How to Keep a Secret

She hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t wanted a life that didn’t have him in it. And because their relationship had been conducted in secret, she’d had to hide feelings too big to be hidden.

It was the only time in her life she hadn’t talked to her sister.

Mack tugged the covers. “Did he know you were pregnant?”

“Yes. I didn’t feel it was right to keep that from him. Every man has a right to know he’s going to be a father.”

“So he freaked and you never saw him again?”

“No. He was shocked, that’s true, because we had used birth control.” She emphasized that and saw Mack roll her eyes.

“Forget it, Mom. You don’t ever get to lecture me again on any of this stuff.”

Lauren decided that was tomorrow’s worry. “For some reason it didn’t work. He asked me what I wanted to do.”

“He wanted you to get rid of me?”

“No. That option was never discussed. It wasn’t something

either of us would have wanted. He said he’d marry me if that was what I wanted.”

Mack rolled her eyes. “Jeez. Romantic. Not. Like you were actually going to consider that.”

She’d considered it.

“Exactly. I was in love and pregnant but I still had enough wits to know that to marry a man who didn’t ever want to settle down would be a recipe for disaster.”

Reliability. That had been the most important thing for her.

“So you turned him down.”

“Yes.” And seen the relief on his face.

“So you decided to have me on your own. That’s kind of brave. And super scary. And he didn’t try to talk you out of it? He walked away.”

“He sailed away.”

Mack gave a snort of derision. “Men. What did Grams say? She was okay about it, right?”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“Wait—you never told her you were pregnant?”

“I was going to. Before I could do that, I met Ed.”

“Where? How?”

“On the beach. I was sitting there one evening, trying to work out what to do.” Breathless with panic, life in ruins, trying to work out whether to walk into the sea, start swimming and never come back.

“So you were sitting on the beach, and Dad—I mean Ed—” she stumbled over his name “—Ed came along and you hooked up?”

He’d talked her down off the ledge and for that she’d always been grateful.

Kind, patient Ed who had taught her that people’s lives were rarely what they seemed. That everyone had a part of himself or herself that they didn’t show to the world.

Ed, who had also been nursing a bruised heart and problems of his own.

“We talked. Turned out he was on vacation to get over a relationship that had gone badly wrong.”