Twenty-four hours ago, when she’d walked into the hotel room and found him waiting, she’d figured things couldn’t get much worse.
What a joke. And it was her fault.
Why had she told him the truth? Yesterday, when he’d asked if he’d made her pregnant, she hadn’t so much as hesitated. The lie had come as easily as breath.
No, she’d said, you didn’t.
So, what had changed?
Not a damn thing, except for her sudden inability to keep her mouth shut. Telling him the truth only complicated things. Nothing good would come of it, she of all people knew that.
She was repeating her mother’s story, meeting some guy, having sex, getting pregnant—”knocked up
,” to use her mother’s blunt terminology.
Sage stared at herself in the mirror.
That she, of all people, should bring a baby into this world bearing the stigma of illegitimacy …
She knew that was an increasingly old-fashioned attitude. Not for her. Illegitimacy had defined her childhood, growing up in a small, very conservative town with a mother incapable of leaving the past behind.
Was that was why she’d admitted the truth to Caleb? Had part of her hoped he’d hear the news and say …
What?
That he’d acknowledge the baby as his own? Assume a father’s role? A part-time role, at best. Alternate weekends, two weeks in the summer? Father-daughter dances, or father-son camping trips? Show up once in a while so that when other kids said, “This is my dad,” her child wouldn’t have to stand silent?
Sage sank down on the closed toilet seat.
All these weeks, she’d kept from thinking about things like that. She’d concentrated on the day-to-day stuff. Finding a place to live. Finding a job.
Had it been deliberate? Had she been trying to avoid remembering her own childhood? No father. Not even a name or a picture, only her mother’s never-ending references to how her life had been ruined by a man.
“He was a liar,” she’d say, “just like all men, sayin’ and doin’ whatever would get him into my pants. Any woman puts her trust in a man is a fool and deserves whatever she gets.”
It was a blunt, harsh recitation of the facts of life, but it was effective.
Sage had seen its validity all around her, starting in high school with girls who lost their hearts to boys who lied to get what they wanted and going all the way up to young actresses who fell for the I’m-going-to-make-you-a-star lies of producers.
As for sex …
She’d tried it. Once. Her first year in New York, mostly because she was tired of hearing girls say how great it was, but it wasn’t great at all so she’d never tried it again …
Until that night three months ago, when it turned out that sex was—it was wonderful, with the right man, except he’d turned out to be exactly the kind her mother had described, out for sex and nothing else.
“Sage?”
The knock at the door jolted her.
She leaped to her feet, turned on the water, made it sound as if she were doing something useful instead of trying to stop her world from spinning completely out of control.
“Sage? Are you okay?”
She almost laughed. She was fine, aside from being pregnant, alone and baffled as to why she’d told Caleb a truth he surely hadn’t wanted to know.
“Yes,” she said brightly. “Just give me a minute.”
She clutched the edge of the sink, bowed her head, took a couple of breaths.