Page 93 of Before I Loved You

“What are you hiding?”

“Hiding? I’m not hiding any—”

“Is someone in there?” he asks, his eyes darkening.

Okay, now I’m pissed.

“Are you accusing me of hiding someone in here?” I ask, defiantly crossing my arms over my chest and moving my foot to jut out my hip. In hindsight, this is where I made my mistake. Because just as I jut out my hip, removing my foot from behind the door, Paul pushes it open, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop.

“Wait, Paul!”

But it’s too late.

He bypasses me as he steps inside, eerily silent, his eyes scanning the room. Every damn piece of baby furniture is on display for him to see.

His silence begins to suffocate me.

“It’s not what you think,” I say meekly.

“So, you’re not pregnant?” he asks.

I yank at the hem of my shirt, eyeing the ground. “Okay, so maybe it’s exactly what you think.”

Paul spins towards me, his eyes bulging wide and his mouth agape.

I shuffle my foot, biting my bottom lip. I don’t know what to say. This wasn’t at all how I planned on telling him the news. “Do you want to sit?” I motion toward the couch, where he drops down.

He slides Greyson’s phone on the coffee table and rests his elbows on his knees, holding his head between his hands.

After a few minutes of insufferable silence, he asks, “How far along are you?”

“Umm.” It’s time to tell him the truth. He deserves the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I let out an anxious sigh. “Almost sixteen weeks.”

His eyes shoot up to mine. “Am I…the father?”

My shoulders drop as I nod, looking at the floor through a blurry lens.

“And how long have you known?” he stresses through clenched teeth.

I hesitate before softly saying, “Three months.”

His eyes blaze with fury as he stands, turns away from me, and walks over to the barely standing crib. He looks down at the baby mattress and slams his fist on it, the whole thing falling to the floor.

Well, there goes at least two hours of my life.

I rub my forehead. The headache increases with each passing second.

“So, were you ever planning to tell me, or were you just going to keep this a secret from me forever?” His voice is lethally low, spiked with…pain…because of me.

“I was going to tell you, I swear. I just—”

He spins around, looking at me as though I’m the last person on Earth he wants to see. And it breaks me.

“You just what? You’ve known for three months. Three months! And you never said anything to me. Not once. And then I come here to find this”—he waves his hand around the room—“fucking baby furniture.” He looks away, running his hand over his head before squeezing his neck. “I have told you everything. Everything. About how important family is to me. About my dad. My fears and insecurities. Trying over and over again to knock down that damn wall you keep up between us. And I thought…I thought I had finally made some progress. I thought the wall was crumbling.” His head tilts down, and the dejected look on his face is one I will never be able to forget. “I opened up to you because I trusted you with everything, including my heart.” He shakes his head, staring at me like he has no idea who I am.

Tears pour down my cheeks, and I can’t rein them in. I sniffle, trying as hard as I can to make them stop, but I fucking can’t. And I deserve to feel this way. I deserve every ounce of this viselike grip squeezing my chest because I hurt this man. This amazing man who would part the seas for me if I asked him to is standing before me in agony, all because of me.

But what he says next makes my heart fragment into a thousand tiny, jagged pieces.

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