On Mystic Lake

About five minutes later, Dr. Burton knocked on the door and pushed it open. “Hi, Annie. Are you still feeling blue?”

How in the hell could she answer that? One minute she was pink, and the next—especially since Blake’s call—the blue was so bad it was a dark, violent purple. She tossed the magazine onto the vacant chair. “Sometimes,” she answered.

“Marge tells me you tried to make an appointment while I was gone. What was that about?”

“A bout with the flu. I won, but . . . in the last day or two, the nausea has come back a bit. ”

“I told you that this was a time to take extra good care of yourself. When the depression bites, your system has a hard time with bugs. How about if we draw a little blood and see what’s what. Then, if everything’s okay, we can talk about how you really feel. ”

Three hours later, Annie stood in front of her father’s house. Shivering, she moved forward. Her legs didn’t seem to work; it felt as if she were walking through a dense gray fog that resisted her movements.

Slowly, she climbed the steps and went inside.

Hank was sitting by the fireplace, doing a crossword puzzle. At her entrance, he looked up. “I didn’t expect you until—”

She burst into tears. He was beside her in an instant. He scooped her into his big arms and held her, stroking her hair. Holding her close, he guided her onto the sofa, sitting beside her. Behind her, the door slammed shut, closing out the world.

“What is it, Annie?”

She sniffed hard and wiped her runny nose on her sleeve. She turned to him, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Annie?”

“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, and at the words, she started to cry again. She wanted to be filled with joy over the news; she was three months pregnant. After endless years of taking her temperature, religiously charting her ovulation cycles, and standing on her head after sex, she had effortlessly conceived a child.

Blake’s child.

She’d never been so confused and shaken in her whole life, not even when Blake had asked for a divorce. At first when Dr. Burton had given her the results of the blood test, she’d assumed it was a mistake. When she realized it was no mistake, she’d had a moment of paralyzing, gut-wrenching fear. She wondered whose baby it was.

Then she remembered what Nick had told her. He’d had a vasectomy when Izzy was two. And then there’d been the pelvic exam, which showed that Annie was three months along.

It was definitely Blake’s child.

Hank touched her cheek, gently turned her to face him. “It’s a miracle,” he said, and she knew it was true. She felt it, the small seed of a baby growing inside her. She placed her hand on her stomach. It thrilled her and terrified her.

“It changes everything,” she said softly.

That’s what scared her most. She didn’t want to step back into the cold, sterile life she’d had in California. She wanted to stay here, in Mystic, to let the cool green darkness become her world. She wanted to keep on loving Nick. She wanted suddenly, ferociously to watch Izzy get braces and cut her hair and learn to dance. She wanted to open her own bookstore and live in her own house and be accountable to no one but herself.

But mostly, she wanted to be in love for the rest of her life, to wake up every morning with Nick beside her and go to sleep each night in his arms. But she couldn’t do that. There wasn’t a good enough perinatologist within a hundred miles of Mystic, and no hospital with a neonatal ICU. She’d called her obstetrician in Beverly Hills and been told to get home. Bed rest was the order of the day. Just like it had been with Adrian. Only this time Annie was almost forty years old; they weren’t going to take any chances. The doctor was expecting Annie in three days—and not one day more, she’d said sternly.

“Have you told Blake?”

This time, she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. She stared at her dad, feeling already as if everything she wanted was moving away, receding just beyond her touch. “Oh, Dad, Blake will want—”

“What do you want?”

“Nick,” she whispered.

Hank gave her a sad smile. “So, you think you’re in love with him now. Annie, you’ve been with him for a few months. You’ve loved Blake since you were a teenager. Just a couple of months ago, you were so devastated by the breakup of your marriage that you couldn’t get out of bed. Now you’re willing to toss it out like yesterday’s garbage?”

She knew her father was right. What she had with Nick was special and magical, but it didn’t have the foundation that was her marriage. “Blake and I tried for so long to have more children. After Adrian, I was desperate to conceive again, but years went by and . . . nothing. When he finds out about the baby . . . ”

“You’ll go back to him,” Hank said, and the quiet certainty in his voice tore her apart.

It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and Annie knew it. She couldn’t take Blake’s child from him and move up here on her own. A baby deserved its father.

There it was, the truth that stripped her soul and left her with nothing but a handful of broken dreams and soon-to-be-broken promises.