“Will you eat before you talk?”
Her roiling stomach made her want to refuse, but she knew how important this was to her mom, how important it was toher if she wanted to stay healthy.
“Maybe a tray?”
“I’ll bring one up.”
“Bring food for Miguel, too.”
“I am not hungry.”
She turned fierce eyes on him. “If I have to eat, so do you. You look like you’ve lost a stone and you didn’t have a stone to lose.”
There was satisfaction in being the one doing the haranguing in this area.
Her dad actually laughed. It was such a nice sound and Amber realized one that had been all too infrequent over the past months. “Listen to her, son.”
“Anything.”Miguel’s face twisted with emotion. “If it will make you happy.”
Amber stared. Would it make her happy if he ate? She didn’t think so, but…but…“I would be satisfied.”
“Then I will eat.”
They waited in silence, neither making the slightest effort to break it or move from their positions on her bed, until her mom returned with a tray laden with two dinner plates and juice to drink. “Eat first, talk after,” she admonished and then left.
And that is what Miguel and Amber did. They ate.
When they were finished, Miguel took the tray and put it on the floor. Then he turned back to face her, his expression as ravaged as her sister had alluded to. “Your sister said you almost died…from not eating?”
She nodded.
He swallowed, his eyes glistening in a way she couldn’t accept as real. “Why?” he asked in a whisper.
Terror coursed through her. No one else had asked that. They’d all assumed they knew the answer and she’d let them go on believing it. So, she hadn’t had to lie. Could she lie to him? Could she pretend that it was what everyone else believed it had been?
But he was the baby’s father. He deserved to know. Didn’t he? He’d rejected her, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have the right to know. But she hadn’t admitted her culpability to anyone. Not even the E.R. doctor, though she was sure he suspected.
Miguel waited without speaking, apparently willing to sit like that all night while she worked through the thoughts swirling in her head. Oh, but his eyes spoke and the message in them was so filled with emotion she wanted to hide.
He was feeling enough for both of them and she didn’t understand how that co
uld be. He was the one who had not wanted to try to have a long distance relationship, but he looked like a man who had been abandoned by love. Not vice versa.
She licked her lips. “A couple of weeks after I got back from Spain, I got nauseous. It was an all day thing and my agent wanted me to lose a few pounds for a commercial.”
“You did not have a few pounds to lose.”
She shrugged. “It was easy to stop eating at all when food made me feel sick. I wasn’t sleeping, either. The dreams…they got to me and I hated waking up to loneliness.”
“I am sorry.” He made a pained sound, his hands fisting against his thighs with white knuckle intensity.
“Miguel?”
He shook his head, like he was trying to pull himself together. “You almost died. I could not have stood that and I know it is my fault.”
He sounded like that knowledge was killing him. And it wasn’t true. “No. I worked out that you’d never once lied to me or led me on. I just assumed that if it was so special for me, it must be for you, too.”
“It was special.”