My Babies and Me

He glanced up from the papers he’d been studying. “Fine, why?”

“I don’t know.” Susan held her side as she trod, wondering why something that was so good for you had to feel so bad. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“We’ve only been up for half an hour.” Head bent, he returned to the business in front of him.

She tried to catch his eye the next time he glanced up. He managed not to notice.

“My folks invited us to their place tomorrow.” His words came out of nowhere.

Susan’s heart gave a little jolt—even more than it was already jolting. She’d always adored Michael’s parents. But she hadn’t known he’d told them—

“There’s a family reunion planned, a picnic.”

A Fourth of July picnic. And she’d been planning to stay home and get caught up on laundry, reading, lying by the pool—anything that would keep her close in case Michael had some time to spend with her.

“Are you asking me to go?” she finally murmured when he said nothing else.

Arms crossed at his chest, he sat back in his chair. “They don’t know about you.”

There was no reason to feel disappointed. After all, she’d assumed as much. “About the babies, you mean.”

“About any pregnancy at all.”

Susan nodded. She understood. “So you’re going alone.” And she was on her own for the holiday. No big deal. She had that laundry and reading and...

Coming around to the front of the desk, Michael leaned back against it, close enough for her to touch. “I don’t know what to tell them, Sus.”

“You don’t have to tell them anything,” she panted. “I’m not pinning these babies on you.”

“They know we still see each other....”

“What if I’d had artificial insemination?” One foot in front of the other. Nothing more than that required. Just one foot at a time. Easy. “Insemination was always one way to meet my goal.” Not that she’d have done it. She’d need to know far more about the father of her child than the reports prepared by a clinic.

“Those babies...” He swallowed, looked down at her bulging stomach covered by the cotton T-shirt and shorts she was sweating in. “They’re my parents’ grandchildren, Susan. My parents are their grandparents. They have a right to know each other.”

She hadn’t dared hope that could ever be. At least, she’d tried not to.

“They have as much right as your father has to know them,” he said, his chin jutting almost defensively.

“Is that what you want?” she asked him. Didn’t he know that all he had to do was say so?

Michael stood up, strode to the window, lifted it to let in a fresh Cincinnati breeze. “I don’t think it matters what I want or don’t want in this situation,” he said. He’d moved to the far wall, straightening a picture. Susan was getting dizzy—keeping up with him, treading and breathing, all at once.

&nbs

p; They were right back to square one. And she wasn’t sure how much more energy she had. “Of course what you want matters,” she told him. She couldn’t seem to come up with another way to tell him that she wasn’t going to be responsible for ruining his life. That he was under no obligation, that there was no reason for him to give up what he was to become something he was not.

“Not in this case.” He sat back down beside her. “The children are people, Susan, with rights and freedoms of their own. My parents, too. What right do you or I have to keep them apart?”

She frowned. She hadn’t thought of it like that. Hadn’t thought her choice to become a mother would have such far-reaching effects on so many people. “I just—”

“Sure,” he interrupted, his brow furrowed. “We can keep them apart easily enough in the beginning. But what about later?” He turned and locked gazes with her. “What happens when the children find out about me and look up my family? I’ll tell you what. They’ll all have lost years of a relationship that they’ll never be able to regain. Can you do that to them? To any of them?”

She couldn’t even think about doing it. But she couldn’t not do it, either, if that was what Michael needed. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“Haven’t you?” He looked surprised.

“I really believed that my decision to have a baby was a very personal one,” she said, studying a spot on her off-white carpet. She’d never felt less intelligent in her life. “And that as long as I was willing, ready and able to bear the total responsibility on my own, I was doing no one any harm.” She turned off the treadmill and came to a stop.