Little Secrets (24 page)

His sharp bark of laughter surprised her enough to let go of his sleeve. Her husband's mouth twisted—not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. He closed his eyes for a long couple of seconds, and when he looked at her again, his gaze was flat and hard and assessing.

“I already did.” He gestured at her belly. His shoulders sagged. He let himself sink into one of the kitchen chairs and buried his face in his hands, squeezing his head like a man in the grip of a migraine. “Didn't I?”

She sat across from him and took his hands, forcing him to let her hold them. She squeezed his fingers. He didn't look at her, but that made it easier and she was grateful for that.

“No. Never.” There'd been times when Ginny was uncertain of what would happen and where her path would lead, but of this she had never been unsure. “You did not lose me.”

He looked up at her. “I didn't want to watch you go through that again, and I was right, wasn't I?”

Disturbed, she squeezed his fingers again. “No. You'll feel differently when the baby comes. You'll see, it will be all right, and we'll be okay—”

“I don't know if I can,” he said quietly.

Her heart started breaking. “You don't know if you can what?”

“Love it. Be a father to it. I figured I'd try, you know? I'd do my best. But I'm not sure I can.”

“Oh, Sean. Of course you can. You'll love this baby. Lots of people are scared about becoming parents, but…you'll see. You'll be an amazing father.”

“But I won't,” he told her steadily, “be the father.”

“Of course you—” He wasn't talking about being afraid. Being incompetent. “What? Oh— What the hell?”

She snatched her hands from his. It would've been her turn to pace, if she'd been able to push herself away from the table, to get her bulk moving quickly enough. Instead, she sat, trapped by her inertia.

“I wondered if you were going to tell him,” he continued conversationally, like they were discussing the day's mail. “But he didn't seem to know. I saw him look at you at the Christmas party when they came in. He was surprised. Why didn't you tell him?”

“Because it was none of his business,” Ginny snapped. Her heart raced. Her stomach churned. She thought she might vomit or pass out; her hands trembled. “Sean, you are the father of this baby.”

He shook his head, pushing away from the table, and she grabbed for him, snagged his sleeve but couldn't keep him there. He jerked from her touch and stood so fast the chair tipped over behind him. She jumped at the crash and put her hands on her ears for a moment. She closed her eyes.

“You are the father of this baby,” she told him, not wanting to see him not believing her. “I swear to you.”

“I can't be.”

“You are!” Ginny shouted, glaring at him.

They stared at each other. She shuddered. He backed up to the doorway as though he meant to flee, but stayed.

“I can't be,” he said again. “I had a vasectomy.”

Ginny tried to draw a breath and could find nothing but dust in her throat and lungs. She choked on it, gasping. This was…this was…

She became aware of him shaking her. Her head lolled. Sean cradled her, slapping lightly at her cheeks until she shoved him away from her. She struggled to her feet, facing off with him.

“What in the actual fuck do you mean, you had a vasectomy?”

He looked as she imagined she had when confronted with the acknowledgment of her infidelity. Guilty and somehow defiant too. The world tipped, but she refused to slide with it.

“I couldn't take the chance of getting you pregnant again. I couldn't.” His tone had turned pleading, and he held out his hands to her.

She refused to take them. “I can't believe you'd do something like that without even telling me!”

“I knew you'd say no.”

She spit to the side, her disgust so thick it was like some living thing she needed to eject. “You should have told me. We should have talked about it. We could've talked about lots of things!”

“I knew you wanted a baby—”

“No!” The word slashed at her throat. “You wanted to fix the situation, Sean, the way you always do. You wanted to fix it so you didn't have to worry about me getting pregnant, so you didn't have to worry about anything. It was all about you, like it always is!”

“That's not true!”

She shook her head and made a shoving gesture with her hands, though she was nowhere near him. “When? When did you do it?”

“The weekend you were gone to the art show.”

“In Philly.” She laughed dully. “Oh Christ, Sean. Jesus Christ.”

“I know you were with him. And it was almost eight months ago. You do the math.”

“You don't know shit,” she told him flatly, her rage undiminished, but finding herself incapable of raising her voice. “And
you
do the math, you son of a bitch. I came home from Philly and we made love. Remember? After we went to that Italian place. You couldn't even wait until we got upstairs. We did it in the living room. Remember that?”

The sex had been some of the best they'd ever had, and, now, even the memory of that pleasure was destined to become pain. Ginny pressed her hand to her breast, pushing on her heart, willing it not to burst. She swallowed around the lump in her throat.

Without looking at him, she shook her head. “You know it takes a few weeks after a vasectomy to be completely sterile, right? They did tell you that, didn't they?”

He didn't answer at first, and when she forced herself to look at him, she saw another combination of guilt and defiance.

“Did you even read the paperwork or pay any sort of attention, Sean? Did you? No,” she said before he could, “because you never do. You never pay any fucking attention!”

“I went back a week later, like they said. I was all good.”

“Yeah, well, we fucked before that, didn't we?” She straightened. “This is your baby, and you want to know how I'm so sure?”

He said nothing.

“I didn't fuck Jason in Philadelphia, that's how I know. In fact,” she added as though it were a casual admission, when it was anything but, “I never slept with him. Not once. I never even kissed him, so how's that for being absolutely sure he's not the one who knocked me up?”

Sean blinked. She held up a hand to stop him from speaking. His mouth opened, then closed.

“I did not have sex with him. Never. But I did have sex with you and, vasectomy or not, you are the one who fathered this child. So I would suggest you pull up your big-boy pants and start dealing with it. Because this is…this is how it is,” she gasped, breaking down at last. “This is how it fucking is!”

Somehow, he was holding her, rocking and stroking her back. She didn't want to be in his arms, but didn't have the energy to push him away. He comforted her, but it was his own comfort he sought, and Ginny was just too damned tired to stop him.

“But I thought…” Sean murmured. “I mean, I saw some of your emails…”

She didn't have the strength to even confront him about his snooping; at any rate, she'd sent the emails and had been wrong to do it. She always knew she would own up to what she'd done, if she had to. But that was before she found out about Sean's betrayal, which was somehow bigger than what she'd done. Or maybe it wasn't, maybe it only felt that way to her and would be the opposite to him. It didn't matter.

“You didn't sleep with him,” he said happily, as though that made everything okay. “Good. Oh good.”

She pushed away from him and went on clumsy feet to the sink to splash some cold water on her face and the back of her neck.

“I'm glad,” Sean said from behind her. “God, Ginny. You don't know how glad I am.”

“Well,” she said coldly without turning, “don't be that fucking happy. I didn't sleep with him, but I wanted to. And I was going to. He didn't show. That's the only reason I didn't.”

The lights went out again.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Instant darkness fell over them.

Ginny heard the scrape of a chair on the linoleum and Sean's muttered curse. The table bumped, the glass salt and pepper shakers in the center of it rattling. Sean cursed again.

“Don't move,” she said crossly. “You're going to get hurt.”

“Where's the flashlight?”

“I don't know. It should have turned on when the power went out.”

“Did you use it today?”

She could sense where this argument was going and her answer came out clipped, “No. I didn't have to. It was daylight when Peg came for me.”

“Are you sure you didn't use it and then not put it back?”

That he could accuse of her this, of all things, while they stood together in the dark, after having the worst fight of their marriage…Ginny lost it. She started to laugh, at first low and then louder. Her laughter cycled up and up, becoming a series of hiccuping, frantic guffaws that hurt her throat.

“Jesus, Ginny! Stop it!” His hand passed by her close enough to brush her sleeve, but he missed her.

“I didn't use it!” she shouted into the shadows. “You're the one who used it last. Remember? You took it downstairs to check the fuse box the last time it blew. That's the last time I saw it. You left it down there, probably.”

“Well shit.” Sean sounded miserable.

She didn't want to take glee in it, but she did. If she'd been able to caper with it, she would've. She wasn't proud of that, but it was the truth. The full and awful truth. She was glad he'd been the one to lose the flashlight, that his accusation had bounced back and hit him in the face.

“You left it down there,” she crowed. More laughter, this time cut off with her hand over her mouth because the sound of it disturbed her. It would've been better to vomit than keep laughing that way.

“I'd better go get it.”

“How are you going to do that in the dark?” she said derisively. Disgusted by this, by everything. And so suddenly tired all she wanted to do was lie down and close her eyes and maybe not wake up.

“Let me use your phone.”

The baby moved inside her, a reminder of why Ginny couldn't give in to selfishness. She sighed and fished in her pocket for her phone. When she thumbed the screen, the dull blue gleam provided at least a little illumination. A thought snagged her; she pulled her hand back before he could take the phone.

“Where's yours?” A beat of silence proved her right again. Ginny sighed, no longer gleeful. No longer glad to be proven right. “You lost it?”

“I dropped it,” Sean said. “I think I did something to the battery. It won't turn on.”

“But there's nothing wrong with your goddamned phone,” she quoted. “Wow.”

“Just give me yours. I'll go get the flashlight and we'll figure out what to do next.” Sean took the phone from her limp fingers. “You stay here. Don't move.”

Ginny said nothing. She watched the blue light move out of the kitchen. She heard the basement door open, then the creak of Sean's feet on the stairs.

She sat in the darkness.

She sat for a long time.

She wasn't sure when the tears began, only that they started in silence. They burned in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She tasted salt. She put her face in her hands and sobbed, shoulders heaving, body racking.

In the darkness, Ginny broke.

And in the darkness, a small hand touched her.

She didn't startle from it, because somehow she'd been expecting this to happen. Small fingers curled over her shoulder, then slipped down her arm. A small hand held hers. The fingers were cold and slender, the nails ragged when they pressed lightly into Ginny's palm.

“Carrie?” Ginny whispered, and got no answer but a squeeze.

Then the hand withdrew as the sound of Sean's feet came up the stairs. The cellar door opened with a familiar creak, and in the next moment the white glare of the flashlight cut through the dark and pierced her eyes. Shadows danced behind her.

Something crashed.

“Ginny?”

“I'm right here.”

“I told you to stay put.” Sean shone the light around the kitchen.

Ginny put up a hand to block the glare, but not before she saw a glass of water she'd left on the edge of the counter had fallen and smashed on the floor. She twisted in her chair, but whatever had knocked it off the counter had disappeared. She closed her fingers over the residual feeling of that cold touch.

“You could've cut yourself,” Sean said.

“I didn't do that.” Outside, the wind howled and a spatter of snow hit the windows over the sink.

It startled Sean, who crunched glass under his feet. He muttered another invective and swept the light over her. “It just fell?”

Ginny shrugged.

“Don't tell me it was a ghost.”

She said nothing, told him nothing. His shoes crunched more glass and he swept the light around the room again. He grunted.

The lights came on as all the appliances beeped. Sean clicked off the flashlight. Ginny didn't move.

“It's broken,” Sean said unnecessarily, and she didn't know if he meant the glass or everything else.

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Mr. Miller?”

The man getting ready to cross the street paused, brow furrowed as he tightened his scarf around his neck. “Yes?”

Ginny had been good at her job, back when she did it. Good at getting people to talk to her without alarming them. Something in her face, she thought. Something pleasant and deceptively innocent. She wasn't investigating Brendan Miller for insurance fraud, so, really, he had nothing to fear from her, but he looked at her warily anyway.

“I'm Ginny Bohn.”

It took him a second or two, but he figured it out. From his expression, Ginny thought he might bolt, and what would she do then? Waddle after him? The thought was laughable.

His gaze fell to the bump of her belly beneath her puffy coat. “If there's a problem with the house, you need to talk to the realtor about it. We signed papers; you took it as is…”

“It's not about the house. Well. It sort of is about the house.” She stepped to the side, in front of him, when he moved to go around her. She'd stopped working because she was pregnant, but now realized something—he might've shoved her aside if not for her belly. She held up the train case. “I have this.”

Miller stopped trying to get around her. “What is it?”

“It belonged to your sister.”

The cold wind had rubbed two pink spots in his cheeks. Now they grew brighter. His mouth worked for a few seconds before he actually spoke. “Impossible.”

“I found it in the house. I thought you might want it.”

He fixed her with an angry, sullen glare. “I don't want it. I don't want anything to do with anything from that house. Okay?”

“Okay. Okay.” She knew how to soothe, how to gentle. Like taming a skittish horse or a strange, tooth-baring dog. “I'm sorry. I just thought you might like to read it.”

“Read it?”

“There's a diary,” Ginny told him. “At least, I think that's what it is. It has your sister's initials on it. Look, can I buy you a cup of coffee or something? Get in out of the cold?”

She pointed down the street. “My treat.”

For a moment, she thought he'd say yes. She was so certain, in fact, that she'd already taken a few steps in that direction. But Miller shook his head and backed up.

“No. I don't think so.”

Ginny paused. There was an art to working people, getting them to agree to things they didn't want to do, or to admit to what they'd prefer to keep a secret. “I know what happened to your sister.”

It was the wrong thing to say. His gaze flickered. His mouth thinned. “Nobody knows what happened to my sister.”

This time, he did push past her. Ginny managed to snag his sleeve, not hard enough to stop him but enough to give him pause. “There's something in the house, Mr. Miller.”

He'd just stepped off the curb, and stood between two parked cars. Everything about him vibrated the urgency to flee across the street. He looked at her over his shoulder.

“I told you. You bought it as is. If you have a problem, talk to your realtor.” Then he stepped out into the street.

“I think it's your sister!”

That stopped him. He turned. He wasn't much older than Ginny, though the lines on his face and gray in his hair made him seem so. He was good-looking, behind the scowl and the furrowed brow, but there was nothing welcoming about him. Not at all.

His gaze dropped to her belly. “What is it that you want, exactly?”

“I just want to know what happened. That's all.”

She'd gotten to him. Everything about him sagged. He put a hand over his eyes, briefly, before looking down the street to the coffee shop.

“Fine. I'll give you half an hour, but that's it.”