"Would you stop rubbing it in! I don't want to hear the word love again. Whether they love each other is totally beside the point… You don't understand anything about friendship."
"Darcy. No offense—and I'm not saying this to be mean, because I care about you, which is why you're here right now for this purported visit," he said, making quotation marks in the air as he said the word visit. "But—"
"But what?" I asked pitifully, afraid of what he would say next.
"But I think you're the one who doesn't understand friendship," he said, speaking fast and furiously. "Not at all. Which is why you're sitting here essentially friendless. At war with Rachel. At war with Claire. At war with the father of your child. At war with your own mother, who, as far as you know, has no clue where you are! And now you're mad at me too."
"It's not my fault that you all betrayed me."
"You need to take a long, hard look in the mirror, Darce. You need to realize that there are consequences to your basically shallow existence."
"I'm not shallow," I said, only half-believing it.
"You are shallow. You're utterly selfish and misguided, with totally screwed-up values."
He had gone too far. I might be a bit on the shallow side, but the rest of his accusations were ridiculous. "What the hell is that supposed to mean? Misguided?"
"It means that you're, what, five months pregnant now? And as far as I can tell, you're doing nothing to prepare for this child. Nothing. You come to London for this so-called visit, but I see no signs of you returning to New York—and meanwhile, you have made no effort to seek any prenatal care here in London. On top of that, you don't eat particularly well, probably in an effort to stay thin at the expense of your baby's growth. You had two glasses of wine tonight. And instead of saving for the child you have to raise alone, you are throwing money to the wind on positively frivolous purchases. It's simply staggering to watch how utterly irresponsible and totally self-absorbed you're being."
I sat there, completely speechless. I mean, what do you say when someone tells you, essentially, that you're a shit friend, a horrible, irresponsible mother-to-be, and an empty, self-absorbed woman? Unless I counted some of the accusations I'd received from scorned lovers (which don't have much credibility), this was an unprecedented attack. He had said so many mean things, come at me from so many angles, that I was unsure how to defend myself. "I am taking prenatal vitamins," I said meekly.
Ethan looked at me as if to say, If that's the best you can do here, I rest my case. Then he announced that he was going to bed. His expression told me not to follow him, that he did not want me in his room.
But just to be sure, after I sat in the living room for a long while, licking my wounds and replaying his speech, I decided to go down the hall and check his door. Not that I would have opened it on a bet—I had some pride—I just had to know whether he had boxed me out for real. Did he regret his harsh words? Had he softened his opinion of me as his beer-buzz dissipated? I put my hand around the glass doorknob and turned. It didn't budge. Ethan had shut me out. There was something about that door, cold and unyielding, that made me feel angry and sad and determined all at once.
* * *
twenty-one
The next morning I awoke on my air mattress and felt my baby kick for the first time. There had been other times when I thought I felt her—only to realize that it was likely just indigestion, hunger pangs, or nerves. But there was no confusing that odd, unmistakable sensation of tiny feet moving inside me, churning up against my organs and bones. I put my hand on the spot, right under my rib cage, waiting to feel her again. Sure enough, there was another small but distinct nudge and twitch. I know it sounds crazy, especially considering that my stomach was quickly becoming the size of a basketball, but I think it took that flutter of baby feet for my pregnancy to move beyond the theoretical and feel real. I had a baby inside me, a little person who was going to be born in a few short months. I was going to be a mother. In a way, I already was.