F is for Finn (Men of ALPHAbet Mountain)

“Alright,” I said.

“Before you say anything,” she said, holding out one hand. With the other, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Sliding it across the table to me, she sat down and waited for me to open it. I looked at her and then the paper, then back again. It looked like it had been folded and unfolded a hundred times.

I opened it up and stared at it. It didn’t make much sense. I read the whole page at least three times before it started to dawn on me. As it did, my heart leapt into my throat and began pounding. My mind did backflips, and I tried to decide if they were in confusion, excitement, or abject terror. I settled on it being somewhere between all three.

“You’re pregnant?” I finally choked out.

She nodded. She was still showing a damn fine poker face, waiting to see how I reacted. However, there was a trace of a smile on the corner of her lips. One that I could notice, only because I had studied that face so intently the last month.

“Apparently,” she said, “the antibiotics did a number on me. One of the side effects is that they make birth control less effective. In my case, it seems like it completely nullified it. So, when my doctor did my blood tests at my last appointment, just as a routine before letting me get back to work, they found this out.”

“I…” I began but had nothing to follow it with. Everything was spinning so fast.

“You asked if we could talk, and I think that now, we kind of have to,” she said. “I wanted to talk about what was going on with us before this, but this forces the issue along a bit.”

“When did you find out?” I asked.

She grimaced a little and shuffled in her seat.

“The day they cleared me to go back to work,” she said. “The day I made the chicken parmesan.”

“Oh God. I walked out before you could tell me.”

“It is what it is,” she said. “But I need to know what you were thinking before this. And what you think now?”

“I…” I began again, desperately searching for the words. When they came, they burst out of my mouth without bothering to go through the brain first. They had been locked up too long already. “I love you,” I said. “At least, I’m pretty damn sure I’m falling in love with you.”

The tension on her face softened into a smile, and she looked away, wiping a tear out of one eye.

“I’m falling in love with you too,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “That’s good. I was worried that you weren’t.”

“Why?” she asked, genuinely confused.

I sighed.

“Look, there are… a lot of things that I need to tell you. About my family. About my history. I’m kind of broken, and I know that is extremely difficult for someone who already has a kid and a life. But I don’t want to be broken anymore. And I want to be with you.”

“I want to be with you too,” she said. “We all have histories. Me too. If you want to, we can get through them together.”

“I do,” I said. “I know it might be hard, but I want to make this weird relationship work.”

“So do I,” she said. “So.”

“So.”

“We’re having a baby,” she said. Her voice was small, and her expression started off apprehensive but then spread to a wide smile as tears streamed down her face. I felt my own face matching hers. Tears and all.

“We’re having a baby,” I repeated.

28

WENDY

“Are you hungry?” Finn asked.

We’d kept talking, eventually getting up and moving into the living room, where we could be more comfortable. My knee was starting to twinge just slightly, not really painful so much as annoying, and stretching it out felt good. Neither of us was finished with the conversation. We’d been holding it in for so long, and it meant so much more now that there was just so much more to say.

The conversation hadn’t been easy to start. In fact, it was one of the hardest I’d ever had. I didn’t remember much about telling Trip I was pregnant with Olly, but I didn’t remember feeling this nervous about it. I didn’t know what was going to happen with Finn and how he was going to react, but I did know I was falling so hard for him there was no going back.

This wasn’t a crush, and this wasn’t just feelings anymore. I was falling in love with him.

We were going to make it work. There was a lot we weren’t sure about and couldn’t possibly plan for. Things that we didn’t know were coming or weren’t ready to navigate yet. But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that whatever was coming, we were going to do it together. We were going to figure it out. We’d work to learn more about each other, interweave our lives, and mesh ourselves together into one life.