I didn’t wipe it off.
I was filthy. I was disgusting. But so was he.
He left that day, slamming out of the house before my tears had even washed away his saliva from my face.
He’d had no idea. None. He’d looked right past my shorn off hair and mangled hand. And that’s what was so heartbreakingly funny.
My pregnancy was most definitely payback.
It just hadn’t been mine.
Chapter 40
Patrick
She’d wrecked me.
I didn’t understand how she could have fucked someone else after I left. She’d only had a few bloody days to do so, but there was no way I’d misinterpreted her words. She was pregnant, and it was not by me. Unless it was the Lord’s child, she’d had another man between her thighs.
Repeating her words over and over in my head made the ride home seem hours shorter than the ride to Texas had been. When I’d been anxious to see Amy and Mum, the ride had seemed to be unending. However, as I pulled into the driveway of the small house I’d been able to afford on my pay from the garage, it was as if the trip had taken mere moments.
There’s a saying, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. The words have been bastardized a bit since William Congreve first wrote them—but the sentiment was the same.
She’d been angry at me—with good reason—and she’d paid me back in kind.
The thought of another man’s hands on her made me shake with fury. I couldn’t even fathom it, and more than once during the ride I’d had to pull off the side of the road to be sick. It made me want to hurt someone. It made me want to hurt her.
Fuck her and her disgusting American views of marriage and fidelity. Fuck her short hair and her missing fingers and her accent.
I’d never speak of her again. It was the only way I’d survive wit
hout her, because as much as I hated her—I loved her still, and that made me angrier than anything else.
The house was quiet as I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. It was late and Moira hadn’t known I was coming home so soon, so she hadn’t left any lights on in the house.
What had I been thinking, renting one place for all of us? Had I been planning on living with both my wife and Moira in the same house? The decision seemed incredibly stupid as I pulled off my boots.
I moved down the hallway as quietly as I could, but Moira’s voice still called out from her open bedroom door.
“Trick?”
“I’m back,” I replied quietly, stopping in her doorway for a reason I couldn’t name.
“I didn’t expect ye back for a while yet,” she said sleepily, raising up to her elbow and resting her head on her palm. “Is everyt’in’ alright?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. Was everything alright? No. However, there was no way to explain the situation without being completely insensitive and cruel.
The next words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“Can I sleep wit’ ye?”
Her eyebrows rose in response, but she didn’t turn me away as she watched me silently. After a few moments, I dropped my hand from the door. It hadn’t been kind of me to ask, especially not after I’d just rode thousands of miles away from her to visit another woman.
“Yes, ye can,” she replied as I began to turn away.
I looked back at her face and nodded once as I pulled off my shirt. I knew that I probably smelled like crap, but I was suddenly so exhausted that I couldn’t even make myself have a shower. I dropped my jeans and climbed in as she moved over to give me room.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time with Moira wrapped around me, sleeping deeply. She was a good woman—built for the life we’d made in the few months we’d been in Oregon. She got on well with everyone, always looked beautiful even as she grew larger, and was genuinely kind to me even when I didn’t deserve it.
I closed my eyes and begged not to dream of my wife.
As far as I was concerned, Amy was dead.
Chapter 41
Amy
That first year was horrible. It took months and months of speaking with a free counselor at a rape crisis center, hours of yoga, and long talks with Peg before I felt anywhere near back to normal, and even then... well, normal was relative.
I’d realized that I had to get my shit together after Patrick had left that day and I’d found Peg crying quietly in the kitchen. She’d suspected that something more had happened to me in Ireland than she’d been told and my insistence that Patrick wasn’t the one who’d gotten me pregnant was the confirmation she’d dreaded. I hated telling her about it, and I’d barely skimmed the details, but she knew enough by the time I was done that she’d been both relieved that I’d finally opened up and completely livid at what I’d gone through.
I understood both emotions. I was angry, too, but life as I knew it would never be the same—not ever. And I realized then that I was going to have to figure out where I went from there. In a little over six months, I was having a baby. I needed to get my shit together.
So I did. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I worked at it. Therapy was work, and it hurt, but I relished it—because with each passing week, things became a little clearer. My fears became a little easier to live with. My nightmares tapered off from every night, to once a week and then once a month.
I learned to think of Malcolm as a man, a very bad man, but not a monster that was hiding around every corner. I learned how to defend myself. I learned how to stop looking over my shoulder every second.
I learned how to live in the new normal I’d created.
And then, out of the ashes of the person I used to be, my son was born.
I named him Phoenix.
***
“I can’t believe how small he is,” I said dreamily to Peg while I watched Phoenix nurse.
Breastfeeding calmed me in a way that therapy and yoga never had. It made me feel connected to something bigger, something more important than myself. It was odd really, because in the month leading up to Nix’s birth I’d been riddled with anxiety about it.
I knew that breasts weren’t purely sexual from a biological standpoint, but that didn’t mean that breastfeeding wasn’t a trigger for me. It was. I didn’t understand why it bothered me so badly, especially since my shirt hadn’t even come off during the rape. I didn’t have to understand the trigger, however, for it to have meaning, and by the time Nix was born, I’d broken out in never-ending hives again at just the thought of trying to feed him anything other than formula.
I was miserable as I tried to think of any excuse I could not to breastfeed my child, and guilt ridden over giving him formula when I was perfectly capable of nursing him myself. My hang-ups filled me with self-loathing and the hormones coursing through my body made everything so much worse.
Eventually, someone noticed my odd behavior, and before I left the hospital one of the nurses walked into the room with a counselor trailing behind her. She was someone I’d seen around the crisis center, and she’d known me immediately by name. I’m not sure if Peg had called them, or if the nurses had, but I’ll never be able to thank that woman enough for the way she helped us.
The first time I nursed Phoenix, I cried the entire time. Not because it felt wrong, but because breastfeeding him was another one of the things that had almost been taken from me as a result of that night. It was freeing. It felt like I was fighting back.
“He’ll be grown before ye know it,” Peg answered with a small smile, folding towels on the couch next to me.
“Have you heard from Patrick yet?” I asked, though I knew she hadn’t.
When Patrick had left over a year ago, he’d been livid. I understood it, and as time went on, I’d forgiven him for it. Therapy had helped me let go of the anger I felt toward my husband—the resentment and the blame. The things that had happened to me were not his fault, and I knew in my heart that he would have done anything he could to stop it. It was just… life. I’d been targeted by a psychopath, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but Malcolm’s.
That didn’t mean that I agreed with Patrick completely cutting Peg out of his life. Me, I understood. He didn’t know the situation and he believed that I’d betrayed him in the worst possible way. For a long time, I hadn’t wanted anything to do with him, either. But Peg loved him and she missed him, and I thought he was acting like an asshole for refusing to answer her letters and phone calls.
“He’ll come around,” she answered me sadly. “He just needs some more time.”
“He’s being an idiot,” I commented stubbornly, moving Nix to the other breast. “A stubborn idiot.”
“Well, he isn’t the only one,” she replied.
“He has a family, Peg.”
“When the hell are ye goin’ to start callin’ me Mum?”
“He has a family, Mum.”
“Yer his family,” she argued. “He’d be back here in an instant and ye know it.”
I looked down and smoothed back Nix’s wild black hair, ignoring her words. Perhaps Patrick would come running if I told him the whole story. Maybe he’d even move to be near us… maybe he’d raise Nix as his own. But as I gazed at my son, I knew I’d never be the reason that Patrick left his child. I couldn’t do that to him and I couldn’t do that to his daughter that Doc had mentioned one of the times Peg had called their garage.
“We’re just fine without him,” I announced, ignoring the pang in my chest that the words invoked. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”
“Yer both a couple of stubborn eejits,” she grumbled as she stood up and walked away.
God, I was so grateful for her.
Chapter 42
Patrick
“A toast!” I slurred, a goofy smile on my face. “To loyal women and babbies who look just like dere das!”
“Hear,
hear!” Slider called back from across the room.
I’d been making that exact toast and several similar ones all night long. I knew I was probably past the point of being annoying at that point, but I didn’t give a fuck.
Moira had given birth just two days before, and I had a beautiful daughter with a head of bright red hair.
Mine. No doubt about it.
Becoming a father was like nothing I’d ever known before. It was terrifying and exhilarating and exhausting all at once, and I couldn’t contain my joy. I wanted to tell everyone I came across about this beautiful creature that I’d made, and more than one woman at the grocery store had nodded in amusement as I’d told them all about her.
My Brenna. The smartest and most gorgeous baby that had ever been born.
I was pissed, completely and utterly drunk.
My mum had called again that day, and I’d refused to answer even though I’d been dying to tell her about Brenna. Dear God, I missed my mum—but speaking to her, even briefly, would open back up a chapter in my life that I was trying very hard to forget. I couldn’t have one without the other, and though I tried to tell myself that I’d moved past Amy’s betrayal, the drunken stupor that had started at three in the afternoon was a clear indication I hadn’t.
Instead, I was making toasts to women who were loyal and babes who looked like their fathers. I was a bloody idiot.
I stumbled against a table, and braced my hand on the top of it, looking up to meet Ham’s serious face.
“Might want to slow down, Poet,” he warned oddly.
Poet, a name that I’d seemed to have fallen into within my first few months at the club and had followed me as I patched in. The name was fine, a lot better than some of the others. But I hated the memories it evoked.