They Gave My Place to Her, So I Vanished With His Child novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Night of the Engagement
Ivy sits outside her fiance's engagement party to another woman, learns she is pregnant and drives away; four years later Caleb finds her outside a kindergarten and tells her she is on the list of the dead.
On the night Douglas got engaged to Felicity, I sat in my car outside the hotel with the engine running.
Through the glass doors I could see the ballroom lights and a banner that said CONGRATULATIONS.
Douglas had been my fiance for a year and a half, and he had ended it by phone five weeks ago.
My brother had cut me off the same week.
Felicity had said I pushed her down our stairs.
Nobody asked me one question about it.
I put my foot on the gas and held the car still against the brake.
The glass doors were thirty feet away.
A tap came on my window.
My brother stood beside the car in his black suit, his hand on the roof.
"Ivy. Go home."
"It's a public street," I said.
"Felicity has had enough this year. Please don't do this to her."
He had raised me.
Our parents lived on planes and in hotels, and my brother Philip was the one who came to every school play.
Now he looked at me and saw only the trouble I was causing.
Another tap, softer.
Felicity came across the sidewalk in her ivory gown, holding the skirt in both hands.
Her hair was pinned up and her eyes were wet and shining.
"Ivy," she said. "You came."
"I didn't come in."
"I told Douglas you would. I told him you'd want to see it."
She leaned through my window and pressed a warm hand to my cheek.
Then she smoothed my hair back from my forehead.
My hair has a white streak at the left hairline, an inch wide, and I have combed it over since I was a girl.
Her thumb stopped on it.
"You should stop hiding that," she said gently. "It's pretty."
I jerked back.
She smiled at me anyway.
"Come inside. Have some cake. We're family."
"She isn't coming in," Philip said.
"Philip, don't."
"Felicity. Inside."
She went, and two guests on the steps watched her go, and then they watched me.
My phone rang on the dashboard.
An unknown number.
I almost let it ring out.
I answered because the music from the ballroom had started, a slow violin, and I needed any other sound.
"Miss Kingsbury? This is Harlan General. We've finished your blood work from Tuesday."
"I wasn't sick," I said.
"No, ma'am. You're pregnant."
The engine stalled.
I had taken my foot off the brake without noticing, and the car rolled forward one foot and died against the curb.
I sat there with my hands on the wheel.
Seven weeks, the nurse said.
Douglas's.
Through the doors Douglas was walking to the front of the room with a ring.
Philip was watching me through the window and he did not look at the ring at all.
I thought of what he would say if I told him.
He would say I was using a child to get back what I had lost.
I started the car, turned it around, and drove to the airport.
I bought the next ticket to a city I had picked off the board without reading the name.
I never called any of them again.
*****
Four years later, I was standing outside Port Calder Elementary with my daughter's hand in mine when a woman beside me said, "Isn't that Caleb Langston?"
I looked where she pointed.
A tall man in a gray hoodie stood across the street, a phone in his hand.
"Never heard of him," I said.
"The singer. He's had four albums. Everyone knows him."
"Not me."
"Honestly, from here he looks a bit like you."
I smiled at her and walked Polly toward the parking lot.
"Ivy."
I did not turn around.
"Ivy Kingsbury!"
Polly tugged my hand.
"Mommy, why is he calling you that? Your name is Ivy Moncrief."
"He's got the wrong person, baby."
I had my keys out when a hand closed on my arm.
It was Caleb Langston, and he was out of breath.
I had last seen him when he told me, in the snow outside his agency, that he wished I had never been born.
I had stood there all night first.
"You're alive," he said.
His eyes were red and he did not seem to know it.
"Let go of me."
"We have a stone for you, Ivy. Your purse was in a collapsed building in Port Calder after the earthquake. They found your ID and put your name on the list of the dead."
My mouth went dry.
"Philip paid for the funeral himself," he said. "He buried an empty coffin."
Polly looked up at him with her white streak falling across her forehead.
"Mommy," she said. "Who died?"
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