She shook her head. “He just found me. I haven’t met him yet.”
His features softened for a moment. Did he understand? Would everything be all right? Her hopes dashed when he came to life, his dark eyes blazing.
“Don’t you think I deserved to know?” His handsome face reddened. “Or did you think at all?”
Kathryn gulped. “Of course I thought. All I did was think.”
The anguish so long buried slammed back into her as though it were yesterday. The yearning for a child she’d never know by a man no one knew she loved. The stigma of being the girl in trouble. Not just the girl in trouble, the class valedictorian in trouble. The heartache, the loss, the absolute fear.
“You deserved a chance to play baseball. God knows you had earned it. I had no idea you were going to run and marry Michelle.”
“I wanted you, Kath. You. We could have made a life together with our child.”
“What kind of a life? You had a scholarship to Ohio State, and I had one to Stanford. That’s a heck of a commute, Brett.”
“I would have given up baseball.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I wanted.”
“What you wanted?” He paced, rage staining his face. “Did you give a thought to what I might want?”
“A child? A child at age eighteen? Who would want that?”
“I had one the next year, anyway. What would it have mattered?”
Kathryn balled her hands into fists. “Maybe it’s not what I wanted. Did that occur to you? Maybe I wanted to go to Stanford, then to medical school. That had always been my dream. Do you have any idea how hard med school is on married people? Over half of the ones I knew ended up divorced. Would you have wanted that?”
The sadness in his beautiful dark eyes haunted her.
“You didn’t want our child?”
Nausea gripped her insides. “That’s not what I meant, Brett. Of course I wanted our child. I still want our child. But I knew another family could give him more than either you or I could at that time.”
“Damn it, Kath.” His fist came down on her coffee table. “I never imagined you could betray me like that. Whether you were right or wrong, I had a right to be involved in the decision.”
She said nothing. What could she say? He was right.
Her head fell into her hands as he walked silently out of her living room, out of her home, out of her life.
Kathryn sat in her car and fingered the delicate note Brett had given her two weeks before. A tear fell onto the discolored paper. What had she expected? That he’d understand? She’d kept a child from the man she loved.
He’d walked out without kissing her, without making plans to see her again. She’d enlisted her babysitter to take Maya to soccer practice in the days following. She couldn’t face him. Not yet. She would eventually tell him how to get in touch with Michael, and perhaps they could regain a friendship. But she had no doubt lost him as a lover, as a soul mate. That she had betrayed him pierced her heart like a poisoned dagger.
She placed a gentle kiss on the note before folding it and placing it back in her purse.
She cleared her throat, choking away more tears, and turned the ignition.
The rap on her window startled her.
Brett.
She wiped her eyes and rolled down the window.
His beautiful eyes were sunken and sad. “Hi, Kath.”
She sniffed. “Hi.”
“Can we talk?”