Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

Taylor is mine. I mean, I can be in her life but I can’t pretend... Ben, I have something to tell you,” she said. “I just don’t know how. And it’s the real reason I have avoided you for all this time.” She breathed out deep, taking his hands in hers, letting a tear fall down her face. “Ben, we didn’t use a condom when we had sex that night.”

She could see confusion flash over his face as he tried to place her comment with a point in time, and realized what she meant.

“I got pregnant, Ben. But by the time I found out you were already back together with Keira. I didn’t want you to leave her because I was pregnant. Or not leave her when I begged you too. And I just felt like I couldn’t win.”

“Lark, what the hell?”

“Let me finish.” She held her hand up. “Please. Please let me finish. There’s not a kid out there. I didn’t keep a kid from you. I thought that I would have time to tell you. And figure out ways to do it. And it was one of those things that seemed inevitable. And definitely part of me was tempted to keep it from you. Just forever. Give the baby up for adoption or something. But... I stayed at school, and I hid from everybody. And I went into labor.” Her face crumpled. “She died, Ben. The baby.”

He stumbled back, his face stone. “She?”

“A girl. She would have been a year older than Taylor. At that point I just... What was the point? I was never going to tell you. I was never going to tell anyone. But here we are, and here you are. And I didn’t mean to get in this deep with you and not tell you.”

He looked at her. Like he’d never seen her before. And she realized that this was so much more complicated than she would like it to be. It was huge for her, this confessional. But he was having to stand there and rewrite his own personal history. Because what he knew about his own story had just changed.

Because what she had just told him would have changed everything at the time. Or maybe nothing. But the potential for change remained, and it couldn’t be denied.

If he had known...

How would things have been different?

And she could see him trying to do that math.

“You can’t,” she said softly.

“I can’t what?”

“You can’t rework it in your head and figure out where we would be if it had been different. I know, because I’ve tried. A hundred times. To figure out what it would be like if I had gone back and made different choices. If she would have lived. If I would have told you. If not having her would’ve been my choice, rather than something that just... Happened to me. I have tried over and over again to figure out how I would feel. Where I would be. And there are just too many things I don’t know. Too many things I’ll never know. If I had told you that I loved you, even before I found out I was pregnant...”

And there was something a lot like regret in his eyes, because they both knew that they couldn’t go back and unpick the stitches.

How could they?

Because their own personal quilt square might be unfinished, but he had one of his own. And it included Taylor.

There was a whole human being that existed because of the choices he’d made. And she knew that he loved his daughter. And that he didn’t regret her.

That there was no possible way for him to regret the last sixteen years of his life, and he shouldn’t.

And she didn’t regret hers.

Because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done a great many wonderful things with all these years.

She had lived so many places and met so many people. She had grown, as an artist, and as a woman.

She had in many ways found the center of who she was, and that was what had propelled her here. She was strong. Artistic. She loved her grandmother, her mom and dad. Her sisters. This place she’d left behind because it hurt too much to be there.

“It hasn’t been perfect,” he said. “But...”

“You had a life. And so did I. We can’t wish we were in a different one.” She cleared her throat. “I realized that I was illustrating all these books for other parents to read to their children, but part of me would imagine it was for her. That the drawing was hers. That the story was hers. And that I was sending it out into the world. But I would never read it to her.”

She gulped air into her lungs, and it burned. “I won’t say that the grief is as sharp now as it always was. But I felt like as long as I was doing that, as long as I was going into that space, I was never going to find a way to heal. I feel like in so many ways it doesn’t make sense to mourn a person you didn’t know. But it’s the loss of all that could have been. That’s what keeps me up. It’s all that what if.”

He took a step toward her. “Above anything else, you were my friend. I would never have wanted you to go through that by yourself.”

“It was my choice. I chose to go through it by myself.”

“But you didn’t give me a choice, Lark,” he said, his voice hard, anger burning through.

“I know. I thought... I thought I handled it. But what I really didn’t think about was that I wasn’t just going to go through it by myself in that moment. But for all the years after.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,” he said. “I had another daughter, and she died.”

His words were broken, and he had bent slightly, as if the weight of the news had broken something inside him.

“I know that