I'm not even sure how I ended up on a park bench, watching a playground full of strange children, bawling my eyes out like the world was ending.
The truth was, my world had been ending for months now, crumbling to pieces around me, and I'd just now received the last blow, the final bit of information that I absolutely, emphatically, could not handle.
It was one month to the day I'd last spoken to Dante. Since I'd destroyed us both over the phone, since I'd used Nate to make Dante bleed, to make him suffer and then callously broken up with him as soon as I was done.
Four months since I took antibiotics while on birth control and then completely forgotten that the one canceled out the other.
I could barely support myself. How the hell was I going to be responsible for someone else?
Not just someone else. A child.
A child without a father. A child whose father had stated, plain as day that he did not want its mother so much as calling him anymore.
I was wearing shades, but even with that buffer between my eyes and the world, I knew I kept not even one ounce of composure.
I was lost. I had no clue what to do with myself.
How could I be so stupid?
What was I going to do?
I'm not sure how long I carried on like that, arms hugging myself as I rocked back and forth, feeling profoundly alone in the world. It felt like hours, when in reality it may have been only minutes.
When I noticed the outside world again, I realized that there was a woman sitting next to me on the bench, just a few feet away, which was not unusual on its own.
What was unusual was that she was crying, like me, sobbing like her heart was breaking, clutching her hands together as though in prayer.
She seemed to notice me at about the time I noticed her. She wasn't even wearing shades, her grief laid even barer than mine.
She wiped her eyes, studying me. My suffering seemed to have calmed hers, as though seeing someone else in need gave her purpose.
And so it did.
It was the type of meeting that imprinted itself on your memory, and looking back on it I realized that it was indicative of her nature—Gina was a woman who always put others needs before her own.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
~Pablo Picasso
PRESENT
SCARLETT
The first time I brought Dante to Gina and Eugene's was the hardest.
They greeted us at the door, and Mercy was with them, flinging herself at me with abandon.
I stroked her hair and let her hug me to her heart's content, my gaze wary on Dante.
The look in his eyes as he saw her for the first time broke my heart all over again.
I knew what he was feeling, and I felt it with him, knew precisely what he was seeing as he took her in.
Mercy was a gorgeous doll of a girl, a lovely mix of her biological parents.
She had her father's blond coloring and the same gorgeous ocean eyes.
And there was no doubt where her wavy hair texture came from, her high cheekbones, her stubborn jaw. Her mother.
But that was all they had in common.
No one called Mercy trash. No one would. No one thought of her that way, she was the opposite, in fact.
And only once had anyone ever thrown her away.
You never make peace with being abandoned. This I know. But we would do what we could to take responsibility for it. To never let her feel the way I had. She was loved deeply, and not just by the parents that raised her. That was a fact.
Dante had known what to expect, or at least he'd had fair warning.
But knowing and seeing are two different creatures.
Not to mention feeling.
It was hard, perhaps even as hard as telling him had been.
He hadn't taken either thing well.
Who would? Who could?
We'd had a bad few days after I told him, a few miserable moments where I wasn't sure we'd make it out the other side.
Of course he resented my decision. Resented that I'd made it without him, but even he knew that that was as unfair as it was natural.
The night I'd told him is one I'd never forget. Neither of us would. It had been as horrible as I'd dreaded. As painful as I'd known it had to be.
"How could you do that? How could you do a thing like that just for spite?" he had asked when I told him, his immediate gut reaction.
I'd been expecting something like that, but I was still offended, still taken from reasonable to messy with those two sentences.
"It wasn't for spite," I told him, voice quavering in something akin to dread. This conversation could ruin us. That fact was not lost on me. "It was for survival. You were engaged to Tiffany when I found out. What was I supposed to do?"
Something awful wrote itself on his familiar features in all caps. His mouth twisted.
Shame.