Mason nodded, looking relieved, and kissed me. “If you’re feeling better, do you want to go to work tonight? You don’t have to if you’re still feeling bad, but I know you really didn’t want to take the night off yesterday.”
“I want to go,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “Go on ahead and get ready, and I’ll take you.”
I took a few sips of the drink and nibbled my way through a couple of the crackers as I walked back into my bedroom. The truth was, I did feel better, but not one hundred percent. I wasn’t going to tell Mason that, though. Saying I would go to work would help to dispel his suspicions.
That night at work, I found as many excuses as I could come up with to reject the alcohol offered to me. I conveniently walked away from the bar just before the guys took their beginning of the evening shot. I politely declined the offers of drinks from customers. I told the boys I was still a little woozy and didn’t think having alcohol on my stomach without having eaten much over the last couple of days would be a good idea.
Partway through the night, Stephanie showed up and I rushed to pull her aside.
“I need you to go to my house,” I said. “I need to talk to you when I get off work. Please, just go and wait for me. I’m going to tell Mason I can’t stay late tonight. I haven’t asked him to bring me back home.”
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“I just need to talk to you,” I said.
Just like I knew she would be, Stephanie was at my place when I got back that night. I explained to Mason that she and I had plans for a girls’ night, and he accepted it without question. When I got inside, Stephanie put down the cup of tea she was drinking and looked at me with wide eyes.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m pregnant,” I told her. There was no buildup, no trying to ease into the conversation. I had to just tell her. “I took three tests today, and they all came up positive.”
She looked at me calmly but with surprise in her eyes. “Am I safe to assume it’s Mason’s?”
“Of course it’s Mason’s,” I said.
“Have you told him yet?”
I shook my head and dropped down to sit on the couch. “No. Not yet. He asked me this morning when he came to check on me, and I panicked and told him I wasn’t. I said it was just food poisoning.” I raked my fingers back through my hair. “I don’t know what to do.”
“How do you feel about it?”
I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. After the miscarriage, I I’m terrified of losing this baby, too. I don’t know how I would deal with that, and I can’t bear the thought of telling Mason and then hurting him so much again.”
“Ava, listen to me,” she said. “Plenty of women have miscarriages and go on to have perfectly normal, healthy babies. It happens all the time. Everything is going to be fine with the baby. But if you don’t tell Mason soon, things might not be fine there.”
I knew she was right. This wasn’t something I could just keep to myself and hope I figured it out. Mason and I were in this together, and he had every right to know.
“I’ll tell him on our next day off,” I said. “This isn’t something I should tell him at work.”30MasonA couple of days later, just as I had promised, I told Tom Ava was feeling better. He immediately made plans for us to go to lunch. From anybody else, that might not have seemed like a red flag. From Tom, it might as well have been a beacon complete with siren.
Tom didn’t just have friendly lunches. He didn’t get together to catch up and chat. If he was going to spend time with the family, it was going to be at our parents’ house, or he was going to come over to one of our houses to spend time with us. He wasn’t going to ask to have lunch. The fact that he was specifically including Ava only made me more anxious.
He hadn’t said anything about us. That day at work he said he wanted to talk to us when she felt better, but he seemed to make it a point not to start up a conversation with me. This was a concerted effort only to talk when he had both of us, and when we were alone.
It felt like walking into an ambush.
Ava and I sat on one side of a booth at the Indian restaurant Tom chose, holding hands but not saying anything. In fact, it felt like we were barely breathing. He hadn’t gotten there yet, and I felt like he was making a point. Tom was never late.