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When I can’t finish, Tate vows, “I’ll give him the chance to come back, Faye. To choose you for himself—before we tell him about the baby.” He pauses, clears his throat and corrects, “Before we tell him about our baby.”

“And if he comes home?”

“I’ll give you to him. No questions. No hard feelings.” He reaches for my hands again as his eyes search mine. “No regret, Faye. Not ever.”

His promise shatters me.

8

I SAW HER FIRST

SEPTEMBER 2009 – 18 YEARS OLD

I’m not showing. I’m not sure when I’ll start showing…but it’s not today. I turn to face the mirror after my sideways daily inspection, slathering toothpaste on my toothbrush and shoving it into my mouth.

Today is the big day. Move in day.

Or, technically, it’s move out day?

It’s moving day.

Today is the day I leave the nest and crash land in Tate’s apartment.

Not a single person is happy about it. But me and Tate have been ‘seeing’ each other for the last four weeks. Again, no one is happy about it.

He called Holt last week. Tate told him we’ve been seeing each other, that it’s serious. I’ve been on edge waiting, hoping and dreading that he’ll show up and fight for everything I always thought we had. For all the promises we made. For us.

He doesn’t show up, though.

Tate wanted to give him a week. A week to come home, to fight for me, before we moved me into his apartment. Before we started paving this path to permanence.

Holt never showed.

So, today is the day. I’m trying not to cry about it.

Mom appears in the doorway, the disappointment in her reflection beaming to spear me in the chest, straight through the heart. I spit, rinse my brush and drop it in the holder.

“Best take that with you,” Mom says through a heavy sigh.

I pluck my brush from the holder and meet her eyes in the mirror. I can’t bring myself to turn around and look at her. To really look at her. To see all that heavy disappointment spill from her eyes to crash like a wave into me, dragging me into the depth of her disappointment where mercy has long since been snuffed out.

My eyes sting. My chin quivers.

My reflection blurs.

Mom cracks, stepping into the bathroom to gather me into her arms. “Oh, baby. Talk to me. Explain it all to me. I can help.”

I just shake my head and cry.

“You’ve been planning to go with Holt for years⁠—”

“But I never wanted to leave.” I sob into her soft chest, clinging to her like a child—nothing like a woman who is about to have a child of her own. “I never wanted to leave, Mom. I just wanted to be what he wanted.”

I realize in that moment how brutally, honestly raw my words are. How I’d been so close to sacrificing everything, all the parts of me for a boy who was so full of his own dreams that the only true place for me was squeezed into the makeshift pockets of his heart, his life.

I’d been so close to shoving myself into one of those pockets. I’d been so close to convincing myself that I could be happy there, feasting on the scraps of his attention, basking in the afterglow of his stardom.

I would have dissolved to nothing.