have a decision. She could track down his number, call him, and tell him she was pregnant. If she did that she knew that they’d be together again.
He was too good, too upstanding, and too family-centric to ignore his duties.
He’d leave Late Night Antics in the blink of an eye, fly to London, and be by her side. As she rehearsed the cast through Officer Krupke on the new stage, her fingers itched to track him down again. She could drop this bomb on him, and he’d come running back to her. She desperately wanted him in her life again.
But as the dancers finished, she rewound to the day he’d shattered her heart. She clutched that memory in her hands, like a lifeline to her brain. Somehow, she had to connect her heart to her head. To find the wires, and reattach them properly, so her brain would receive the right message.
Keep the baby. Give up the baby.
One or the other.
She crossed the weeks off on her calendar, but she was no closer to a decision. Week sixteen. Week seventeen. Week eighteen. Week nineteen.
They came and they went. No one knew. She was barely showing. Even so, she snapped a photo of herself in the mirror, as if the reflection could confirm the small curve in her belly.
Michael had an assignment in Europe for a few weeks, and she vowed to decide when he arrived in London to visit her for a couple days. She’d lay it all out for him. Ask for his help. He’d always been her rock. Her guidepost.
They went to dinner at a pub after the theater, and she told him everything, then asked him what to do.
His answer was swift and immediate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and locked eyes with Shannon. “Call the motherfucking bastard. Tell him he knocked you up. And tell him to get his fucking head out of his ass and take care of the mother of his baby and his child. Done,” Michael said crisply.
“Oh, that’s all?”
“Do it, Shan. Do it,” he urged.
“I don’t have his number. His cell service is disconnected.”
“He works on that late-night show, right?”
She nodded.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and a few phone calls later Michael was writing Brent’s new phone number on a cocktail napkin. “Here you go.”
She put the napkin in her purse. A weight eased off her. It slid to the dirty, hardwood floor of the pub as Michael knocked back a beer, and she nursed a soda. The decision had been made.
“Tomorrow,” she said with a nod, resolute. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since those two pink lines had the audacity to fuck with her life. All she’d wanted was a path. A roadmap. A decision. She had it now.
She woke up early the next morning needing to pee.
The bed was already wet.
Embarrassment washed over her, even though she was alone in her tiny studio apartment. She hadn’t wet her bed since she was a child. But when she stood up, it wasn’t her bladder that was gushing. It was the water in the baby’s sac. A rush of utter helplessness slammed into her, then she rang Michael at his hotel and asked him for help. He called a taxi for her, and told her they’d meet at the nearest hospital. He gave her the name of where to go.
Fear seized her as she buckled the seatbelt, as if that safety measure would somehow protect them both—mother and child. As the cabbie drove her to the foreign hospital—it didn’t matter that the doctors there spoke the same language, everything felt foreign—she did what she’d already intended to do that day.
Called Brent.
Her cell phone service routed her to a switchboard, and then sent the call through to Los Angeles. International calls were hard to make directly. Usually only the country codes appeared on the screens. She hoped the London code would tip him off to pick up the call. But he didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Then she remembered—it wasn’t even after midnight. It was the night before, and his show was on. He was working. Always working. The thing he’d loved more than her. His job.
She hung up.
The tears she’d held back the last few months were unleashed, like a lashing of the windows during a hurricane, like the punishing of a cold storm. Wild and ravaging streams of tears, matching the way her