Page 117
He doesn’t. He’s looking at me, or through me, some middle distance I can’t read, and the silence stretches long enough that I start talking just to fill it, the words tumbling out unpracticed and desperate.
“I found out three weeks before Conference Semifinal. I’ve been managing it — hiding it, I mean, the nausea, the exhaustion, I told everyone it was Nationals stress. I told the girls two nights ago. I was going to wait until after Nationals to tell you, I thought I was protecting you, protecting your season, the draft, everything you’ve been working toward, and I know now that was —”
“Six weeks.” His voice comes out low. Even. The first words he’s said since I told him, and they land harder than shouting would have. “You’ve known for six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You knew before Conference Finals. You knew when we went to Boston.” His voice cracks slightly on that last part, the only crack in an otherwise completely controlled delivery. “You sat in my mom’s kitchen and let her ask if you were eating enough, and you already knew.”
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you?” He steps back. Not far — just enough that the distance between us changes, becomes a decision instead of an accident. “Because from where I’m standing, it sounds like you decided something enormous about my life and didn’t think I needed to be part of deciding it.”
The room tilts slightly. “That’s not what I —”
“That’s exactly what you did.” His voice is still quiet, still controlled, and somehow that control is worse than any volume could have been. “You know what my whole life has been? People deciding things for me. My dad deciding when he shows up and when he doesn’t. My dad deciding I need equipment I never asked for so he can call it a gift instead of a string. Every single person in my life who’s ever mattered making a call about what I get to know and when I get to know it, because apparently nobody trusts me to handle the truth in real time.”
“Theo, I’m not your father —”
“I know you’re not.” His jaw is tight, his hands flexing at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with them. “I know that. But you did the same thing he does. You decided this was too big for me to handle right now, so you handled it yourself, and you let me walk around for six weeks thinking everything was fine when it wasn’t, and I noticed, Margo. I noticed something was wrong every single day and I didn’t push because I trusted you to tell me when you were ready. And the whole time you were ready. You just decided I wasn’t.”
I don’t have an answer for that. It’s true, all of it, delivered with a precision that leaves nothing to argue with.
“I was scared,” I say, finally. Small. “I know that’s not an excuse.”
“No,” he says. “It’s not.”
The silence that follows is different from the one before — not stunned now, just tired, both of us standing in the wreckage of something that used to feel unbreakable.
“I need you to understand something,” I say, quieter. “It was never about not trusting you with the truth. It was about not trusting myself to say it, and watch you have to change everything about your life because of me. I know now that’s not actually a kindness. I know I just made the decision instead of letting you make it. But the fear wasn’t about you, Theo. It was about what I was scared I’d be taking from you.”
“You don’t get to decide what I lose and what I don’t.” His voice stays even, but something underneath it cracks slightly, the first real fracture in the control he’s been holding since I said the words. “That’s not yours to decide for me. Not the draft, not the Frozen Four, not any of it. If something was going to cost me those things, that was my cost to weigh. You took that away from me the second you decided I couldn’t handle knowing.”
“You’re right.”
“I know I’m right.” He finally looks at me, and his eyes are red-rimmed in a way that undoes something in my chest more than anything he’s said so far. “That’s the part that’s killing me. You’re not wrong that it would have been hard. You’re not wrong that I would have had a lot to carry going into the Conference Finals. But I would have carried it with you instead of finding out about it after you’d already decided how it was going to go.”
He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t throw anything, doesn’t slam a door, doesn’t do any of the things I might have braced for if I’d let myself imagine this conversation going badly. He just goes quiet again, the wall all the way up, and he turns away from me toward the window, arms crossed, shoulders set in a line I’ve never seen him hold against me before.
“Theo.” My voice breaks. “Please look at me.”
He doesn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you the day I found out. I know that now. I let fear make the decision instead of trust and I am so sorry.”
Nothing. The specific nothing of a person who’s retreated somewhere I can’t currently reach, somewhere behind years of practice at surviving exactly this — the enormous thing decided without him, delivered after the fact, dressed up as protection when it felt like exclusion.
I stand there for a long moment, waiting for something, anything, and it doesn’t come. I watch his back, the tension in his shoulders, the specific stillness of a person holding himself together through sheer will because falling apart isn’t a luxury he’s ever let himself have.
“Can I say one more thing?” I ask. Quiet.
He doesn’t answer, which I take as neither yes nor no, so I say it anyway.
“I want them. Both of —”
“Both?” His voice cuts across mine, sharp, the first real reaction to break through the wall since he asked about the six weeks.
“Twins.” The word comes out small. “I found out today. Identical, like me and Maddison.” I let that sit for a second before I keep going. “I want this — I know it’s terrifying and I know the timing is wrong and I know I just broke something between us that might not go back together the same way. But I need you to know that underneath all of it, underneath the fear and the secrecy and everything I did wrong, I want this baby. These babies.” I press a hand against my stomach, the gesture I’ve been hiding from everyone for six weeks, done openly now for the first time. “I wanted you to want it too. I was just too scared to give you the chance to say so.”
