Page 12 of Nineteen Eighty

Soren rubbed her swollen feet, which were splayed out over his lap. Maureen rolled her head back against the cushion, miserable. She didn’t remember being so big with Olivia. So unbelievably bloated and miserable.

That’s how you know it’s a boy, Irish Colleen said knowingly, but Maureen knew it was a boy because Colleen had laid hands on her and said so.

“I have,” she said. “Edouard wants me to name him Alain.”

Soren’s hands stopped moving. “Edouard… what?”

Maureen sighed. “We’ve been over this. What else am I supposed to do? He could’ve turned me out on the street for this. The one thing I promised him was discretion, and now I’m pregnant?”

“To be fair, I managed not to get you pregnant for almost four years.” Soren pouted. “I’m sorry, it’s just hard for me to feel grateful to the man who gets to raise my son.”

Maureen withdrew her feet, tucking them under her, despite her discomfort. “Soren, I love you, but that’s not fair, and you know it.”

“Nothing about loving you is fair.” He sighed. “I know you don’t like to hear it. And I know you’d never leave him, Maureen. I’d never ask you to.”

“Almost sounds like you’re doing exactly that.”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “Alain is my son, but Liv is his daughter, and she’s happy there. Of course, I only know this from your stories, because you still won’t let me meet her.”

“You know why.”

“Knowing why doesn’t make it sting any less,” Soren said. He hung his head. “I’m really not trying to make you feel bad, Maureen. I’m sorry. Some days are harder than others.”

Maureen softened. She crawled across the couch and tumbled in his lap, curling her arms around his neck. “They’re hard for me, too.”

Soren pressed his lips gently to hers. His kisses were always soft, but demanding, as if a whisper of a promise he intended to keep but might never. The reminder that every kiss between them could be the last.

After that horrible day in Edouard’s home office, her husband seemed to realize he’d gone too far. A week later, he’d come to Maureen and said as much, in his own way, and then pretended as if he’d never suggested they try things his way. He told her to continue on with Soren, in the same discreet manner, and they’d never speak of it again.

And they hadn’t, for nearly four years. He reminded her, from time to time, that should she want another child she just needed to ask. Maureen did want another child. At one time in her life she’d wanted as many as her body could carry for her. But after that day in Edouard’s office, her desire to rekindle anything with her husband, even for the transaction of impregnation, overcame her vision of motherhood.

And then she realized she was pregnant.

Her own relationship with Soren was complicated since that day. Her love for him grew, but there would always be a band of darkness between them. She’d never be able to completely wash away him reaching behind to coax Edouard to make love to him, too. She’d never forget his shame after, which was less about what he’d done and more about how far he’d let it go.

For his sake, for hers, she tried so hard to put that day behind her. If she could stay married to a man who had raped her, she could certainly go on loving the man who had tried to do something to improve that situation for her and ended up a victim himself.

They were forever locked in the limbo of that event, but it had also brought them closer. She was close to Soren in a way she could never be close with anyone else, man or woman, bound together by a secret so dark it simultaneously buoyed her love for Soren and ate her alive.

It had taken her nearly a month to work up the courage to tell Edouard about the baby. Her heartrate soared so high she saw spots and nearly fell out of her chair with the lightheaded feeling that followed. But Edouard only nodded, thinking. He said nothing that night.

But the next, he set his paper aside at dinner and said,

“In a way, you’ve made my job easier. Another child, and I didn’t even have to come to your bed.”

He said nothing else that night, and then the next, he said,

“I’ll raise the child, of course. I know you’ve been forced to give one up before, and I wouldn’t ask you to again.”

How he knew that, she couldn’t guess. She’d never told him that, or anything else so serious about her. They’d never had a conversation warranting such weighty topics.

Then, finally, the following night,

“You can have Soren until the child is born. After, I’m afraid, continuing on with him will only invite the very rumors we’ve been trying to avoid. The child will never know another father than me, and you’ll never tell him or her about their real father. Letting him go will help with that. It might be tempting if he stayed around.” Edouard frowned then and looked directly at her. “I don’t suppose he’d believe the child was mine?”

“No,” Maureen had said. “He knows better.”

“Pity.” Edouard had returned, then, to reading his paper. The sports section, she thought, by the time on the clock above his head.

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