Chapter 18
He nodded slowly.
“That makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make it right.”
“No.”
We stood in silence.
Then Ryan asked, “Do you still have them?”
“What?”
“The ultrasound pictures.”
My throat tightened.
“Yes.”
“Could I see them?”
I did not answer immediately.
Those three photographs had been mine for five years.
Not medically significant.
Not especially clear.
But emotionally, they were the last pieces of a life Ryan and I had once imagined together.
I went upstairs.
The envelope was inside a memory box in my closet.
I carried it down.
Ryan recognized it before I handed it to him.
His face changed.
“That was in your purse.”
“Yes.”
“At the table.”
“Yes.”
He removed the photographs slowly.
Baby A.
Baby B.
Baby C.
Three tiny shapes.
Ryan stared at them.
Then at me.
“You were sitting across from me with this.”
“Yes.”
“And I…”
His voice failed.
I finished for him.
“You handed me a divorce agreement.”
He sat on the porch step.
For several minutes he said nothing.
Then he laughed once.
It sounded broken.
“I thought you were laughing because of the money.”
“I know.”
“I thought you had never loved me the way I loved Vanessa.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
He looked up.
“That’s what I told myself after you left. That your reaction proved something. Ten million dollars hit your account and you laughed. You signed in minutes.”
“Because I was trying not to tell you I was carrying three babies.”
“I know that now.”
He rubbed a hand over his face.
“Natalie, I spent years telling myself I had been right about you because the alternative was admitting I destroyed my marriage for a memory.”
There it was.
Not a dramatic secret.
Not a conspiracy.
Just cowardice.
The kind ordinary people use every day to survive their own mistakes.
“What happened with Vanessa?” I asked.
Ryan looked surprised.
I had never asked.
“We tried.”
I waited.
“For eight months.”
“And?”
“We were two people trying to recreate a relationship that belonged to people we had stopped being.”
“Did she leave?”
“Yes.”
“Did you love her?”
Ryan considered the question.
“I loved who she had been. I loved what I remembered. I loved the idea that if we tried again, the part of my life I regretted losing would somehow make sense.”
He looked at the ultrasound pictures.
“I confused unfinished business with destiny.”
That sentence stayed with me.