Our Fault (Culpable Book 3)

I didn’t know when I’d finally fallen asleep, but when I opened my eyes, I found Jenna sitting in a chair next to me, looking pale and sick with worry. When she noticed that I was awake, she stood and leaned over me. I saw a blanket was covering me, and an IV was sticking out of my arm.

“Noah? How are you?” she said with fear in her voice.

Seeing her there, and remembering everything, I felt as if we were in a different dimension, as if my life weren’t mine and what they had just told me had closed all the doors that had been open to me before. As if there were just one door left, and I would be forced to pass through it.

“Fine, I think…”

A baby… I mean, having a baby at all had only ever been a theoretical possibility for me. When I’d thought about having a child, I’d always imagined myself adopting one. Maybe. I’d been told the damage I’d suffered as a child could cause problems. That if I wanted to conceive, I’d need to go to a fertility clinic and be monitored the whole time. I never thought it was possible that I could get pregnant naturally…especially not if I was on the fucking pill! Nothing, absolutely nothing had ever suggested this could happen.

I sat up and uncovered myself, carefully lifted my gown, and looked at my belly.

“So it is true… I can’t believe it.” Jenna’s words, not mine.

“What am I going to do?” I asked, resting my hands on my stomach to see if there was anything there that told me I was pregnant, and had been for four months.

Jenna shook her head and sat down again. “Noah, who’s the father?”

I’d assumed that was obvious, but now that I thought about it, I’d told no one what had happened at Thanksgiving. No one knew except Nick and me.

“Nicholas,” I whispered. Just saying his name made my heart ache.

Her eyes opened wide, and a huge smile appeared on her face. “Nicholas? Our Nicholas? But…when? How?”

What the hell was she so happy about?

“It happened during Thanksgiving, after Nick found out about his mom being sick. He was so sad, and things just…”

“Oh my God, Noah, this is fabulous! Wait, did you say Thanksgiving?”

She looked at my belly, then at me. Then she seemed to be counting backward.

“Four months, Jenna,” I said without a trace of happiness in my voice. “Did the doctors not tell you?”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t even know if my suspicions were right until five seconds ago when you lifted your gown and stared at your stomach like you had an alien in there.”

“You really just found out?”

Jenna nodded. “I’m not family; they wouldn’t tell me anything. I even had to fight the nurses to get them to let me in here.”

I sighed. Never in my life had I felt so lost.

Jenna took my hand and placed it on my slightly bulging belly. No one would ever have guessed I was that far along.

“Noah, I was scared the baby could belong to some random dude you’d hooked up with in a bar. But it’s Nick’s! Your Nick! It’s wonderful!”

I let go of her hand and scowled at her. “What’s so wonderful, Jenna?” I replied, realizing just then that the constant beeping of the machines I was plugged into was driving me crazy. “Me being pregnant at nineteen years old by a guy who is with another girl? What the hell’s so wonderful about that?!”

“Noah, relax, I just meant—”

“No!” I shouted. “Don’t say anything, don’t be happy for me, because this isn’t good news—it’s shit. I don’t want a baby, I don’t want to raise a baby alone, and certainly not Nicholas’s.” Tears started to roll down my cheeks. I wiped them away impatiently. “I didn’t even know I was pregnant! What mother doesn’t know she has a kid inside her? What kind of mother will I be? I don’t have anything to offer.”

She was lost. She didn’t know what to say. She was scared to even open her mouth. “Noah, when Nick finds out—”

“Don’t even think about it!” I cut her off in a panic. “Don’t you dare tell him anything, Jenna. Not him and not anyone else!”

Not only was she surprised, it was clear she didn’t agree at all. “Noah, you have to tell him.”

Goddammit. I wanted to stand up and walk out, to be alone and think, but every time I imagined myself leaving, I remembered the image from that ultrasound. Before I could argue with Jenna, the door opened and the doctor came in.

“I’ve got good news, Miss Morgan,” he said. He had a folder in his hand. He looked at it, took off his glasses, and focused on me. “You don’t have any illnesses or complications, and the baby’s heartbeat is normal, strong.” I felt something warm in my stomach. “You’re in the second trimester. This is when doctors usually recommend telling the family, but you’re what we call a high-risk pregnancy. That sounds more alarming than it is. In two or three weeks, we can do another scan, and we’ll be able to learn the baby’s sex, if you’d like to know. You’ll probably also start feeling some movement.”

Jenna gawked at him like he was saying I had a Hello Kitty in my uterus. But I was feeling strange, too, something like vertigo…and I was utterly speechless.

Since we didn’t respond to him, he went on talking, apparently unable to notice that we were both completely freaking out.

“It looks like we’re out of the woods as far as the hemorrhage, but we’ll still want to schedule another ultrasound to make sure the hematoma has fully healed. I’m going to put you on progesterone. The tests show your levels are really low. It’s important for you to closely follow all the directions on the sheet I give you, okay?”

I nodded, overwhelmed by so much information.

“Complete rest, Miss Morgan. ‘Complete’ means getting up to go to the bathroom and nothing else, understand?”

I nodded again, wondering how in the hell I’d tell my professors I couldn’t get out of bed without revealing I had a living person growing inside me.

“I’m scheduling you to come back in two weeks. If you have any more bleeding, you need to come straight to the hospital. Brown discharge is normal. You should expect some of that as the hematoma heals.”

I nodded a third time, even though there must have been a million things I should have asked him.

“Have you spoken to the father?” he asked.

Jenna pursed her lips as I said no.

Why the hell was he asking that? It wasn’t his business!

“It would be good if he could be there for you, especially these next few weeks, when you need to stay in bed.”

I was about to speak, but Jenna interrupted me:

“My husband and I will take care of her, Doctor, no worries.”

I felt infinitely grateful to her then and regretted being mean to her a few minutes before. She was the one person who could help me with this if I really planned to keep it secret.

And I did. This was going to be my secret…mine and mine alone.

When I got home, there was nothing to do but go straight to the guest bedroom. I was scared as I took each step. I didn’t want to harm the baby. And when I got to the bed, I climbed in. Only then could I rest easy.

Lion would be gone for another three days, but Jenna and I would be fine on our own. Every time she came to see me and ask if I needed anything, I had the sense she was biting her tongue.

At first, we didn’t even mention the baby; it was like I was bedbound with some mysterious illness, and Jenna respected my silence, even if I knew it was torture for her not to talk about it.

I was in total denial, but I followed all the doctor’s orders, took my medicines, tried not to stress out, slept a lot, drank lots of liquids. Only when Jenna left me in peace did my mind go crazy seeking a solution. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider an abortion: that would have been the easiest option, the one that would allow me to keep living as I had, the one that would keep me from having to see Nick again and admit what we’d done in the light of day. But just imagining that, just imagining hurting the baby…

I couldn’t choose that road. Everything crumbled, everything I thought I knew, believed, or felt had stopped mattering the moment I’d seen the image of that baby on the screen. Not my baby—I still couldn’t say that. I would get there, I guessed.

For a time, I kept thinking back to the moment of conception, the moment when I made the biggest mistake of my life. I blamed Nick for my sorrow, my anger, my rage…and now I blamed him for this. He hadn’t forgiven me for what I’d done. Well, he’d sure as hell remember the moment he’d decided not to use a condom for the rest of his goddamned life. If I even decided to tell him. Which, for now, I wouldn’t.

After this, I passed into a phase of thinking of all the things I wouldn’t be able to do from that moment on. What would I do about school? How would I tell my mother? The same mother who’d gotten pregnant with me at eighteen and had given me endless talks about condoms and the pill; the same mother who thought getting pregnant so young had been the height of irresponsibility and idiocy… Sure, she always said she loved me like crazy and that one thing had nothing to do with the other. She had even gone so far as to forbid me from getting pregnant until I was twenty-five.

Then there was money. I didn’t have a Swiss bank account or anything like it… My entire financial worth was twenty-five hundred bucks, if I was lucky.

I thought about where I was going to live. I’d rented the loft for a year, but it was no place to raise a kid. Shit—raising a kid? I was actually going to raise a living being? Me? I’d have to work like crazy just to pay for the baby’s things. I surfed around on the Internet and saw strollers that cost a thousand bucks… I could afford approximately two fancy strollers, or maybe five to ten normal ones…it was pathetic! I was going to have to turn to my mother—me, who hated asking for money.

On the fourth day, Jenna came to my room. She’d told Lion I’d been diagnosed with sciatica, but she was looking at me pensively, and finally, she seemed to reach a conclusion.

“You have to tell him,” she said dryly.

If I could have gotten up, I’d have walked away from her, but since I couldn’t, I ignored her and went on reading the book in my hand.

“Noah, are we going to talk about this, or are we going to go on pretending you don’t have a baby in your belly?”

I set the book down and glared at her. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’ll take care of it.”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh yeah? How?” she asked, pointing at me. “You can’t even get to the bathroom on your own.”

I scowled. “This is just for a few days… In a week, I’ll go to the doctor, and he’ll tell me everything’s fine. This craziness will be over, and I’ll be able to get on with my life.”

That plan didn’t hold water for any number of reasons, but I tried not to think about that.

“Are you listening to yourself?” Jenna shouted. “This is only going to get worse, Noah! I mean, not worse, but people are going to realize! You’re already showing a little bit.”

We looked down at my belly. It was swollen. Not a lot, but still.

“I read about some moms who could conceal it till the eighth month almost. I’ll have to buy some baggy clothes, but I can do it…”

She shook her head and looked at the ceiling, searching for the magic words that would make me listen to reason. “I don’t get it. This is your child we’re talking about! Why don’t you want to tell Nick? Why?!”

I could feel myself heating up inside, and that was a bad sign. I was a walking time bomb, and I didn’t want to take it out on Jenna. But I couldn’t stop the following words from coming out:

“Because I begged him to come back to me, and he said no!” I screamed, trying to hold in my tears. “He said he couldn’t forgive me, that what I had done had ended what we had forever. I gave him an ultimatum; he didn’t care. He left!”

Jenna passed almost instantly from surprise to indignation.

“I told him I loved him, Jen, and he didn’t care. I asked him to stay, and he didn’t.” I choked back a few sobs. “And now you want me to go tell him I’m expecting his child? Why? So I can tie him to me when he’s made perfectly clear he never wants to see me again?”

“But I promise you, when he finds out about the baby…”

“He’s going to want to take care of it? Take care of me, take me home with him, give me everything he has and more? You think I don’t know that? But I don’t want anyone to be with me because they feel obligated. I don’t want to force him into forgiving me, and if I tell him I’m pregnant, that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.”

Jenna shook her head, unsure of what to say.

“Nicholas loves you,” she told me after a minute’s silence. “I know he does. He’s insanely in love with you, and when he finds out about the child, he’d going to be the happiest man on earth, Noah. What happened between you was awful, but have you considered that maybe this child is what you needed to put aside your differences and try again? I can’t imagine a better reason to do it.”

I saw the image she was trying to create in my mind: Nick and me, together again, with a precious little baby to take care of, both living the lives we had always wanted, even if I hadn’t planned on being a parent for several more years. Yes, that was what I wanted: a life with Nick.

But I exhaled a long breath and shook my head.

“I don’t want to keep talking about this, or about Nick, or about the baby. Just let me finish taking it all in before I have to face the rest of it, him, what we had…”

She leaned down and gave me a soft hug. “You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Noah, and this baby is going to be the prettiest little thing in the world.”

I blinked, trying as hard as I could not to cry again as the image of a little child with Nick’s traits formed in my head.

Jenna put a hand on my belly. “I’ll be your favorite aunt.”

That made me crack up.

Jenna left to see what Lion was up to, and I covered myself with blankets and tried to rest, but I was so scared of having to tell Nicholas what had happened that I couldn’t sleep a wink.

Those two weeks were the longest ones of my life, but they did allow me to think through a lot of things. I was finally able to call the child my baby. That was a big step. In my head, I started calling it Mini-Me because, boy or girl, it was mine and would resemble me. The name just clicked somehow. I had read enough on the Internet to know that it could already move its hands and feet, was sensitive to light, was receptive to stimuli. That meant it could hear me when I talked, which I did all the time when no one was around. It could move its neck, it was growing fingernails, it was supposedly the size of an avocado. And its sex could be determined.

We lied to Lion again when Jenna had to take me back to the doctor. He looked at us as if we were up to something. I got stressed out when I was dressing. I’d just been wearing pajamas the whole time and hadn’t noticed how the baby and I were growing.

Forget pants. I put on a loose skirt and a Ramones T-shirt. Wow. Some mom I was.

We went to the maternity wing of the hospital, not the emergency room. I was freaking out, thinking someone would see us there. We looked like a couple of little girls who’d gotten lost and didn’t know the way out. The women there were all adults, the kind it would be normal to call Mom. Whereas when I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw an overgrown high schooler reflected back at me.

They called my name, and I felt myself blushing and wishing the earth would swallow me whole. Some of the women there were staring at me, many with their eyes on my belly.

We walked into Doctor Hubber’s office, and a nurse asked me to lie back on the bed and wait. Jenna looked around, picking up a plastic model of a fetus in a uterus and showing it to me. She pointed at the vaginal cavity, said, “Here’s where yours is going to come out,” and started laughing.

I glared at her, getting more and more nervous. She replaced the plastic baby and sat next to the table. A few minutes later, the doctor came in and smiled.

“How are you, Miss Morgan?” he asked, walking over to me.

“Good, I think. You know…taking it all in. You can call me Noah, by the way.”

Dr. Hubber seemed to find that amusing. It was the same routine as last time. He turned the screen of the ultrasound machine so I could see it, and he could reach the handpiece.

“Let’s see how the baby is doing and if that hematoma is all better.”

He spread the gel on my belly again and rubbed the device across it. Soon, we could see the baby on the screen and hear its heartbeat loudly.

“Oh, Noah, look!” Jenna said, leaning in to see better.

There, a little bigger than last time, was my Mini-Me, in a somewhat weird position, its hands squeezing what I thought was the umbilical cord.

“It’s playing…that’s a good sign,” the doctor said with a grin. Then he took some measurements. Everything was perfect, including the head size. I could even see a little wisp of hair.

My eyes filled with tears… Seeing the child again, after finally coming to acceptance, and knowing it was healthy, made me happier than I’d been in years…and I wished I could share that happiness with a special someone.

“Would you like to know the baby’s sex?” Dr. Hubber asked, showing the baby from different angles.

“Yes!” Jenna said.

“No!” I replied.

The doctor stopped and observed me. Jenna turned to me as well, just as the tears poured down my cheeks. I was crying because I didn’t want to know Mini-Me’s sex if Nick wasn’t there. How could I refuse him that moment? Mini-Me belonged to him, too; maybe less to him than to me, but still, it was half Nick… That precious little baby playing with its umbilical cord had a father I was sure would adore it above all else. Was I going to let him miss out on that?

Jenna seemed to realize why I was crying and squeezed my hand tight.

“She’d rather wait, Doctor,” she said for me.

Dr. Hubber nodded and looked back at the screen. “Unfortunately, the hematoma hasn’t decreased much in size. I had hoped we’d see much better progress after two weeks’ rest.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means you’re still in the danger zone. And if you were to miscarry at eighteen weeks, that could be dangerous for you as well.”

I looked at him, deeply afraid.

“We’ll keep you on bed rest and prescribe you more vitamins. I know you’re frightened, Noah, but this isn’t out of the ordinary. It happens to lots of women, especially with their first pregnancy. Just be patient and stay in bed.”

It all sounded so bad… Two more weeks of complete bed rest! What was I going to do?! Jenna couldn’t just keep taking care of me, and Lion would eventually realize something was up. Plus, soon enough I’d no longer be able to hide what was happening under my Ramones shirt. Time was running out, dammit!

“We have to tell someone. Let me talk to Lion. I promise you he won’t tell anyone,” Jenna said on the way back home.

I’d made her stop at an ice cream shop. Suddenly, I was dying for a chocolate sundae with nuts. I guessed this was my first official craving, and I was licking my lips while she looked at me with worry.

“We can’t tell Lion,” I replied. “He won’t last long without needing to tell his best friend.”

“Your mother, then,” Jenna said, striking the steering wheel.

My mother… Dammit, I was more scared of telling her than I was of losing the baby.

“Look, just leave me a Tupperware full of food next to the bed, and I won’t have to move, and that way you can stop taking care of me.”

I could tell Jenna was getting pissed.

“I’m not leaving you alone. That’s out of the question.” She stared at the road for a moment in silence. “Noah, honey, it’s time. I’m sorry, but you’re four months along, you’re not going to be able to keep hiding it, you need to accept what’s happening… Do you want Nicholas to show up here and see you with a huge swollen belly? He also needs time to deal with this and figure out what to do; this will change his life, too.”

“Don’t talk to me about Nicholas. I don’t care what changes he has to deal with; I’m the one who’s dealing with the real changes here, not him.”

When we arrived home, we ran into Lion, who was parking near the front door. He walked over and smiled.

“How’s your back?” he said. I guessed he thought it was funny that I’d fucked it up badly enough just lifting a box of books that I had to spend weeks in bed. He’d tried to tell me before about the benefits of exercise…

If only he knew…

Jenna gave him a kiss and looked back at me doubtfully again. “Two more weeks of rest, they said.” I could tell she hated lying to him.

Surprised, he replied, “Jesus, Noah, now I’m starting to get worried!”

I waved it off as I struggled to get out of the car. Jenna looked at me with worry. It was unnecessary; I could manage on my own.

“Lion, carry her upstairs,” she said, with a little too much urgency in her voice.

“I’m fine, Jenna,” I said.

But Lion was already on the case. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Come on, softy, grab me around the neck.” He crouched, and soon I was in the air. I grabbed him tight, but instantly I was afraid. What if he tripped on a stair and dropped me on my belly? “I can tell you haven’t been moving…you’re heavy!” he said, laughing.

Jenna smacked him on the arm.

In a panic, thinking I’d been found out, I narrowed my eyes, feigning indignation. “Very funny,” I said.

When we got to the bedroom, he laid me on the bed, and I got comfortable, taking a deep breath.

Lion stared at me for a moment. I wished I could read his mind. But at the same time, I thought it was probably best not to know what he was thinking.

“Anything you need, just shout,” he said and walked out.

I didn’t even turn on the TV. I just lay there trying to figure out what the best way to tell Nick everything was. My God, just the thought of his face, the surprise… He’d probably just get mad or blame me for it. He was going to fucking hate me! He’d hate me because I’d done exactly what the worst women did: try to pin him down. It was the oldest trick in the book, and it must look pathetic.

A few minutes later, I heard murmurs behind the door. And soon after that, Jenna came in.

“Lion wants to tell Nick.”

“You told him?!” I shouted, sitting up.

She shook her head quickly. “He wants to tell him you hurt your back. I said he shouldn’t say anything, but I don’t know if he’ll pay any attention to me.”

Wait, what?

“Why would Lion want to tell Nicholas something so insignificant?”

Jenna bit her lip nervously, and I knew I’d caught her in something.

“Look…” she said, sitting down. “Shit, like…your two best friends being in love and breaking up, it’s fucked up, okay?” she confessed. “And after it happened, Nick asked us to keep him informed… Like about how you were doing and all that.”

“Nicholas asked you what?”

She had taken me totally by surprise.

“He wanted to know everything: how you were doing at work, at school, how you were dealing with the separation… I know I don’t have any right to tell him stuff about you, but I thought that was a good sign… Technically, he’s the one who broke up with you, so if he’s interested in what’s happening with you, maybe that means…”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“What? That he’ll forgive me? Jenna, Nicholas is just trying to control me. That’s what he does, dammit. Even after he’s left me, he’s doing it through you two.” I realized something just then. “I never told you anything about me falling off the motorbike, did I?” I asked, seeing then why he’d gotten so mad at his father’s house. He thought someone should have told him. But I had hidden it from everyone because it was stupid, meaningless, and I didn’t want anyone to chew me out over it.

“You fell off a motorbike?” she asked.

I exhaled and covered my face with my hands. “Jenna, tell Lion to keep his goddamned mouth shut. This is my life. You don’t have a right to tell anyone about it.”

She looked ashamed. I was just tired of the whole situation.

“Actually, tell him to come here.”

“What?”

“Lion’s party is next week, right?” I asked, looking out the bedroom window at the leaves piling up on the sill. “Invite Nick… When he comes, I’ll be able to tell him.”