Not far enough.” She sighed and looked at Madi. “Hi, I’m Lizbeth. I’m pretty open about some of this, but it’s about to be a bunch of TMI.”
Madi gave her a sympathetic smile. “I’m Madi. I won’t tell anyone, but I can pray for you.”
“Thanks. I’ve miscarried every pregnancy I’ve ever had. We stopped trying to figure it out a few years ago and have been planning to adopt, but that hasn’t happened yet for several reasons. We were all ready to take a child home, believing him to be an orphan at age five, when his parents showed up knowing nothing about any of it. We’ve been kind of gun shy ever since.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Madi said. Yvette clearly already knew most of the story.
“We didn’t mean to get pregnant this time. Apparently, our precautions failed.”
Madi watched as a tear streaked down Lizbeth’s face.
“I know about six miscarriages. I suspect more. I’ve only made it past the first trimester once, and then only by a week or so.” Her hand covered her lower abdomen. “I can get pregnant. I just can’t stay pregnant. If I don’t this time, I’m going to try to convince my doctor I need permanent measures taken. She’s not allowed to do anything permanent at this point because we never exhausted the testing to find out why. She probably would, but wants me to be sure I don’t want to do that because she thinks there could be a possibility. Legislation passed decades ago means she can’t do it until I’ve done all the testing. I just couldn’t go through all of that a few years ago.”
Lizbeth wiped the tears. “It hasn’t been all bad, though I often struggle to see the good. I had just started dating Robert, nothing exclusive, when I spent a few days at my father’s house in Ravenzario. There was this guy staying there. We got drunk one night while he tried to teach me to swim better and...”
Madi’s stomach dropped, churning as Lizbeth’s words began to sink in.
“Anyway, a few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. I had no idea who the guy was or how to get in touch with him. He never called, though I asked the woman who runs the house to give him my contact information. My father would have been absolutely furious, on many levels. Instead, Robert asked me to marry him, to be a father to my baby. We eloped. I miscarried. That part was horrid. But having Robert with me to fight my father when I needed to was a silver lining. Robert himself has always been my silver lining.”
Taking a deep breath, Lizbeth waved a hand. “Forget all of this. I don’t want to dwell on it. I want to watch a cheesy, sappy movie with a happily ever after and no such thing as infertility issues.”
Madi felt like she’d been gutted with a dull knife. It was too much of a coincidence to be anything else. This woman had to be the one Wyatt had told her about the night before.
And she’d been pregnant with his child.
No matter what else happened, Madi wouldn’t be the only woman to have that distinction.
She hadn’t thought about it in those terms until now. When the other women chose a movie, Madi nodded her agreement, knowing she wouldn’t remember a word of it.
The idea that Wyatt had been intimate with several other women was something she’d believed she could come to terms with, but this added dimension changed things.
She sipped her wine, barely noticing when Yvette refilled her glass, but shaking her head when the princess offered her a snack to go with it.
The conversations about wanting to have a child, soon, once the cameras went away, rolled through her head.
But would he feel the same way knowing Lizbeth had conceived his child years earlier?
The movie played, though Madi didn’t see any of it, or respond to the comments made by Yvette and Lizbeth.
“Are you all right, Madi?” Yvette asked her as the end credits rolled. “You seem off.”
Madi forced a grin to her face. “I’m fine, but I think something at lunch didn’t agree with me. I’m going to go lay down for a little while.” The truth but not all of it.
Both women told her they hoped she felt better soon.
Her stomach continued to churn and her mind felt trapped in a whirlwind. Thoughts swirled and ebbed and flowed, but rarely stayed put long enough for her to