The Pregnancy Test (NY Girlfriends #1)(37)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Ben let himself out, and Caroline and Jamie burst from the bedroom to find her clutching her stomach, tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Are you okay?" Jamie grabbed her hands and led her to the couch.

"Of all the nerve," Caroline proclaimed. "Where exactly does he think he’s been for the last three months?"

Mandy started to cry harder.

Jamie clucked. "Oh, honey, don’t cry. It will all work out."

"He’s not worth it," Caroline assured her.

Mandy shook her head. "It’s not that."

"What is it?" Jamie wiped the tears off her cheeks with the bell sleeves of her prairie top.

"I had sex with Damien Sharpton!"

Caroline’s jaw dropped. Jamie looked confused. "Just now?"

"Well, not in the taxi! When we were in Punta Cana."

"But you’re pregnant with Ben’s baby and… oh, shit." Jamie’s hand went over her mouth.

"Exactly. Oh, shit." Mandy felt a headache coming on.

Damien was having sushi with Rob on Monday and trying not to be a brusque jerk. He didn’t think he was succeeding.

"Man, I thought going to the Caribbean would loosen you up. You’re tighter than when you left." Rob poked his chopstick at Damien. "Told you you should have slept with your assistant."

"Fuck off." Damien adjusted his tie and chewed his maki. He had spent an absolutely hellish weekend shut up in his apartment trying to work, with very little result. All he could think about was Mandy. Mandy and her baby. Mandy and him.

He hadn’t seen her at work that morning, but then he hadn’t expected to. She was good at avoiding him when she wanted to.

Rob shook his head. "You know something? You make it really hard to like you sometimes."

Damien thought Rob was joking, but when Rob looked at him, he had disgust on his face. "What do you mean?"

Only he knew what Rob probably meant, and Rob was right, but maybe for the first time, he needed to hear it said out loud.

"I mean you’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself, you treat everyone else like shit."

Chest tightening, he set his own chopsticks down on his sushi plate. "You think I’m feeling sorry for myself? That’s fine for you to say. You weren’t the one who was charged with raping and strangling your wife. You’re not the one whose marriage was dissected for a grand jury, and whose wife’s attributes and flaws were picked apart and discussed as if she had never been a human being."

He never did that. He never spoke about Jess like that out loud. He never talked about the arrest, the charges, the feeling that he might as well be dead like Jess. He had felt empty, soulless, when they had charged him with her murder. And only marginally less so when the grand jury had voted not to indict him.

But the reins of his tight control slipped through his fingers at Rob’s accusation. He felt anger, hot and bright. He couldn’t have anything he wanted, and yet his only friend had the balls to accuse him of feeling sorry for himself?

"Look, Damien, I know you’ve been through some serious stuff. But I’ve known you since we were kids. We’ve got a lot of history, and you’re just not the same guy anymore."

No shit. When had Rob figured that out? Damien had known it for a long time. "Of course not. I can’t be the same stupid kid I was, the one who thought my dad was as strong as a superhero and that my mom was the perfect woman. I can’t be the same stupid twenty-two-year-old who met Jessica and thought I’d be happy and in love for the rest of my life."

Rob shook his head. "If I could go back to that day at the lake, the day you and I cut out of work at the bank early to hit the beach, I would. I’d throw the football the other way so it wouldn’t hit Jessica’s friend… what was her name?"

"Patty." Damien’s maki churned in his gut. He remembered that day with agony. Patty had been a flirty little thing, who had zeroed in on Rob after he’d beaned her with the football on accident. Jessica had been more aloof. It had taken Damien the whole afternoon to convince her to give him her phone number.

"Even though she was a hot little thing and we had a fun weekend together, I wish I’d never met Patty so you had never met Jessica. Because ten years later she’s still fucking with you."

"She’s not fucking with me. She died. That wasn’t her fault."

But Rob gave a sound of exasperation. "It’s not her fault she was murdered, of course not, and I wouldn’t wish that on any woman. I’m damn sorry that happened to her, I really am. But apart from all of that, before that, you have to recognize that Jessica was just a bitch, Damien. She was a bitch the day we met her and she was a bitch every day after that. She played you for all you were worth."

Damien’s face went cold. He sat very, very still, thinking it was a good thing they were sitting in a restaurant, because he felt like pounding Rob. It was wrong to say those things about Jessica. "That’s my wife you’re talking about."

Rob’s voice was low, urgent, his hand gripping the table. "I know that. And maybe you’ll never talk to me again after today, but I have to say this. I can’t stand watching you die a little day by day, becoming this person I don’t know. You’re miserable. Tell me this – when you think of Jessica, are your memories happy?"

No. The answer was in his head before he could consider it. Of course he had some pleasant memories of Jessica. He had loved her, in his own youthful, flawed way, and there had been some fun times. They had been married, they’d lived together, they’d made love. But something had always been wrong between the two of them, and they both had known it. He was always insecure that she would throw in the towel on their relationship, and smart woman that she was, Jessica had always used that to her advantage.

"That doesn’t change the fact that she was killed." Something he had never really dealt with. He knew what had been done to her in excruciating detail thanks to his grand jury indictment, but he hadn’t dealt with any of that. He had rammed it into a dark, hidden corner of his head to prevent him from losing his mind.

"No, no it doesn’t." Rob ran his fingers through his hair. "But you need to let go of your relationship, don’t you think? Don’t you deserve a chance to be happy?"

But Jessica had never been happy. Running the tip of his finger over a stray grain of rice on the table, Damien told the truth. "I don’t know. I don’t know if I deserve anything."