Page 106 of Once Upon A Small Town Secret
Somewhere, a dog barks twice and then stops.
Paige came by the Pint a couple of hours ago, slid into a corner booth after lunch rush, and told me about the gym. Told me about Jason. Told me he listened. That he didn’t yell. That he didn’t forgive, either. That he’s… trying. She told me she was going to dinner.
“He said he’d come by the house tonight,” she said in a careful voice. She touched my wrist under the table, and then she left because the bakery needed her and, honestly, because I couldn’t follow where she was going.
At first, I was mad she went without me. I had a whole speech in my head ready for him. All the things you don’t say with yourface in your best friend’s fist. But she was right. Jason would’ve shut down if I were in the room. He would’ve walked out before a single word landed. So, she went.
And I’m here, pacing.
I can’t help but feel like the outsider I am now. The unwanted factor in this situation.
I wasn’t wanted by my mother or father, so why should this be any different?
It just took longer to get here, is all.
Jason has been my family for fourteen years, and I’ve always been welcome at the Richards’ home.
Until now.
The thought is suffocating me. It’s making me sick.
It makes me feel exactly like I did when I came home from my first break at Harvard to find a new family living in our condo.
But the Richards had opened their door to me then, and it had been open to me ever since.
For fourteen years, I’ve known what that house sounds like at dinner. For fourteen years, I’ve heard, “Ben, grab plates,” and “Ben, did you eat?”
Fourteen years, and now I’m pacing my own kitchen because the only thing I can do that doesn’t make anything worse is nothing.
I pick up my phone. Put it down. Pick it up again. Type “I’m sorry” into a text to Jason, delete it, type “When you’re ready,” and delete that too.
There’s no string of words that can fix this. There’s no sentence that makes Jason’s best friend not be the guy who knocked up his sister.
My eye itches—still a faint yellow bloom at the edge of my socket—and it’s almost a relief. Something visible to match the bruise I keep feeling under my ribs. He hit me once. I’ve hit myself with that moment a hundred times.
I try the porch because the walls in here are starting to close in on me. The boards are warm under my feet. The hanging baskets Gwen insisted I hang this spring sway a little in the late breeze. I lean on the railing and try to focus on the details like they’ll help get my mind off everything else.
It doesn’t help.
“You threw away something amazing,” my brain says, and I stop moving because the words ring true.
Maybe I did.
If the story ended there, it would be neat and clean and exactly the kind of punishment I’ve always secretly suspected I deserve: you screw up, you lose the good thing. The end.
Except the story doesn’t end there. There’s a new chapter: a baby on the way.
A person who didn’t ask for any of this and gets all of it anyway. I picture the ultrasound and the little comma-shaped thing in the center of it.
My hands stop shaking when I let that image fill my head. It hushes the panic for a second.
I go inside and take the printout from the drawer where I tucked it so it wouldn’t crease. The glossy paper is already soft on the edges from too much handling.
I set it on the counter and make myself look. Fear floods my throat. Right behind it comes something else I don’t have the words for yet.
A… vow, maybe?
I think of my dad leaving the moment he was free of me, like he was closing his tab. A line item. “Pack everything. Move.”
