He Divorced Me While I Carried Twins, Now He Wants Them novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Locked Out

Marilyn offers Jessa a house for her silence, Jessa finds her locks changed and the mistress in her bedroom, and the man on Kerry's TV is the stranger from the hotel bar.

Marilyn shut the door behind her and sent the sonographer out with a look.

I pulled the sheet up over the gel on my stomach.

"Twins," Marilyn said again. She sat on the edge of the visitor's chair, the one Landon had warmed. "Two Carrington boys. Or girls. I'm not particular."

"You're not entitled to either."

"Don't be tiresome, dear. You are nine weeks along and my son was in your bed in August. I can count."

I didn't correct her.

I slid my phone off the tray and pressed record with my thumb, under the blanket.

"Here is what happens," Marilyn said. "You tell nobody about the father. You take the house in Westbrook, with a nurse and a driver and an allowance. Landon will be told when it suits the family."

"When it suits the family."

"After the Kendra business settles."

"You want me to keep your grandchildren secret from your son."

"I want them raised properly," she said. "And I want you quiet. The Carrington name has survived worse than a pregnant ex-wife."

Her smile was patient.

"They're mine," I said. "I'm not taking the house, and I'm not staying quiet. I'm taking my bag and going home."

"Home," Marilyn said, and almost laughed. "Jessa. Everything you call home has Landon's name on the deed."

The door banged open.

"Visiting hours are over," said Kerry Rooney, in green scrubs, with a stethoscope around her neck and her hands on her hips.

She was five foot four and she took up the whole doorway.

"Ma'am, this is a medical room. You need to leave."

"I'm family," Marilyn said.

"You're the family that left her to sign divorce papers in a gown," Kerry said. "Out. Or I'll call security, and I'll tell them it's your heart."

Marilyn rose with great dignity.

At the door she looked back at me, pleased, though I had agreed to nothing.

"We'll talk soon, dear," she said.

Kerry shut the door, locked it, and turned around.

"I watched them walk in with that folder," she said. "I couldn't leave my station for twenty minutes. I'm so sorry."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine." She sat on the bed and put her arms around me, gown and gel and all. "Why are you half smiling?"

"Because I just lost a marriage and found out something else," I said. "Kerry. It's twins."

She screamed into my hair, and then clapped a hand over her own mouth.

I was discharged at four, in my own clothes, with the garnet in my pocket and a printout of two small gray shapes in my hand.

Kerry wanted me to come straight to her place.

I wanted my things first.

The Carrington house sat at the top of Larkwood Drive, white and lit, with the gate standing open.

My key didn't fit.

I tried it three times, and then rang the bell like a stranger.

Kendra opened the door in my cardigan.

It was the gray one, the one I had left on the kitchen chair.

"Oh, Jessa," she said. "Landon had your things packed. They're by the gate."

Two black garbage bags sat beside the mailbox, with the neck of a lamp sticking out of one.

Across the street, a neighbor stood very still behind her curtain.

Another one was watering a lawn that did not need water.

"I'll just get my mother's photograph," I said.

"The photographs are..."

I walked past her.

I took the framed picture off the hall wall, the one of my mother at twenty with her hair full of wind, and tucked it under my arm.

Kendra followed me down the hall, light and quick.

"You don't have to make this ugly," she said.

"I'm not making anything," I said. "I'm taking what's mine, and you're watching me do it."

On the stairs, I stopped and looked up at the landing.

The door to the master bedroom was open.

My side of the closet was already empty, and a row of her dresses hung where my coats had been.

I walked back out through the front door with the picture in my arms and did not look at the street.

I carried both bags to Kerry's car myself.

"Don't," Kerry said, taking the heavier one away from me. "Twins, remember?"

Her apartment was two floors above a bakery, and it smelled like bread and fabric softener.

She made me tea and sat me on the couch with a blanket and my feet on her knees.

"Okay," she said. "Say it. Out loud."

"Landon came to my bed on his birthday, August twenty-first."

"Ugh. And?"

"And three nights later I found Kendra's earring in his car, and I went to a hotel bar and sat there until a stranger sat down beside me."

Kerry's eyes went round.

"A stranger."

"His name was Ronan. That's all I know. He had a gray scarf, and he left it on my chair."

I reached into my tote and held it up.

She stared at it.

"Jessa. Are you telling me you don't know whose they are?"

"The doctor says nine weeks. It could be either night." My voice cracked, and I let it. "I signed away my marriage today, and I don't know whose children I'm carrying."

"Then we find out quietly," Kerry said, and took my hand. "And we tell nobody until we do."

On the television behind her, a news anchor said something about the freight industry, and I almost didn't look.

Then I heard the name.

"Keyes Freight announced this afternoon a hostile bid for Carrington Logistics..."

The man on the screen stood at a podium, in a charcoal coat, with gray at his temples.

He turned his head toward the camera.

I knew the shape of his hands before I knew his face.

The scarf in my lap was the same gray as his eyes.

"That's him," I whispered.

"That's who?" said Kerry.

"That's the man from the bar."

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