Page 76 of Mismatched

He shrugs. “I’m good. He’s asleep in the car, but I can’t stay long anyway. We’re meeting Eden with the keys to the new place in an hour.” He sets our stuff down on the counter while Heartthrob runs in circles around us. He loves Uncle Seth.

But then, out of the corner of my eye, I notice a strip of paper fluttering to the floor. I forgot I’d been holding it in the car.

Seth bends to retrieve it before it even hits the ground.

“Don’t be stupid. You eat my burger, I have some lasagna,” Anton is saying, digging through the fridge. While Seth stretches out the paper, furrowing his brow.

I open my mouth.

“Oh—oh hey!” Seth holds up the strip of sonograms with a great big grin. “Is this the little bean?”

Anton has straightened, still standing in front of the fridge. His eyes find mine, and when they do, they’re filled with pride—and apology.

Seth looks from his brother, back to me, and it’s hard to miss the moment he realizes he didn’t follow his apparent directions.

I turn to my husband, voice thick. “What happened to sharing the news together? On Thanksgiving?”

“I—” He winces. “I’m sorry. We were talking the other day, and I was excited?—”

“Who else knows?” My throat burns. “Did you announce it to your whole office? To Henry? Have I been bending over backward to keep this under wraps when everyone already knows?”

“Um, I wanna give congrats, but... I’m going to go check on my cat,” Seth says, stepping out of the kitchen.

“No one else knows, and I am sorry I told him without you. I shouldn’t have.” Anton clears his throat. “But... does it matter at this point? We’re flying out to tell your family tomorrow, Lydia.”

I ball my hands into fists and step toward him, something hot and ragey boiling up inside me. Because after what we’ve been through—what I’ve been going through for him—how could he?

But when I open my mouth, nothing comes out. Because he’s right. There’s a baby growing inside me that’s already developed for fourteen weeks. We’re flying to Ohio, where we will tell my mom and my sister. Which is as good as telling the whole world. Seth already knows. Henry will know. Caprice.

My hands fall limp at my sides and I turn away, down the hall. “Taking a bath.”

On the bed, my purple suitcase lays half-packed, surrounded by the slim number of viable outfits I’ve cobbled together after trying on nearly everything in our closet. Leggings are all still workable, but many of my shirts and T-shirts, and even my favorite gray sweatshirt, hide nothing anymore. This week’s baby email—which informs me our fetus is now the size of a peach—described some women “popping” at the start of the second trimester. Like, one week you don’t look pregnant at all, and the next it’s a full-on baby bump.

Apparently my body got the memo. Every time I look in the mirror, I want to cry.

And my boobs. They make me look like one of those adults-only Hentai images. I’ve already sized up my bras, but I appear to have two inflated balloons on my chest, so out of proportion with the rest of me, they don’t even look real. I frown. I’ve always hated the word, and I’ve only said it in the context of sex, but these are most definitely what Anton would call tits. Huge, and heavy, and obscene, and even worse—now they’re tender in a way that makes me want him to grab them and pay attention to them.

I groan, pulling my robe over my bra and underwear and knotting the belt. All of this has to be one hundred percent hormones. Those sunshiney, weekly what-to-expect emails even said so. I mean, they didn’t say you will turn into Barbie and become indescribably randy, but they did say my body would change, and sex drive might go up or down at the end of the first trimester.

Maybe there was no way for it to go down, so it had to go up.

“How’s it going?” Anton asks, peeking in the door from the hall. I heard him and Seth chatting quietly while I was in the bath, but my brother-in-law eventually left, and now I feel terrible for how I acted. He deserved a proper welcome. I’ll try to make up for it when we get back.

“Couldn’t we just fly out tomorrow morning and come back after dinner?” I ask. “Do we have to stay the night?”

Anton chuckles, coming into the room with a white shopping bag. “Our flight leaves mid-afternoon Friday. But don’t forget your mom scheduled family photos that morning.”

I glare at him, sure that my nausea has returned. But the sensation in my chest simmers into something more like heartburn. “Have you checked the weather? Are there any snowstorms coming? Maybe our flight will get canceled and we won’t have to go.”

He gives me a sympathetic smile. “All forecasts across the country say it’s the clearest, sunniest Thanksgiving anyone can remember.”

I slump onto the bed.

Anton sweeps my hair away from my face, tucking it behind my ear. “I bought you something.”

He hands me the shopping bag, and I reach inside to find several basic T-shirts, and what looks like one fluttery gray top. My jaw drops as I realize the tags are from a maternity shop in Cherry Creek. He must’ve known how I was feeling, and actually went shopping for me. I look up at him, a lump forming in my throat. On some level, I know this reaction, too, is over the top, but I don’t care. I’m just grateful for my husband.

“I thought you might like something new, that actually fits,” Anton says. “The gray one even coordinates with Marion’s specifications for the photo shoot.”

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