Page 12 of His Best Friend's Baby

“Sounds good.” Julia swallowed a lump of emotion.

“Ron.” Ben pointed to Ron and everyone laughed.

“Grandpa is for old men,” Ron said with a grin. The metal frame of his glasses caught the sunlight and winked, making him seem particularly merry. “Besides, Ron is easier to say.”

He looked young, trim and healthy with his blond hair shot through with a little silver. He appeared younger than his wife and Julia wondered if Mitch would have looked that way. Respectable. Dependable.

She doubted it.

“Ron, it is.” Julia nodded definitively as if she were checking that off a list. What to call Grandfather—check.

“Ron,” Ben mimicked Julia’s nod and tone.

“He’s such a sweet baby,” Agnes said.

“The sweetest,” Julia said, smiling in agreement. She ran her fingers through her son’s hair to try and work out a knot of maple syrup near his ear.

“Look at us, forgetting our manners.” Agnes stood, suddenly a flurry of activity.

“Would you like something to eat, Julia?” Ron patted the chair next to him at the small kitchen table. “Some coffee?”

“Coffee would be a dream.” Julia sat and an uncomfortable silence blanketed the room. They had covered the basics last night. Weather. Flights. How they must just be exhausted. This morning all the unsaid things and the hurt they had caused each other in the past pulled up chairs and sat at the table.

Julia curled her bare toes into the braid rug under the table and folded her hands into her lap, trying to look the opposite of a gold-digging whore. She felt shabby in Mitch’s old army T-shirt and pajama bottoms.

I should have worn something nicer, she thought, when unease and doubt slipped under her guard. I don’t have anything nicer.

“How did you sleep?” Ron asked.

“Like a rock,” Julia said brightly and wondered how she could stretch that answer for another hour of conversation. “Very well, thank you.”

More silence.

“You have a lovely home.” She hoped that didn’t make her sound like a gold digger. She was only telling the truth. Every room was filled with books and art and warm rich colors, rugs, beautiful wood floors, light stucco walls with dark wood support beams across the ceiling.

“Thank you.” Ron nodded and took a sip of coffee.

Kill me now, Julia thought.

Agnes cleared her throat and Julia looked over to where the woman, short and round, stood in a pool of light from the window above the double ceramic sink. Tears glittered on Agnes’s cheeks.

“I am sorry, Julia,” she whispered and shook her head. Squeezing her eyes tight. “I was horrible to you and—” She stopped and a single sob came out.

Julia leaped to take the coffee mug out of her mother-in-law’s hands. She wrapped her arms around Agnes’s curved shoulders. “I wasn’t the best, either,” she said.

“I was just so upset that you got married without telling us,” Agnes went on. “Mitch is—” another sob escaped “—was our only son and I know we expected a lot but it was just such a shock. The marriage and then the news of the baby—it was just such a shock.”

“Tell me about it,” Julia said dryly, relieved when Agnes gave a watery chuckle. “Trust me, getting pregnant and marrying a helicopter pilot was the last thing I expected to happen.” Or wanted to happen, she didn’t say. Her life tended to be made up of things she had to make the best of.

“You know how your son was,” Julia said softly. “He was so—” She stopped, at a loss for words, trying to remember exactly what it was that had attracted her so ferociously to Mitch Adams. “Bright, you know? Shiny and bold. Like the world was there just for him to enjoy.”

“Yes,” Ron agreed. “He was like that.”

“He just swept me off my feet.” Swept wasn’t even the right way to describe the sensation. It was as if she had been blinded by the light that always shone around Mitch.

“When I got pregnant—” she cleared her throat, uncomfortable with the topic “—we hadn’t known each other very long.”

“A month,” Agnes said, obviously casting judgment on Julia’s loose morals. Julia swallowed the protestations of her innocence. They seemed pretty stupid, in light of what had happened. What did it matter if Mitch had been her first? She’d been so completely paranoid about pregnancy that they’d used two forms of birth control.

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