“I won’t,” I said, turning away so she didn’t see the tears that had rushed crazily to my eyes. “Thanks, it was nice to see you.”
I watched Nancy’s tired face disappear past the front windows and Justin appear in her place. I scrubbed my face with my hands, trying to rub away the incriminating weepiness as Justin stepped inside. He was wearing jeans, Vans, and an untucked, slightly wrinkled button-down—a young literature professor’s uniform.
“Hey there.” He wrapped an arm around my waist and leaned over to kiss me. “Everything okay?”
“Yes.” I tried to smile. “And no.”
He nodded sympathetically. And he didn’t know the half of it yet. “Why don’t you go sit? I’ll get your coffee for you,” he said. “A latte?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
I went back and sat down, watching Justin’s quick back-and-forth with the girl behind the counter. She had a plain square face and an athlete’s sturdy frame. She laughed too loudly at whatever Justin said as he motioned to the baked goods. Preternaturally charming—men, women, old, young. Justin couldn’t help himself.
I’d known that since the day we met. I was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, an old-school no-frills café near Columbia, studying constitutional criminal procedure, listening to Justin a couple tables away, chatting up the sixtysomething man sitting near him. Apparently they shared an intense interest in collecting. In the older man’s case, it was mechanical banks; for Justin, it was bottle caps.
“Do you collect anything?” Justin had asked me once the man was gone.
“No,” I said, trying not to notice just how good-looking he was.
“Me, neither,” Justin said.
“I just heard you telling that man—”
“See, I knew you were listening,” he said with a sly smile that made him even better-looking. “Anyway, no. No collecting. I was just making conversation.”
“So you were lying,” I said.
According to my law school friend Leslie, a cheerful guy’s-girl soccer player who never had a shortage of boyfriends, this was why men never called me for a second date: I was a hard-ass. Too serious, too exacting. Humorless. I needed to let some of their harmless male bullshit flow over me; men didn’t want to be called out for every little thing. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. My whole life, friends—men especially—had been telling me how much luckier in love I would be if I’d lighten up. Sometimes I wanted to defend myself, to ask how many of them had grown up like me. Because the truth was: I would choose alone any day over angry like my mother.
As it turned out, Justin fell in love with my sharpest edges. He genuinely valued my willingness to call him out on his particular brand of bullshit.
“I’d say I was just being friendly,” Justin had said that day in the café. “But I guess that depends on how you see the world.”
And as much as Justin valued the clarity of my black and white, I’d been intoxicated by his world of grays. By his fearlessness and his freedom and his very modest sense of entitlement. Justin had never believed that he needed to be right 100 percent of the time to be a decent person; he didn’t need to be perfect to be loved. As it turned out, I wanted to feel that way also, much more than I’d ever let myself believe.
No doubt it had been easier for Justin with Judith and Charles, his generous parents, celebrating every milestone big and small in his picture-perfect house in New Canaan, Connecticut. With his accomplished and loving sister, Melissa, at his side, Justin had played lacrosse and swum competitively. He spent summers on the Cape and winter holidays in Vail. He had a golden retriever named Honey. And thank God for the relentless optimism those things had given Justin. Without that, I never would have had the courage to forge ahead with him on a family of our own.
“Not everything about where you’re headed, Molly, has to be about where you’ve been,” he’d told me once when we’d been deep in the throes of debating getting pregnant the first time.
And I’d believed him, proof of just how much I’d loved him.
“It’s a baby,” I blurted out when Justin returned with our coffees. So much for playing it cool. He hadn’t even sat down.
“What?” Justin looked confused.
“The body they found,” I said. “It’s a baby.”
His face was stiff as he lowered himself into the chair across from me. “Well, that’s a completely upsetting turn of events.”
“Tell me about it.”
He turned his coffee cup in his hands. His face was tighter. He was trying hard not to overreact, but he was worried. It was obvious.
“Do they know whose it is?”
I shook my head and willed my tears back. “Somebody terrified, I’m sure.”
I knew that much from my years at NAPW. I’d never handled the criminal side of things; my focus had been on legislative change, drafting amicus briefs and working with lobbyists. But I had spoken to colleagues who had clients with pregnancies that had ended in tragedy. Almost always, the women had been abused themselves or worse. They were usually poor and alone, always terrified and overwhelmed. Assigning blame in these circumstances wasn’t nearly as simple as some people liked to believe.
Justin reached forward and put a hand over mine. “Are you okay?”
I shrugged, then nodded and again tried hard not to cry. Because as much as I wanted to pretend I was upset about what the poor mother of this baby might have been through—assuming she was responsible—I was thinking more about myself. I was thinking about what I had been through. What I was still going through, at least enough that I wasn’t ready to contemplate trying for another baby. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready for that. But I had to be careful. If I seemed like I was slipping under again, Justin wouldn’t let me out of his sight.