Charlotte smiled at me. "Precisely," she said, nodding. Then she turned to Meg. "Why don't you invite Darcy to your party? Isn't Si coming?"
"What a fab idea! You must come, Darcy. I'm having a few friends over this Saturday night. Won't you join us?" Meg asked.
"I'd love to," I said, thinking how satisfying it would be to tell Ethan I had been invited to a party by women. I took a mental inventory of my list. In just one short day, I had ticked off several items already. I had helped Ethan (by cleaning his apartment), I was being healthy (by not ordering a caffeinated beverage), and I had made a couple of new friends. I still needed to find a job and a doctor, so after a few more minutes of polite conversation, I asked Meg and Charlotte for a recommendation on both fronts.
"Oh, I have the perfect chap for you. Mr. Moore is his name," Charlotte said, consulting her address book and jotting down his number on the back of one of her own calling cards. "Here you go. Give him a ring. He's really lovely."
"How come he goes by 'mister' and not 'doctor'?" I asked, feeling a bit skeptical about the British health care system.
Meg explained that in England only nonoperating physicians are called doctors—something that goes back to medieval times, when all surgeons were butchers and therefore mere misters.
"As for the job," Charlotte said, "what is it that you did in New York?"
"I worked in public relations… But I'm looking for something different here. Something that would help the poor, old, or sick," I said earnestly.
"That is so nice," Charlotte and Meg said in unison.
I smiled.
Meg told me that there was a nursing home right around the corner. She jotted down some directions on a napkin, and then wrote her own address and phone number on the other side. "Do stop by on Saturday," she said. "We'd love to see you. And so would Si." She winked.
I smiled, took my last sip of coffee, and said good-bye to my new friends.
That evening, when Ethan returned home, I was waiting for him with a homemade Greek salad, a glass of red wine, and softly playing classical music.
"Welcome home!" I said, smiling nervously as I handed him his glass.
He took it from me tentatively, sipped, and then looked around his apartment. "It looks great in here. Smells good too. Did you clean?"
I nodded. "Uh-huh. I scoured the place. I even cleaned your room," I said, and then couldn't resist adding, "Still think I'm a lousy friend?"
He took another sip and sat on his couch. "I didn't say that exactly."
I sat next to him. "Yes you did."
He gave me a half-smile. "You can be a good friend when you try, Darce. You tried today. Thank you."
The old me would have held out for an over-the-top apology coupled with a complete retraction and a small gift. But somehow Ethan's simple "thank you" was enough for me. I just wanted to make up and move on.
"So guess what happened this morning?" I said, bursting to share my news with him. Before he could guess, I blurted out, "I felt my baby kick!"
"Wow," Ethan said. "That was the first time you felt it?"
"Yeah. But I haven't felt her since. Should I be worried?"
Ethan shook his head. "No. I remember when Brandi was pregnant… she would feel a kick one day and then nothing for several days. The doctor told her that when you're active, the baby is less likely to move around, because you're essentially lulling it to sleep," he said with a somewhat pained expression, as if it still hurt to think of Brandi's betrayal.
"Does it make you sad to think about her?" I asked.
He kicked off his wet Pumas, peeled off his socks, and propped his feet up on the coffee table. "I'm not sad about Brandi, but sometimes I am sad when I think about Milo."
"Milo? Was that the guy Brandi cheated on you with?"
"No. Milo's the baby."
"Oh," I said sheepishly, knowing that I should have remembered that detail. I looked at Ethan, wondering what empathetic words Rachel would offer. She always had a way of saying the right thing, making someone feel better. I couldn't think of anything good so I just waited for Ethan to continue.
"For nine months, I thought I was going to be a father. I went to every doctor's appointment and fell in love with those ultrasound pictures… I even picked the name Milo." He shook his head. "Then we had the baby, and I realized he wasn't mine."
"When did you know for sure that he wasn't yours?"
"As soon as he was born. I mean, he was dark-skinned with black eyes and all this crazy black hair sticking up everywhere. I kept thinking of my own baby pictures. Bald and pink. Brandi's a blue-eyed blonde too. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was going on."
"So what did you do?"
"For the first few days, I think I was in shock. I pretended that it wasn't true, that it was just a fluke genetic thing… All the while, in the back of my mind, I remembered that 'big b, little b' chart from high-school biology… Two blue-eyed parents just couldn't make a Milo."