Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,9

that little child was almost sickening.

But I still had another year of college. I had to find a job after that. Put in a lot of hours to make a name for myself. David had law school. We’d planned on backpacking around Europe the summer before he went to law school.

Not to mention, it would be a slap in the face to my parents who had worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to make sure I would have a different life than them. And I think getting knocked up before I’d even graduated college was not the life they wanted for me.

“What?” Horror saturated David’s voice.

I looked up from the little plus sign to face the man I loved more than anything. I was terrified to see what was in his eyes. They were shimmering and held the same horror that was in the single word he had uttered.

His hand moved to my stomach. It was flat, showing no sign of what the test was promising. New life. Swollen ankles. Morning sickness. Motherhood.

“You are having my baby,” he said on a mere whisper. But despite the fact he whispered it, there was iron to it. David had a way about him, a command, a control without coming off arrogant.

His eyes moved from my stomach to my eyes. “We are having a baby,” he said, louder this time. “You’re going to finish school. We’re going to get married. I’m going to put a rock on your finger and make sure it’s big enough for every man in Black Mountain to know to stay away from you. Forever.” He lifted my hand, kissed my ring finger. “We are going to have forever, baby. We’re going to work this out. It’s going to be perfect.”

It wasn’t perfect. Promises of forever rarely are.

His mother was furious, was certain I’d done this to trap him. There was a period of months of cold silence between the two of them, until she backed down and realized that her only son was willing to shut her out forever if she was going to continue to be blatantly evil. So she apologized, settling for thinly veiled barbed comments and undermining me whenever she could.

She did love her grandchildren, in her own cold-hearted way.

I pressed my hand to my stomach, flat now thanks to killing myself in workouts and barely eating. Small stretch marks were the only evidence of the two boys I’d grown in there. Nothing remained of David’s reverent hands on my stomach.

And now I was sitting in the car, looking up at our oldest son’s snooty high school and looking into the rest of my life navigating this shit on my own.

“You lied, David,” I whispered. Then I got out of the car.

“Ryder has been exceptional,” Emma Kensington, his English teacher told me after I sat down. She was the only one that didn’t stumble over awkward condolences. I appreciated that. “I really think he has a talent for the written word. He certainly has a passion for it. His essays on Dickens are some of the most original I’ve ever read.”

I exhaled. I could relax a little now. It was the last of my interviews for the night. Despite the awkward interactions over my husband’s death, the rest of his teachers had overwhelmingly positive things to say about him. Except his science teacher, but he was an asshole and science class was bullshit anyway.

Somehow, Ryder had managed to keep his grades up and generally be a pleasant teenager in the aftermath of his father’s death and in the midst of his mother losing her shit.

I’d birthed an alien. A freak of nature.

“Mrs. Langmore?” Emma asked.

I realized I’d lapsed into my zombie state right here in my son’s English classroom. My eyes were dangerously watery and I could not break down right now. Not when I’d taken all this effort to pull myself together. Made a promise to be a mom instead of a mess.

I cleared my throat. “His father is responsible for his love of literature,” I replied. “For both of the boys. It was always his dream for one of them to be the writer and one to be the director. Creative powerhouses, he said.”

I’d blurted this all out in a relatively even tone. I was proud of myself, since saying the words and remembering that conversation was similar to what acid spilling on my skin might feel like.

David hadn’t wanted our boys to follow in his footsteps. To be like