"We're over. Finished. It's never going to happen again with you and me. Baby or no baby. I'm with Rachel now."
I stared at him, feeling outrage well up inside of me. It was all so unbelievable! So utterly inconceivable! How could he be with Rachel? I stood and paced over to the window, trying to catch my breath.
"So tell me the truth right now. Is it mine?" he asked.
I turned and looked at him. He wasn't going to fold. You come to know a person well in seven years—and I knew that once Dex made up his mind, there was absolutely nothing that I could say to change it. His jaw was clenched. There was no opening for me. Besides, as brazen as I could be, I knew I could never actually go through with a ploy like this one, even as a temporary measure. It was just too awful, and I only felt worse for having tried it.
"Fine," I said, throwing up my hands. "It's Marcus's baby. Are you happy?"
"Actually yes, Darcy. I am happy. No, ecstatic is more the word." He stood and pointed angrily at me. "And the fact that you could lie about such a thing confirms to me—"
"I'm sorry," I said before he could finish his sentence. I was crying again. "I know it was really low… I just don't know what to do. Everything is falling apart for me. And—and—you're with Rachel. You took her on our honeymoon! How could you take her on our honeymoon? How could you do that?"
Dex said nothing.
"You did, didn't you? You went to Hawaii with her?"
"The tickets were nonrefundable, Darcy. Even the hotel was already paid for," he said, looking guilty.
"How could you do that? How? And then I see you two in Crate and Barrel, shopping for couches. That's how I knew about Hawaii. You were all tan. Shopping for couches… All tan and happy and buying couches." I was babbling now, a total mess. "Are you moving in together?"
"Not yet…"
"Not yet?" I said. "So you are eventually? Are you serious?"
"Darcy, please. Stop this. Rachel and I didn't do this to hurt you. Just like you didn't get pregnant to hurt me. Right?" he asked in his "please be reasonable" tone.
I looked out the window again at a pile of trash on the curb. Then I returned my gaze to Dex. "Please be with me again," I said softly. "Please. Give me another chance. We had seven good years together. Things were good. We'll forgive each other and move on." I walked back over to him and tried to hug him. He stiffened and recoiled like a puppy resisting the grasp of an overzealous child.
"Dex? Please?"
"No, Darcy. We don't belong together. We aren't right for each other."
"Do you love her?" I asked under my breath, truly expecting him to say no or that he didn't know or that he wouldn't answer the question.
But instead he said, "Yes. I love her." I could see in his eyes that he wasn't saying it to be mean; he was saying it out of a sense of loyalty to her. It was that committed, resolute look of his. It was Dex being a good person, being true to his new girlfriend. I marveled at how fast old loyalties, ones that took years to build, could be ripped apart and replaced. I knew I had lost him, but I felt desperate to recruit a small piece of his heart back to me. Make him feel even a sliver of what he used to feel for me. "More than you ever loved me?" I asked, looking for one small scrap.
"Don't do this, Darcy."
"I need to know, Dex. I really need to know the answer to that," I said, thinking that he couldn't possibly love her more in a few weeks than he had loved me when he had proposed after years together. It just wasn't possible.
"Why do you need to know, Darce?"
"I just do. Tell me."
He stared down at the coffee table for a long minute in that dazed way of his where he doesn't blink. Then he looked around the apartment, his eyes resting on an oil painting of a dilapidated, pillared house surrounded by terraced fields and a solitary oak. We had purchased the painting together in New Orleans right at the beginning of our relationship. We had spent nearly eight hundred dollars on it, which seemed like a huge sum of money at the time, as Dex was in law school and I had just begun to work. It was our first big purchase as a couple—an implicit acknowledgment of our commitment to each other. Sort of like buying a dog together. I remember standing in that gallery, admiring our painting, as Dex told me that he loved the way the early evening shadows fell across the front porch. I remember him saying that dusk was his favorite time of day. I remember we grinned at each other as the clerk bubble-wrapped our painting. Then we returned to the hotel, where we made love and ordered a banana split from the room service menu. Had he forgotten all of that?
I guess I had forgotten such moments when my affair began with Marcus. But I remembered every such occasion now. Regret surged through me. What I would have given to have a big ol' redo, take back everything with Marcus. I looked at Dex and asked the question again. "Do you love her more than you ever loved me?"
I waited.