Page 114 of The Singing Trees
Then it hit her like a truck running a red light. “That was Nino with me on the balcony. Seeing me with my cousin is why you gave up?”
Thomas’s face melted. “I didn’t know. He didn’t look like Nino, but it was dark.” He dropped his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The war, Anna. When I read your letter, I was in a bad place. I go over there to fight for my country, and I come home to get spit on. Tons of guys over there were getting broken up with all the time, girls writing to say they were moving on. Everybody back home was against what we were doing. And against us. I just thought you’d had enough. And I couldn’t have blamed you. I’ll never be the same after what I saw.”
“But you should have trusted me.” She wiped her eyes.
He looked at her like she was crazy. “It’s not that I didn’t trust you. I just felt like we were back to the same damn thing, like the last time you’d broken up with me.”
Annalisa knew he had a point.Shewas the one who’d not trusted him, andshe’dgone on to hide his baby.
“When I drove to Portland,” he said, “I didn’t even know what I was going to say. I think I just wanted to see you. But then I saw you two together, and I was just too exhausted. Even if a guy hadn’t been up there, I might not have gone through with it. I felt like a beggar, being there after reading your note. By the time I got back to Davenport, I was so damn angry. I never wanted to see you again. Never wanted to hear your name again. As if that would have helped me get over you.”
He’d been two hours away the whole time, still loving her. Oh, how that hurt. “It wasNinoup there, for God’s sake. I just don’t get it. All you had to do was ring the bell. Or call me.”
“I didn’t want to mess up your life. You asked me not to anyway.” He spun around and interlocked his fingers behind his head, looking out over the water. “What a damn idiot I am. My sister, my damn sister, kept us away from each other?”
There was no other way around it. And they’d fallen for it? In her weakness, Annalisa had fallen for it.
Another silence scorched the air. She looked back down to the beach, to their daughter. Right then, she knew she had to tell him therest. The one thing he didn’t know. And she knew the space where they were now, looking at a second chance, was about to end.
“Were you ever married?” he asked, his question a rope tossed down into the quicksand in which she was sinking deeper. “Or is Glen her father?”
Annalisa shook her head, not ready for truth to come out but knowing it had to. “No.”
“Is her dad still in the picture?” More optimism poured out of him, and she wished to God there was a way she could save them. To stop the inevitable.
She looked at him and through him, speechless and bewildered. His never-ending love for her was about to die.
Leaving his question behind, he replaced it with another, all of them dripping with his frustration. “Why didn’tyoucome find me? How could you have given up on us by looking at a picture?”
She latched on to the last question, her last grip before she fell into the depths of her lonely hell. “It wasn’t just the picture. It was the note your mom wrote. Emma had just hung up on me, telling me it was best to never call there again.”
They both had strong points, but that didn’t solve the problem. “How could you not have come to me?” he asked again, this time a quiet plea to recover the past.
She shook her head. “I was furious. How was I to know your sister had lied? I saw the picture.”
“You should have found me and let me explain. You owed me that. You know me better than that. You were my everything. I never would have done that to you.” His voice cracked, and his cheeks quivered. “You’re still my everything.”
His words crushed her, and her face flushed with sadness, feeling all the more responsible. She loved him, too, and in this tiny space before she told him the truth, she tasted a second chance. But her decision to hide Celia would soon destroy it, and the time was now.
The time was now.
“There was another reason,” she said, wondering how this possibly could have happened, how their whole lives had been ruined.
“What?”
She pointed down to the beach. “Because of her.”
He was on the edge of exploding, his hands in the air, his head shaking. “What does that mean, because of her? Because you cheated on me?”
“No, Thomas,” Annalisa whispered. “Because she’s our daughter.”
Time stopped. Even the waves seemed to subside.
“What are you talking about?” The words barely left his mouth.
“She’s yours, Thomas,” she finally let loose. “I got pregnant in Hawaii, and she’s yours.”
Her confession was like lighting the fuse on a bomb, and she waited for the terrible explosion to come. He stared at her for a long time, his mouth open, his eyebrows curled.
