Move the Stars (Something in the Way 3)

He grabbed my wrists finally, wrestling me against a wall. Locking my forearms over my chest with one hand, he covered my mouth with the other. “Calm down or they’ll think I’m hurting you.”

He loomed over me, larger than life, blocking out everything but him. I couldn’t look at him while he did this to me again. I twisted my head side to side, bucking my entire body to get him off me. “You are hurting me,” I snapped. “You’re always hurting me.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, his voice raised. “She stopped birth control without telling me. I didn’t know, Lake, I swear.”

My eyes landed on the hotel desk phone, remembering the winking red light. It took me back to last night, when I’d seen, with my own eyes, that Tiffany had been trying to reach her husband—and I’d held him tight anyway. Manning hadn’t known about the baby. He hadn’t done this. And I’d known things could fall apart, but I’d pushed forward anyway.

When I stopped squirming, Manning said, “She did it on purpose.”

I blinked at him, panting into his palm. The pain in his eyes, the truth, was enough to clear my haze of anger. This had Tiffany written all over it. All the messages she’d left, the calls from her Manning had missed—maybe she’d even wanted me to know, otherwise why wouldn’t she wait to tell Manning tonight, in person?

It clicked. This wasn’t Manning’s fault. I sagged against the wall and batted my lashes, clearing my vision. The past few days had passed quickly, and yet, they’d thoroughly changed me. Manning and I had felt permanent, but Tiffany had one-upped me in the most ultimate way. There was nothing more permanent than a baby.

Manning lowered his hand. “I swear to you, Lake, if I’d thought there was even the slightest chance this could happen, I wouldn’t keep that from you. You know I wouldn’t.”

I wanted to keep being angry, to scream at Manning and make him feel as hurt as I did. And in the same instant, I was angry for him. Protective. Tiffany hadn’t just taken this from me, but from him, too. “She tricked you.”

“Like I told you last night, we were talking about having a family down the line,” he said, loosening his grip on my wrists. “She thought in her own twisted way, it would be okay to start now.”

“No she didn’t. It didn’t just occur to her out of the blue,” I said, straightening up against the wall. I thought about how I’d feel if I were in Tiffany’s shoes. If it’d been my husband coming to see the woman he truly loved. If I’d been faced with losing him to my sister. I had been through that, but not publicly. Nobody but Val had known about Manning and me when he’d married Tiffany, and that had been bad enough. She wouldn’t be able to hide the reasons for her divorce forever. “You said she did this on purpose.”

He frowned. “We’ve always had shit timing, you and me,” he said, dropping his hands. “But Tiffany . . .”

“Her timing is impeccable,” I said, “and never a mistake.”

“I put in a request to come here in September. It didn’t occur to me that after four years of me hardly breathing a word about you, she’d go to this kind of extreme.”

Three months was enough time to stop birth control, get pregnant, and announce it. I closed my eyes, shedding a few silent tears. “Are you sure it’s yours?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“She has issues around infidelity.”

“Tiffany?” I made a face. “Has she brainwashed you into believing she wouldn’t cheat if the opportunity presented itself?”

He hesitated. “This is a conversation for another time, but I have no reason to believe it’s not mine.”

“What if it’s a false alarm . . . a faulty pregnancy test?” A chill ran down my spine, and I shuddered. “Something she made up for attention?”

“She’s been to the doctor, and if she’s lying about that, I’d never forgive it.” He grabbed his hair, holding it in a fist. “That’d be grounds for me to leave her, and she knows it.”

Everything in me was tight, like I might snap in half. I loosened my fists and dropped my eyes to our bare feet. A sense of relief came over me, as if I’d been anticipating bad news for days. Maybe I deserved this after what I’d done to Tiffany. Manning was right all those years ago when he said he could hurt me just by loving me, but I’d been so sure it was no longer true, even up until ten minutes ago. “You said this was it for us.” My chin trembled. “You said you wanted a family with me.”

“I do,” he said thickly. He brought me to his chest, hugging me with a strength that took my breath away. “I meant everything I said, and I still do.”