One Reckless Decision

“I had a hard labor,” she said. “There were…some complications. I was depressed, scared.” She had had postpartum depression on top of her physical ailments, of course, but it had not seemed, at the time, like something she could ever come out of whole. She snuck a look at him then. He had found his way to the couch opposite, but he did not look at her as he sat there, sprawled out before the fire. He aimed his deep frown toward the dark red Persian carpet at his feet.

Jessa wondered what he was thinking. Did this seem unreal to him? Impossible? That they could be sitting in a Parisian room, so many miles and years away from the heartache that they had caused together? It boggled the mind. It made her feel dizzy.

“I had no job, and no idea where I might go to get one,” Jessa continued, ignoring the thickness in her voice, the twist in her belly. “I had this perfect baby boy, the son of a king, and I couldn’t give him the life that he needed. That he deserved.” Her voice cracked, and she sighed, then cleared her throat. “I thought at first that it was just hormonal—just first-time mother fears, but as time went on, the feeling grew stronger.”

“Why?” Tariq’s voice was barely a whisper, and still so full of anguish. “What was missing in the life you gave him?”

Me, Jessa thought. You. But she said neither.

“I was…not myself,” she said instead. “I cried all the time. I was so lost.” It had been more than she could handle. The baby’s constant demands. The lack of sleep. The lack of help, even though her sister had tried. Had she not been so terribly, terribly depressed—near suicidal, perhaps…But she had been. There was no point in wishing. “And how could I be a good parent? The single decision I’d made that led to my being a parent in the first place had been…” Her voice trailed off, and her gaze flew to his.

“To get pregnant accidentally,” he finished for her, so matter-of-factly, so coldly. “With my child.”

“Yes.” Something shimmered between them, a kind of bond, though it was fragile and painful. Jessa forged on, determined to get the rest out at last. “And I had had all this time to read about you in the news, to watch you on the television, to really and truly see that nothing you had ever told me was true. That I’d made up our relationship in my head. That I was a silly girl with foolish dreams, not fit to be someone’s parent.”

He raked his hands through his hair, his expression unreadable. But he did not look away.

“Meanwhile,” she continued, her voice barely a thread of sound, “there were people with intact families already. People who had done everything right, made all the right choices, and just couldn’t have a baby. Why should Jeremy suffer just because his mother was a mess? How was that fair to him?”

“You gave him up for adoption,” Tariq said, sounding almost dazed. “You gave him away to strangers?”

“He deserved to have everything,” Jessa said fiercely, hating the emphasis he put on strangers—and not wanting to correct him. “Love, two adoring parents, a family. A real chance at a good life! Not…a devastated single mother who could barely take care of herself, much less him.”

Tariq did not speak, though Jessa could hear his ragged breathing and see the turmoil in his expression.

“I wanted him to be happy more than I wanted him to be happy with me,” she whispered.

“I thought…” Tariq stopped and rubbed his hands over his face. “I believed it was customary in an adoption to seek the permission of both parents.”

Jessa bit her lower lip and braced herself. “Jeremy has only one birth parent listed on his birth certificate,” she said quietly. “Me.”

Tariq simply looked at her, a deep anger that verged on a grief she recognized evident in the dark depths of his troubled gaze. Jessa raised her shoulders and then let them drop. Why should she feel guilty now? And yet she did. Because neither of them had had all the choices they should have had. Neither one of them was blameless.

“I saw no reason to claim a relationship to a king for a baby when I could not claim one myself,” she said.

Tariq’s gaze seemed to burn, but Jessa did not look away.

“I can almost understand why you did not inform me that you were pregnant,” he said after a long, tense moment. “Or I can try to understand this. But to give the child away? To give him to someone else without even allowing me to know that he existed in the first—”

“I tried to find you,” she cut in, her voice thick with emotion. “I went to the firm and begged them to contact you. I had no way to locate you!”