A blood test at my GP’s office confirms it. I tell no one yet except for Mia, Beth, and Tessa. Mia’s first question, of course, is “Was it planned?”
I shake my head. “Edward got a bit…carried away one night.”
“Mister Control, carried away? I’m not sure whether I should be worried, or relieved he’s human after all.”
“It was a one-off. We had words about it afterward, actually.” I know Mia will think I mean about the lack of contraception. I don’t go into details.
“Does he know?”
“Not yet.” The truth is, I’m not sure how Edward is going to feel about this.
Mia’s ahead of me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t ‘No children’ one of the rules?”
“The house rules, yes. But this is hardly the same.”
“Is it?” She raises an eyebrow. “We all know how men love unplanned pregnancies.”
I don’t say anything.
“And you?” she adds. “How do you feel, J?”
“Scared,” I admit. “Terrified.” Because despite the whirligig of emotions—disbelief, joy, anxiety, euphoria, amazement, renewed grief for Isabel, happiness—when it all comes to a stop, the one I’m left with is sheer naked fear. “I couldn’t go through that again. If something happened to this one. That…misery. I just couldn’t. It would break me.”
“They said at the time there was no reason your next baby shouldn’t be perfectly healthy,” she reminds me.
“There was no reason last time, either. It still happened.”
“But you are going to keep it, right?”
There are very few people in the world who could ask me that question, and even fewer to whom I would give an honest answer: that part of me has been saying, Don’t. You’re back in the light after so long in a dark and lonely place. Why roll those dice again? It’s the same part of my brain that looks around One Folgate Street and thinks, Why jeopardize all this?
But there’s another part of me—the part that has held a dead baby in her arms, that gazed down on her perfect face and felt the ecstatic joy of motherhood just the same—that could never even consider aborting a healthy fetus because of my own cowardice.
“Yes, I’m going to keep it,” I say. “I’m going to have this baby. Edward’s baby. I know he won’t like the idea at first, but I’m hoping he’ll get used to it.”