yourself by going hungry won’t help.”
Reagan frowned at the soup and bread. “I’m not punishing myself. I have no appetite.”
“Well, you’re already the skinniest one of the three of us, and we don’t like that, so we’ve both decided you must eat.”
Reagan couldn’t even make herself laugh. But when Serenity got up to retrieve the tray and place it on her lap, she picked up the spoon.
Serenity sat back down on the bed. “How do you like the room?”
“It’s great. The whole cabin is.”
“Wait until you see the lake.”
“Believe me, I’m anxious for this storm to pass so that I can.” She took a bite, found the soup much tastier than it looked and realized she was hungry, after all. She ate half of it before she asked, “Where’s Lorelei?”
“Putting Lucy to bed.”
She tore off a piece of the roll and crammed it in her mouth, so depressed she didn’t care about her manners. “Can you believe her best friend is pregnant with her husband’s child?” she asked as she chewed.
“I can’t. An affair is bad enough. You have to wonder—how did the two of them let something like that happen?”
Reagan had no idea. A baby made everything so much worse. It affected the future, not just the past, making it that much harder for Lorelei to forgive and forget. Harder for her to stay in the marriage, too. A child was a lifetime commitment. In nine months or less, she’d have a constant reminder of her husband’s philandering.
Reagan opened her mouth to say as much—then nearly choked on the bread she was trying to swallow as a memory flashed through her mind. She and Drew hadn’t used any birth control. She’d been so busy the past few months she hadn’t been sexually active, so she wasn’t on the pill. And he was married. It wasn’t as if he was walking around with a condom in his pocket.
A curious expression came over Serenity’s face. “What is it?”
Surely she wasn’t—
Reagan tried to cut off the thought before she could fully think it. She’d been so worried about all the other ramifications of what she’d done that she hadn’t even considered this one. But now the possibility had burst onto the stage of her mind, and she couldn’t chase it away, no matter how hard she tried.
And that put the fear of God in her.
Somehow she managed to finish swallowing before pushing aside the tray. “That was good, but I’ve had enough.”
“Are you okay?” Serenity’s voice was filled with concern.
The chance of pregnancy had to be slight. They’d had only one encounter, and Drew had pulled out.
“I—I’m fine,” she replied, but she could barely force out those two words, and the food she’d eaten sat heavy on her stomach. The situation with Lorelei and Francine proved that the worst could happen.
And she had to acknowledge that it could happen to her.
7
lorelei
THE FAMILIAR NIGHTMARE woke Lorelei, the one where she was lost and wandering around in the dark on a cold, rainy street she didn’t recognize. She couldn’t find a single thing that looked familiar, no one she knew or trusted. Figures seemed to skulk in the shadows, following her, and yet, when she turned around, there was no one there. Her surroundings, those strange people—everything—felt menacing, but she couldn’t say exactly why, couldn’t identify the danger.
Clammy with sweat, she pushed off the heavy comforter she’d found so welcoming when she went to bed and hauled in a gulp of clean, cool air. She’d been having that dream since she was a child, and she hated it. Her various foster parents used to tell her caseworker that she’d wake up in the night, kicking and screaming, and couldn’t be consoled.
Lorelei was convinced that was why she’d never been adopted. She should’ve had a good chance, especially with her first placement, when she was so young. But those foster parents had taken her back to the receiving home after only nine months. Somehow, following years of infertility, they’d managed to get pregnant, but they were having a baby with