Page 146 of Return To You

The phone rings again.

“Aren’t you gonna pick up?”

I swallow with difficulty, hit the green button on my phone, and turn my back to Ethan. “Hi, hon—Kyle.”

“Hey. I was getting worried.”

“Worried? Oh. About the storm?”

“Yeah. Everything okay with you?”

“I-I’m fine. I mean part of the roof is gone, and my deck is a mess, but other’n that, no physical damage. Everyone in Emerald Creek is safe and sound, thank god. Nothin’ we can’t handle.”

“Is Ethan still here?”

“Yeah, he’s…” I turn around and face Ethan, watching me with his hands on his hips. He might as well have a question mark tattooed on his forehead. “He’s already working on the roof.”

“Oh good. Thank god for Ethan.”

I giggle. “You got that right.”

“Alright then, I’ll let you go. Tell him I said hi.”

“Uh.”

“Or not. Whatever.” I hear the smile in his voice. “Love you, sweetheart. Take care.”

“Love you too.” I hang up and look at Ethan and set the phone slowly on the bathroom vanity.

“And that was Kyle,” Ethan states.

“And that was Kyle. My ex-husband.”

A muscle ticks around his eye, and god I hate myself right now. “Anything you wanna share about honey-Kyle, I love you-Kyle, ’fore I go back up there and risk breaking my neck by fixing your roof?”

I exhale. “Yeah, maybe I should have told you about Kyle before. But, really, it’s nothing.” I walk past him into the bedroom and grab a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

“‘Honey’ and ‘I love you’ doesn’t sound like nothing to me.”

“I can see how that sounds but…” I can’t avoid this conversation now, can I? “Why don’t we… why don’t we sit down?” I move to the kitchen, pull two cups out of the cupboard, and pour us some coffee.

“Is this a sit-down conversation? Not sure I’m gonna like it.”

“Okay then—let’s not sit down. We can do this standing up.” Forgetting the coffees for now, I pull up a barstool and prop half a butt cheek on it for support. “Kyle and I… we… we were fooling around during college. On and off. He…” I blush and go for it. “He knew about you.”

“During your college years? He knew about me?” He says it as a question, but also a disbelief. My college years were after Ethan and I broke up.

“Yeah. I might have told him about you during a drunken party. Or two. And sober late-night confessions.”

Ethan grunts but doesn’t ask for dates or content, and thank god for that because that might have taken a long time to recap.

“Long story short, since we’re not sitting down.” I take a deep breath and let it all out. “I got pregnant end of senior year in college, and that’s why we got married.”

Ethan goes pale, and I can see the internal back-and-forth he’s having. But I guess he can’t or doesn’t want to draw conclusions, because he simply repeats, “You got pregnant.”

“Yes.”

He runs a hand across his face. His eyes are wet. He takes two steps away and turns around and then faces me again. Then he pulls me off the stool and into his arms. “Fuck, baby. What happened?”

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