But as the dancers finished, she rewound to the day he’d shattered her heart. She clutched that memory in her hands, like a lifeline to her brain. Somehow, she had to connect her heart to her head. To find the wires, and reattach them properly, so her brain would receive the right message.
Keep the baby. Give up the baby.
One or the other.
She crossed the weeks off on her calendar, but she was no closer to a decision. Week sixteen. Week seventeen. Week eighteen. Week nineteen.
They came and they went. No one knew. She was barely showing. Even so, she snapped a photo of herself in the mirror, as if the reflection could confirm the small curve in her belly.
Michael had an assignment in Europe for a few weeks, and she vowed to decide when he arrived in London to visit her for a couple days. She’d lay it all out for him. Ask for his help. He’d always been her rock. Her guidepost.
They went to dinner at a pub after the theater, and she told him everything, then asked him what to do.
His answer was swift and immediate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and locked eyes with Shannon. “Call the motherfucking bastard. Tell him he knocked you up. And tell him to get his fucking head out of his ass and take care of the mother of his baby and his child. Done,” Michael said crisply.
“Oh, that’s all?”
“Do it, Shan. Do it,” he urged.
“I don’t have his number. His cell service is disconnected.”
“He works on that late-night show, right?”
She nodded.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and a few phone calls later Michael was writing Brent’s new phone number on a cocktail napkin. “Here you go.”
She put the napkin in her purse. A weight eased off her. It slid to the dirty, hardwood floor of the pub as Michael knocked back a beer, and she nursed a soda. The decision had been made.
“Tomorrow,” she said with a nod, resolute. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since those two pink lines had the audacity to fuck with her life. All she’d wanted was a path. A roadmap. A decision. She had it now.
She woke up early the next morning needing to pee.
The bed was already wet.
Embarrassment washed over her, even though she was alone in her tiny studio apartment. She hadn’t wet her bed since she was a child. But when she stood up, it wasn’t her bladder that was gushing. It was the water in the baby’s sac. A rush of utter helplessness slammed into her, then she rang Michael at his hotel and asked him for help. He called a taxi for her, and told her they’d meet at the nearest hospital. He gave her the name of where to go.
Fear seized her as she buckled the seatbelt, as if that safety measure would somehow protect them both—mother and child. As the cabbie drove her to the foreign hospital—it didn’t matter that the doctors there spoke the same language, everything felt foreign—she did what she’d already intended to do that day.
Called Brent.
Her cell phone service routed her to a switchboard, and then sent the call through to Los Angeles. International calls were hard to make directly. Usually only the country codes appeared on the screens. She hoped the London code would tip him off to pick up the call. But he didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Then she remembered—it wasn’t even after midnight. It was the night before, and his show was on. He was working. Always working. The thing he’d loved more than her. His job.
She hung up.
The tears she’d held back the last few months were unleashed, like a lashing of the windows during a hurricane, like the punishing of a cold storm. Wild and ravaging streams of tears, matching the way her body was once again letting her down. She hated the way she’d lost the ability to dance because of a fluke injury in rehearsal. Hated the way she’d become pregnant when trying not to. And hated the way her body was expelling a baby she didn’t know she’d wanted, but would now do anything to keep safe inside her.
She reached the hospital a wet mess.
“Your water’s broken, love. There’s nothing we can do,” the nurse said, her warm British accent almost fooling Shannon into thinking everything was going to be all right. But nothing was all right. Not as she went into labor—did they even call it labor at twenty weeks? It was fast and furious, and it barely hurt her physically. But it tore apart her already-shattered heart an hour later as she delivered a baby boy. Less than one pound. His heart no longer beating. The nurse wrapped her son in a white hospital blanket and handed him to the mother who was no longer a mother.
Her.
That was her.
She was there, but somehow seeing it all through a lens, as if that lens was supposed to protect her from the pain. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Not even as she watched the scene play out. Not as she sobbed into the blanket, and cried over a life she hadn’t even been sure if she was keeping for her own. A life that had stopped sometime in the early morning when she woke up. Or on the cab ride to the hospital. Or on the hospital bed. The nurses and doctor didn’t know when the baby had slipped from the living, but it didn’t matter. Her water had broken prematurely for unknown reasons. The baby would never have survived. It didn’t matter when his tiny heart stopped working.
The only thing that mattered was that the decision had been taken out of her hands.
Michael walked into the room and sat with her as she said goodbye to the son she would never name and never know.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As soon as she was dressed, Shannon returned to the kitchen. Michael rose, and hugged her.
“I’m sorry, Shannon bean. I didn’t mean to get mad at you.”
She rested her cheek against his chest. “It’s okay. I just want you to respect my choices.”
“I know,” he said softly.
“Even if you don’t agree with them,” she added.
He chuckled. “You know me too well.”
“I do.”
She pulled apart. “I need to put on my makeup and dry my hair. Is the video done?”
He nodded. “It’s just compressing. I’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”
“Thanks for doing that.”
“You know I’d do anything for you,” he said, tucking a finger under her chin so she looked him in the eyes.
“Duh,” she said, playfully. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
A faint trace of a smile appeared on his lips. Rare for Michael. He was usually so intense, so serious. But the smile was a rueful one. He looked her up and down. “Could you wear a sack instead of that dress? Maybe a paper bag?”
She scoffed. “No such luck.”
He sighed heavily. “What time should I pick you up? You only need an hour with him, right? Tell me where to come get you.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha. Nice try, buddy.”
He parked his hands on her shoulders. “Be careful. I don’t want anyone hurting you.”
“I know,” she said softly. She didn’t want that either. Not one bit. Seeing Brent again was like tearing off the protective coating she’d worn for the last decade. Like peeling it off, leaving it in a heap on the floor, and whispering please don’t hurt me.
“Are you going to tell him? About what happened in London?”
“How do I even say it?” she asked, sinking down to a kitchen chair. “I haven’t talked to anyone but you and grandma about it in years.”
He took her hands in his, and his touch was comforting, as it always had been. “You just say it. You say there’s something I need to tell you. And then you get the words out.”
Her shoulders rose and fell as she took a big breath. Michael always made things sound so... doable. Surely this was one of those things. She swallowed and parted her lips to speak. Brent, you were going to be a dad.