Page 32 of Second Chance with Seth

“Really?”

“Yeah. To be honest, I put it down to how tired I was, and I was grateful I wasn’t being sick all the time, or even feeling sick, because I think I’d have struggled to work in the coffee shop all day long, being around all those smells, and looking at food, if I’d been feeling as sick as some women do.”

“So you kept working all the way through? Right to the end of your pregnancy?” he asks, gripping my hand a little tighter.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You could have called me.” He sounds offended that I didn’t and I turn to face him, although we keep walking.

“At the risk of sounding childish, you could have called me.”

“I didn’t know you were pregnant,” he says.

“You knew there was a chance.”

He sucks in a breath, nodding his head. “I did… but I convinced myself you’d call if there were consequences to what we’d done. Why didn’t you?”

“I was mad at you, Seth.”

“The entire time?”

“Okay… maybe I wasn’t as mad at you as I had been at the beginning, but I still didn’t want to call you.”

“Why not?” he says, still sounding unsure of himself and my reasoning.

“Because I didn’t want you to come back just because I was pregnant. I knew you would, if I told you, and I wanted it to be about more than that.”

He lets out a long sigh, shaking his head. “I can understand that,” he says. “And I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could trust me enough to come back just for you… because I would have done.”

I wish I could believe that, but it’s hard to know what would have happened, or how it would have felt. It’s hard to understand how it feels now, and I’m not pregnant anymore.

We walk on; the trees shading us from the spring sunshine, and after a while I stop and ask if he’ll help me remove my jacket.

He takes it off, and I straighten my blouse, trying not to disturb River, and then hold out my hand to take my jacket from him, although he shakes his head, folding it over his arm and linking our hands again, as we continue on our walk.

“What was the birth like?” he asks, making it clear he wants to know more. It’s only fair, I guess, and I decide to be honest.

“It was painful.” There’s no point in pretending it wasn’t. It was absolutely excruciating. “I went into labor in the middle ofthe night,” I add and he nods his head, looking down at me, his eyes filled with regret.

“What did you do?”

“The only thing I could. I called for an ambulance to take me to the hospital.”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“No.”

I want to ask him who he thinks I’d have wanted to be there – other than him – but I can see he already feels bad enough, which he proves by muttering, “Sorry,” his head bowed.

“I’d heard horror stories about labor dragging on for hours,” I say, sticking to the story, rather than how we both feel about it.

“And did it?” he asks.

“No. River did me a favor and arrived about three hours after we got to the hospital. I’m not gonna say it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I know it could have been a lot worse.”

“What day was this?” he says, tilting his head. “I mean, when’s her birthday?”

“December twenty-second.”

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