Page 93 of The Love Rematch
So he answers.
“Oh, Jacob, you picked up.” Her warm voice comes over the line, full of delighted surprise. That feeling will soon change. “Jacob?”
He tries to respond, but his throat is full of cotton balls, clogged and dry. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, unable to form sound.
How can he tell her?
What can he say?
He’s her prince, her only child, her son. She’s never seen the truth of him, but now she will. Now she’ll see what everyone else does. He’s the spitting image of his dad.
It will ruin her.
It will ruin them.
“Jacob, are you there?”
“I got Emily pregnant.”
The confession comes out soft but clear. His voice is raw, his tone hollow. The sound is pulled from somewhere deep, forced up a scratchy throat and thrown into the world like a hammer into glass, shattering everything in its wake. Four little words, then brutal silence.
“That was quick,” his mother finally says. “When we spoke a few weeks ago, it didn’t sound like you were ready to tell her how you feel. What happened? What changed?”
She doesn’t get it.
She doesn’t understand.
“Not now,” Jake says, tripping over the words while his lips stick to his teeth. He swallows the glue in his mouth and forces himself to continue. “Seven years ago. You always wondered why I left in the middle of the night. You thought it was because we broke up, but that’s not why. I got Emily pregnant. Or I thought I did. We were going to move in together. We were going to be a family. I was about to propose. Then she got a call from her doctor. They were false positives. There was no baby. So I left.” He finishes softly, hardly even a whisper. “I just left in the middle of the night without ever telling her why.”
His mother doesn’t respond. She just breathes on the other side of the line. And because he can’t stand the quiet, the judgment of everything left unsaid, he keeps going.
“That’s not even the worst part, Mom. She thinks I left because of her. Because I didn’t want her if there was no baby. Because she wasn’t enough for me on her own. How can she think that? How can she have spent seven years thinking that when she was my whole life? I would have gone anywhere with her. I would have done anything for her. And I did. I didn’t leave for me. I left for her. How can she not see that? It’s so obvious. It’s so—”
“Jacob.”
He was lost in his own thoughts, in his memories. He forgot his mother was on the line, but he remembers now as her demanding tone cuts through his rambling. He’s never heard her so firm. She was always the gentle touch after his father’s hard hand, not the one delivering the blow.
“What do you mean, you left for her?”
He swallows thickly. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“You do, Mom,” he murmurs, digging his free hand into the sand and crushing the grains between his fingers. “You don’t have to pretend for me anymore.”
“I’m not pretending anything. Tell me what you mean, Jacob. Now.”
“I left so she could be free of me,” he whispers. “I wreck people, Mom. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. I wrecked you, and—”
“No.”
“Yes,” he urged. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t go back if you could. If you got the same chance Emily did when you were eighteen. Don’t tell me, deep down, you don’t wish that Dad had walked away, that you both could have walked away.”
“I don’t, Jacob.”
“You must.”
“I don’t,” she repeats, the sound echoing in his skull. It’s the first time he’s ever heard her raise her voice. “I don’t, and I know that, Jacob, because I had that chance and I chose you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I knew I wanted you the moment I found out about you. It wasn’t the fifties, my god. I had options. I chose you, and for better or worse, I chose your father. I knew the man he was, and I loved him in spite of it. That was my mistake, not yours. Never yours. I’ve told you this a thousand times before, but I’ll say it again in case this one time maybe it gets through. You’re not him.”
