“He only asked about his father when he started preschool. Other children had daddies, but he did not.”
“And?”
“And I showed him pictures, told him that he would meet you someday when he was older.”
“You told him this? So, you had some faith in me, then?”
“Not so much, no. But he’s your spitting image and I didn’t think once you met him, even a coldhearted bastard like you could deny his existence.” Though the quickness with which Konstantin had latched onto Mickey being his was a small point in the rat’s favor.
It had clearly never occurred to him that she might have jumped from his bed into that of another man.
“How was this meeting supposed to happen?” Konstantin asked, still subdued.
“Not the way it did, that’s for sure.”
“But you planned to try again. To tell me about him?”
“He deserved for me to.”
“But I did not.”
“Frankly, your feelings did not come into it for me.”
“You have changed.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Five and a half years ago, you lived for me.”
“Five and a half years ago, if I hadn’t been pregnant, I might well have died for you.”
“Do not make melodramatic statements like that, even if you are merely trying to make a point.” But he sounded shaken rather than condemning.
Which is why she maintained an even tone when she asked, “Melodrama?” She shook her head and that’s when she told him about the mugging. It had happened the same night her parents had kicked her out.
She’d been mugged for the twenty-nine dollars she carried in her wallet. Emma hadn’t had credit cards then. Her parents didn’t believe in them. She’d just been taking a walk to clear her head, but the motel she’d landed in wasn’t in the best part of the city.
“When I woke up in pain unlike any I’d ever known and remembered I literally had no place to go, no one to call to come help me, I had a moment when I just wanted to go back to sleep and never wake up. The doctor came in and told me that it would be touch-and-go for a while. For both of us. But that my baby was still alive inside me and I clung to that. I have never felt anything like my determination to give Mickey life. It was touch-and-go for almost a week, for both of us. But every time I surfaced to consciousness, I thought of my baby and determined to live.”
Konstantin was gray. “Where were your parents?”
“Like you, they had decided that I was no longer suitable for the role I had in their life.”
“They disowned you?” he asked in shock.
“Yes.”
“And you probably blame me for this as well.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They adopted me, believing they could raise me to be a good, religious daughter. They tried their best, but I had sex with you outside the bounds of marriage and that was not acceptable. According to them, bad blood outed.”
“Because you were pregnant and that was my fault.”
“No, the choice to share my body with you? That was mine to make. And I made it. I took responsibility for it then and have done ever since.”