All for This (30 page)

“When Viv went to London, I went to New Hope to talk to Hanna one more time.”

“If you hurt her,” I growl, “I’ll fucking kill you.”

“No, you won’t,” Vivian snaps.

“I didn’t hurt her.” Drake throws up his hands. “Why would I have wanted to do that? I was just there to find out what she’d decided, and she was wearing that local boy’s ring.”

I flinch. “Did she ever say why?” I don’t want it to matter to me. It shouldn’t matter if I have her now. But it does.

“She said that she loved him,” Vivian says, talking for Drake. “That she wanted to marry Max, and it was her final decision.”

I push past them and into the living room and collapse on the couch. My gut aches, and I feel like I’m seconds from losing the tequila I had on the plane.

“I thought you knew,” Vivian says behind me.

I rest my head in my hands. Of course I did. She was wearing his ring. My own damn sister said Hanna was leaning in that direction.

“But I didn’t believe. Jesus. I don’t know why it matters so much, but I needed to believe she’d choose me.”

“Maybe she would have,” she says softly. “I did something terrible.”

I stiffen. I’ve known since the beginning of this conversation that something was coming. “Hanna?”

She nods. “I didn’t want you getting hurt. I’d never seen you like this. I was afraid she was just some money-grubbing, celebrity-chasing…”

When Viv’s eyes meet mine, I can see I don’t have to explain. She knows now that Hanna isn’t any of those things. “What did you do?”

“I went to New Hope and informed her I was still in love with you.”

“So I hear.”

She chews on her bottom lip and shakes her head. “I told her she was standing in the way of a
family
. That if she would move aside, you would finally have the thing you want most. What you need most.”

“When?” My voice is hard.

Her face crumbles and she shakes her head. “I’m so sorry, Nate. I didn’t realize how good she is or how very much you love her.”

“When was this, Viv?”

She shrugs. “Back in August. Before I met you in London.”

Before the accident. Before she put on Max’s ring. Before I fucked up.

“Fuck,” I mutter, dragging a hand through my hair. No wonder.

“She’s lucky,” she says to her wine. “I would have killed to have you look at me just once the way you look at her.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me how you felt? Years ago, before your marriage, before Hanna?” I wait for her to look at me, but she stays focused on her wine, looking for all the answers there.

“I thought you didn’t love me. I thought the problem was
me,
so I pushed you away. You don’t let people in. You know that? You and Janelle are so close, but you shut the rest of the world out. When I realized it wasn’t just me, I thought it was too late.”

“I never meant to shut you out.”

“You changed last summer. You smiled more. You’d been living like a zombie for years and suddenly you were awake. You were happier, and I thought we could make it work.” Finally, she brings her eyes to mine. “By the time I realized
she
was the reason, it was too late. Sure, I was still married, but mentally, I’d moved on with you.”

“Dammit, Viv. I never meant for you to dissolve your marriage for me.”

“I had to. If I was willing to leave him for you, I shouldn’t have been with him at all.” She takes a sip of her wine, and her sip turns to a long drink until the glass is nearly empty.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“Give me physical custody of Collin,” I reply without hesitation. “Let me take him to New Hope to live with me.”

She draws in a shaky breath. “I won’t have half the country between me and my son.”

“Don’t make me fight you, Viv. I’ve learned the hard way I need to fight for what I want—for who I love.”

“T
HE GOOD
news,” Nix says as she scans the monitors beside the bed, “is that the medicine made the contractions stop.”

I stare at the monitors, unsure what they all mean but too scared that, if I look away, they’ll stop their beeping and wiggling and something terrible will happen to my babies.

“What’s the bad news?” I whisper.

Liz squeezes my hand.

When I called Nix, she told me to have Nate drive me to Labor and Delivery. I called Liz and had her bring me. I don’t think she’s taken a full breath since we arrived. She’s not the only one.

“The bad news,” Nix says, “is that you’re a centimeter dilated and you’re looking at bed rest for the remainder of your pregnancy.”

I dare to take my eyes off the monitors to look at Nix. “Bed rest? That’s it?”

Nix sighs. “Well, this will all be up to your perinatologist, so it’s just speculation on my part, but I imagine they’ll keep you here to monitor you for a couple of days. If the medicine appears to be working and keeping your contractions at bay, they’ll continue with it, put you on strict bed rest, and keep a careful eye on you. We want those babies to stay in there as long as they can.”

The room is tense with the words she’s not saying: the prognosis for twins born at twenty weeks’ gestation is not a good one.

Liz looks like she might lose it and start crying any minute. “Do you think this is because of her fall?”

“I don’t know,” Nix says. “But that’s highly unlikely. If that fall was going to create a problem, I imagine we would have seen it early on. Or we would have never known about the pregnancy.”

My eyes are back on the monitors, but I feel Nix’s hand on my shoulder.

“Try not to worry too much about why. Just rest. And get a hold of Nate. He’ll want to know.”

She shuts off the lights on her way out and leaves Liz and me in the glow of the light trickling in from the bathroom.

“Do you want me to call him?” Liz asks.

I shake my head, but I don’t mean no. I just mean that I don’t know. He’s in California to spend Christmas with Collin, and I don’t want to ruin that.

“He’s upset with me,” I finally admit. “I told him I thought Vivian pushed me down the stairs. And he told me she couldn’t have because she was in London.” I swallow. “In bed with him.”

Liz gasps and chokes a little, and when I turn my head to look at her, her face is red and splotchy and she’s crying.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t blame him.”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t know you really believed someone pushed you.”

I shrug. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“No one pushed you,” she whispers. “Not intentionally at least.” Then she sinks to her knees and rests her head on the side of my bed. “I’m so sorry.”

“Liz?” Panic lodges in my throat. “Liz, what’s wrong?”

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats. “You’re the most important person in my world, and I would never hurt you on purpose.”

Oh my God
. “What happened, Liz?”

She lifts her head and draws in a ragged breath. “The day of the accident, Sam called me and said you’d met with him. He said he was worried about you and that maybe you were about to rush into a marriage you weren’t ready for.” She pushes herself off her haunches and paces the room. “Of course, I didn’t know anything about Max proposing at the beginning of the summer, and the idea of you getting married was new to me. And terrifying. You’d pulled away from me completely. You’d become a shell of your former self—exercised-obsessed and quiet and secretive—and in my mind, that was all associated with Max. I thought he made you like that. I thought that, if you married him, I’d lose you forever.”

I force myself to steady my breathing. I know what’s coming.

“I came up to your apartment to see if what Sam said was true and to try to talk you out of rushing into it. You met me on the balcony and you had a puffy lip and a swollen eye. You wouldn’t tell me what those were from, and you were wearing the ring.” She stops pacing and lifts her eyes to mine. “I demanded that you take it off. I’m your twin sister, and I didn’t even know he’d proposed, and you were wearing his ring, telling me that I needed to trust you. You were doing the right thing, you said. But to me, it was all wrong, and I wanted my sister back. I tried to take the ring off you myself. I was desperate. I felt like it had you under some spell or something and if I could get it off your finger…”

“And I didn’t want you to take it,” I say softly.

“I don’t even know how it happened. I had your hand and you were yanking away from me, and you told me to let go, said I was hurting you, and I did. But your back was to the stairs and somehow you lost your balance and fell.” Tears spill down her cheeks. “I called 911 and got you to the hospital, and it was so much more terrible than I ever would have imagined a fall like that could be. I was terrified I was going to lose you. And then, when I didn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to tell you the truth because I finally had my sister back. I am so sorry.”

“It was an accident, Liz.”

“It was my fault.”

“It was an
accident
,” I repeat. But my mind is spinning and I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t taken that fall. Was I planning on telling Max about Nate? And when would I have learned about the pregnancy?

“Can I get you anything?” she asks. “Anything at all? Should I call him?”

“Don’t call Nate.”

“He’ll come,” she says. “He loves you.”

I nod, and a salty tear runs into my mouth. “He does.”

What was it he said to me the day we made love?
“I love you, and I’m afraid you’re going to ruin your life because of it.”
Turns out, it wasn’t my life he needed to worry about.