Our Fault (Culpable Book 3)

I ordered a car as soon as Nick left, and after a long wait and a longer drive, I was surrounded by unopened boxes and lying in bed with a bowl of dry cereal I’d had to look everywhere for. I didn’t have milk—I didn’t have anything in the fridge—but at least I was alone after all those weeks with Jenna.

I didn’t know what I was thinking, going off with Nicholas, as if things could ever be the same as before. What had happened between us wasn’t the kind of thing you just forgot, even if I was pregnant, even if he was the father. What he had insinuated in that hotel room was going to last in my memories for far longer than anything he had ever told me in the past.

How could he ever believe I could be vile enough, trashy enough, to try to trap him by having a baby? How dare he try to say he’d take it away from me when it was born!

I didn’t even want to see him. If things had been bad before, now they’d reached a new level. I tried to relax; I didn’t want to stress out Mini-Me, and even if it was hard, I finally managed to fall asleep, until five in the morning, when my phone started vibrating like crazy.

But there was no way I was going to talk to him. Had he really only just figured out that I’d left? What the hell had he been doing all night?

Better not to ask.

I sent him a message.

Leave me alone.

And he did. At least for a while.

The next morning, he showed up at the apartment. I guessed Jenna had waited to give him my address until a reasonable hour. I wished she had at least warned me first, though. I was tired of her and Lion getting mixed up in things that didn’t concern them.

I opened the door and found him with two cardboard cups and a bag from Starbucks. He was wearing a suit. He had a black eye, a cut on his left cheek, and a split lip. He looked ridiculous, like a boxer pretending to be a businessman.

“Can I come in?”

I crossed my arms. I didn’t want him to come in, but we did need to talk.

I turned around and walked to my bed. I hated having to do that, as though I were using my health issues to manipulate him; it looked almost like he was the adult and I was a little girl.

“If you start getting in fights again…that’s going to be a point in my favor when we’re trying to get custody of the child in court.”

“That’s enough, Noah,” he said, putting the bag and the cups on the counter of my small kitchen. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

“You certainly seemed to have your mind made up when you said I wouldn’t be capable of taking care of a child.”

He rubbed his face and looked around. I felt ashamed of the lack of order there. My loft was the worst place imaginable for raising a child, and Nicholas must have been thinking the exact same thing just then.

“You could take care of a baby with both hands tied behind your back, Noah,” he said, coming over. “Here, it’s hot chocolate,” he said.

I accepted it grudgingly. “Let’s get one thing straight, though… I don’t want to hear you say you’ll take the baby away again, okay?” I said, more serious than I’d ever been.

“I would never do that. Jesus, who do you take me for?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t stand to look at him or even have him in front of me. He’d hurt me again; he’d poured salt in the wound, had hit me where it hurt most, implying I couldn’t give my child what it needed.

He sat next to me in bed. “Noah, look at me,” he said firmly.

I refused. If I did, I worried I’d start crying like a schoolgirl, and I would not, could not feel weak at that moment. But he grabbed my chin and turned my face up, and I had no choice.

“I’m sorry for what I said yesterday,” he said, caressing me. “I’ll be here for you.”

“This isn’t what you want,” I replied, my voice trembling.

With all my soul, I wanted to be with him again, start from scratch, have a family together, but he had told me that was impossible. Now I was pregnant, and yeah, things had changed. I had to think about Mini-Me, not just me, and that meant I had to be in Nicholas Leister’s life somehow, even if he didn’t want me there.

I would need to swallow my feelings, pretend we could go back to before…that was the only choice I had. It’d be like playing a role in a movie about loss and redemption. Nick knew that, too.

“Come back to the hotel with me,” he said, wiping away one of my tears.

I’d have given anything not to have to rest then, to be independent and need no one, but that wasn’t how things were. I needed him, at least until the doctor told me the baby was out of danger.

So I agreed, and I went back to the hotel. When we got there, Nicholas helped me get settled in and left again, saying he had things to take care of at LRB. He seemed strange, we both did, like different people, but I was grateful to be alone. I spent the rest of the day in bed reading Wuthering Heights. I’d never liked it that much—the characters were too tormented, the plot too dramatic for my taste—but something had told me to go back to it. Eventually I put it down and tried to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Nicholas. I wished he’d call me at least once to see how I was. I realized I’d kept him in the dark about what was going on with Mini-Me. Everything had happened so fast, he hadn’t thought to ask why I needed so much rest. He’d only found out I was pregnant a day and a half ago, but I knew it mattered to him, because we’d talked seriously or tried to. I closed my eyes and let sleep take me.