There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you.
“You have no idea what that man is willing to do for me. Or what I’m willing to do for him.” I meant every word of it.
The incredulity on Harper’s face made me want to smack it right off. She had watched my life go up in flames while she held the matches. Not anymore. It was my turn to win. I had proven that I could take whatever I wanted of hers and make it into something better, more beautiful. Ben had been depressed with her, sullen, dull. I turned his misery into a work of art, passionate, colorful, and exciting.
And wretched, doomed Lane, chained to obligation to his sister and mother. He lacked luster, and independence, and a zeal for life, and I hand delivered all of that to him. I reached into his lonely heart and pumped it back to life with my own hands. How dare Harper belittle all that I did for them, or question the love I was entitled to.
Unlike Harper, I never had loving parents dote on me. I never had a man who adored me above everything else, tending to me like a beautiful flower. I never had children to look up to me like I was their sun and moon. Harper was so fortunate and she didn’t even see it. I did, and that’s why I deserved it, because I appreciated it.
“You’re fighting for people who don’t want you, Candace.”
The bite of her words went deep. I didn’t know why I lunged at her. Anger at her truth. A fight for self-preservation. It was a familiar fury I couldn’t control—pure vengeance swirled into a tornado I couldn’t stop. I first felt it at the hands of Noah, but back then I was too scared to stand up for myself. Then when Ben rejected me and his unborn baby, the one still growing within me, that righteous anger resurged. I wanted him dead, because he had made me as good as dead to him. I felt it again when Michelle Hudson threatened my last chance at happiness when she’d gone to the police. And now I felt it with Harper. All I knew was that once that wildfire was lit, it burned out of control.
I leaped forward, sinking the scissors into her body, slicing through muscle and sinew. The quick little coward scooted away, so I tried again.
“Mommy!” Jackson’s distraction took just long enough to pause the Red that blinded me as he thrust his tiny fists into my legs. I imagined those same little hands drowning his sister and my compassion for him was gone. He ran toward his mother, just as I dropped another swing that pushed her back. Another one hit her forearm. No more missing the mark. End it now, the Red commanded.
A tinge of brief regret hit me as Harper wrapped Jackson up beneath her, cowering and begging for mercy. The image pulled me back into my memories of my father beating my mother while she covered me, protecting me from his fists. For an awful moment I had become my father, and my core trauma came to life. Only this time, I was the villain.
All I had ever wanted was to love and be loved. All I got was rejection and pain. I thought of how my father chose death over me. And how Ben chose Harper, then Lane chose Harper. Why wouldn’t anyone choose me? The Red returned, then just as swiftly it was snuffed out as something hit me against the back of my skull. Deafening silence, like high-altitude pressure, pressed against my eardrums at the same time darkness pressed against my eyes.
I felt myself falling more than I saw it, then everything went away, the anger and the regret, swirling into the black hole that the rest of me was floating toward. Somewhere in the bits and pieces of my thoughts, I drifted into my past, into my mistakes, into my fate.
* * *
I opened my eyes after several blinks, unsure of what I was seeing. Could it be true? Had I finally found my happily ever after?
I was more familiar with this plastic white stick than I cared to admit. So many pregnancies. So many positives. All ending in negative. Loss. Miscarriage. Pain. Anger. But this time . . . I knew this time would be different because it wasn’t with Noah. It was with someone who wanted a baby, wanted me, wanted us.
It was with Ben, my future.
I pulled up the delicate white panties I had bought for his eyes only. Black lace was for sluts and red lace for lust. White was for the woman you wanted to marry. Pure. That’s who I was. I adjusted the matching bra and slipped on the floral silk kimono that he liked on me. He mostly liked slipping it off my shoulders, watching it drop to the floor in a pool at our naked feet.
I flushed the toilet and washed my hands with the tangerine-scented soap the Durham Hotel provided. Where did they get this? I was in love with the fragrance. Checking my hair and makeup in the mirror, I fluffed up the waist-length blond tendrils just right and dabbed a shimmer of gloss across my lips. Ben loved my hair, often telling me he wished his wife didn’t insist on cutting hers short. He especially loved to pull it during sex when the animal in him came out.
I rubbed the free, trial-sized lotion on my hands and bare legs, picked up the pregnancy test, and opened the bathroom door. When I slipped into the hotel room that had become “our spot,” Ben was lying across the modern platform bed holding a bottle of postcoital wine. We always drank and cuddled and talked after sex, and sometimes I liked it even more than the orgasms he gave me. He wagged the bottle at me—oh, not wine but champagne! That was new—and smiled.
On the contrasting red bedside table were two fluted glasses, each one half full and fizzling with bubbles.
“What are we celebrating today?” I asked, climbing across the navy comforter toward him. I wondered if he knew. Was I already glowing? I’d have to remind him that I couldn’t drink alcohol.
“Us.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it gave me all the assurance I needed to share my own celebratory news.
“I have something else to celebrate.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
I took the champagne bottle from his hands and set it on the table beside the glasses. Sidling up to him, I wove my fingers between his. I needed to be close to him as I told him. This moment would last forever, we’d recount it to our son or daughter someday—I was pretty certain it was a girl—and I wanted it to be perfect.
“Us.”
I held out the pregnancy test for him to take. But he didn’t. Instead he just went still, gawking at it, looking anything but happy.
“What is that?”
“It’s a pregnancy test, Ben. I’m pregnant. We’re pregnant.”
Only now did he look at me, and it was with clenched-jaw anger. Only now did he take the plastic stick, and throw it against the crisp white wall.
“How is this possible? You told me you were on the Pill.”
I had told him that, hadn’t I?
“It’s not always one hundred percent effective. I guess this baby was really meant to be. Our little miracle.”
“No.” As if that word simply erased the baby’s existence.
He pushed me away from him. Not our little miracle, apparently.
“You’re not happy.” I stated the obvious.
He slammed his fist into the mattress, then rose from the bed, running his hand through his hair like he was trying to rip it out.
“Of course I’m not happy. I’m married, Candace. How the hell am I supposed to tell my wife I’m expecting a baby with another woman? She’ll never forgive me.”
“I thought you and I would get married and—”
“You and I are nothing!” he yelled over my voice, over my dreams, over our future together.
I felt the embarrassment of tears. How could I have made the same mistake twice, loving the wrong man, a man who didn’t love me back? How could I fall for a man who used me, tinkered with me until he broke me?
Ben stomped across the blue carpet, blue like the water I wanted to drown myself in. I slid off the bed and threw on my clothes while Ben fumed back and forth. When he paced himself out, he spoke, as if he had come up with a logical solution.
“You have to get rid of it. There’s no other choice. I’m not raising a baby with you, and I’m not leaving Harper. I don’t know how you could be so irresponsible.”
As if I impregnated myself. As if he had no part in it. He turned to me, glaring with such hatred that I felt it seep into my pores.
“I’m not getting rid of my child, Ben. You’ll just have to come clean to Harper and tell her what happened.” I grabbed my purse from the red nightstand, knocking over the champagne flutes, and headed toward the door. “Or I will.”
His hand reached out, jarring me backward. Flinging me around to face him, he leaned toward me, his face inches from mine. “This is your one warning, Candace. Fix this problem, or I will.”
The fingers pinching my muscles tightened until I yelped. “You’re hurting me!” I whipped my arm away, finding five oval bruises where his fingers had been. Ben wasn’t the knight I had thought he was. He was another Noah.