Page 23 of Diamond Devil

“Two months as of last night.”

“You just heard yourself right now, right?”

“I warned you it’d be a shock.”

“Of course it’s a shock! Celine, I know nothing about this guy! He could be a—a—a—”

“A what?”

“A murderer! A psychopath! A K-Pop fan! Shit, I don’t know!”

“You will get to know soon enough,” she assures me. “I’m calling to invite you to our engagement party tomorrow.”

I hold the phone away from my ear to double-check that it is in fact Celine Theron I’m talking to. “Tomorrow?” I repeat into the mouthpiece. “Now, IknowI’m hallucinating.”

“Yes, we’re having a luncheon in the garden. At noon. I’ll text you the address.”

“A ‘luncheon.’ In ‘the garden.’ Sweet Jesus, Cee, what is even happening? I don’t even know this guy’s name!”

“His name is Ilarion,” she fills in. “And he makes me happy. Isn’t that all you really need to know?”

All I want to do is scream,No.There’s a hell of a lot more I’m dying to know. But that road is paved with the thinnest ice imaginable. We’ve been down it, she and I, and it almost cost us our relationship. I swore I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

So even though all I want to do is tell her to run away from this, I can’t.

Instead, I take a deep breath. “Noon. Luncheon in the garden. Got it. I’ll see you there.”

I hang up and drop the phone onto the counter. Memories of Alec and Celine and tears, so many tears, run through my head in one jumbled mess.

It’s only when my eyes stray to the mass of paper towels at my left elbow that I remember why I came into the bathroom in the first place. I glance over, almost as an afterthought. I’m jolted back into my body when I notice what’s in the window of the stick.

Two thick and definitive blue lines.

“P-pregnant,” I stutter. “Oh my god.I’m pregnant.”

This jumbled mess just got that much bigger.

10

TAYLOR

Walking back into my home is weird in a way I can’t really put into words. The creak of the third front step, the smell of must and Mom’s lavender cleaning solution seeped into the floorboards—it’s like pressing on a bruise I didn’t know I had.

“Mom!” I call out as I let myself in. “Dad!”

“Upstairs, honey.”

I take the stairs two at a time and find my mother in the master bedroom. She’s lying in the armchair that faces the window, her legs kicked up on the footstool that Dad hand-carved for her on their twentieth wedding anniversary.

“Hi, Tay,” she croons weakly, pulling her yellow shawl tighter around her shoulders as she sits up. The chair swallows her whole. She looks like a child in a fairytale who stole into the giant’s house and cozied herself up in his furniture.

I give her a quick peck on the cheek and then I place her legs on my lap so I can sit on the footstool. When I look up again, Mom is beaming. “Celine said she already told you the wonderful news.”

“Yeah, she did,” I reply cautiously. I want to gauge her reaction before I tread any further. “What do you think?”

“I think—well, it’s certainly fast.”

“Too fast, you might even say.”

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