Seven Weeks Pregnant, until I Found His Secret Chat novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Lake House

Renzo sets terms in his boatyard house. Dario arrives at night with two cousins.

It took two hours and ten minutes to reach the lake.

Renzo drove the whole way with both hands on the wheel and said nothing I had to answer.

I watched the mirror for the cousins' SUV until the Pennsylvania hills closed in behind us.

At one in the morning he turned onto a gravel road that ran down to black water.

A boatyard sat at the end of it, with a dozen hulls on stands and one light over a shed.

Beside the shed stood a small house with a porch and a woodstove chimney.

"This is yours?" I asked.

"It's mine."

"Does your mother know where it is?"

"She knows the name of the lake," he said. "She's never been inside."

He carried my suitcase up the steps and unlocked a door that had no deadbolt, only a plain old latch.

The inside smelled of cedar and engine oil.

There was a couch, a table with two chairs, and a kitchen with one pan hanging on a nail.

He set a glass of water in front of me and a plate of dry toast beside it.

"You were green in the truck," he said.

"I'm seven weeks pregnant. I'm always green."

"Eat it."

I ate half of it, because it was kind and because I did not want to fight over toast.

Then I put the glass down and looked at him straight.

"You said fourteen months."

"Yes."

"You knew about her for fourteen months, and you let me set the table."

He leaned on the counter and folded his arms.

He didn't look away, which I held against him and respected at the same time.

"I was not allowed to write in that chat," he said. "My father's rule, when he threw me out. I could read it. I couldn't answer."

"You could have called."

"I called Dario a year ago. He laughed and hung up."

"You could have called me."

"I didn't have your number."

"My number is on my husband's phone and on every Christmas card his mother mails."

His jaw moved once.

"I was told not to speak to you," he said. "I was told it by my father, and I was told it again by you, at your wedding, when you looked right through me."

I opened my mouth and closed it.

I did remember that day.

I had been twenty-three and terrified of every person in the room, and I had looked through all of them.

"That isn't an answer," I said.

"No. It isn't."

He did not give me another one, and I thought less of him for it, and then a little more.

I put both hands flat on the table.

"I'll stay here tonight. I want rules."

He nodded once.

"Go on."

"I sleep in my own room, with a door that locks from my side."

"There's a bedroom at the back. The lock works."

"Nobody touches me. Not you, not a cousin, not a doctor I haven't picked."

"Agreed."

"You don't do me any favors I can't repay, and you don't ask me to forgive anything."

"I won't ask you for that."

"And when the baby is safe, I go."

"When the baby is safe," he said, "you go wherever you want."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"You're very easy to agree with."

"Not usually," he said.

I took my suitcase to the back room and stood on the wrong side of the door a long time.

There was a narrow bed with a quilt, a window onto the water, and a lock that turned with a good solid click.

I turned it.

Then I sat on the quilt and read the family chat again from the top, because I could not stop.

I read it until my eyes burned.

It was ten past two when I heard gravel under tires.

I went to the window without turning on the lamp.

Two sets of headlights came down the road toward the shed, one behind the other.

The first car stopped in the yard, and a man got out of it in a dark suit he had not changed since the afternoon.

Dario.

He looked up at the house and lifted both hands to show they were empty.

Renzo was already on the porch, in the doorway, with the light behind him.

The two brothers faced each other across the gravel for the first time in five years.

I opened my window an inch to hear.

"Fratellino," Renzo said.

"Don't," Dario said, and his voice shook. "Don't be clever, Renzo. Just give her back."

"I haven't taken anything."

"Casey." Dario raised his voice so I could hear him through the glass. "Amore, come out. I know you're listening."

I did not move.

Behind him, two cousins stepped from the second car and stood with their hands in their jackets.

Dario took a step toward the porch, and he smiled, so tender and so sad that for half a second I almost felt sorry for him.

"Come home, Casey," he said. "Papa signs the paper tomorrow, and the baby has to be in the room."

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