She Wore Mourning by P.D. Workman (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

“You’ve been following me!” Bridget accused. “What a low-down, creepy thing to do!” He tried to respond, but she cut him off mercilessly. “I told you not to talk. You stop stalking me, or I’m going to take out a restraining order! I’ll get your butt thrown in jail! This is the most despicable thing—if I see your car near me again, I don’t care what your excuse is, I am going to have you slammed in jail so fast you won’t know what happened. Understand?”

Zachary didn’t say anything.

Bridget’s voice had risen to a screech. “I said, do you understand?”

“Am I allowed to talk now?”

“Don’t get smart with me, you jerk! You stay the hell away from me, you understand? I don’t want to see your car in my rear-view mirror! I don’t want to see you at any of the restaurants we went to together. I don’t want to see or hear about you anywhere I go! You got it?”

Zachary tried to answer, but she hung up. He pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen to confirm that she had terminated the call.

Zachary looked back at Kenzie, his face hot. “You still don’t think she hates me?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “No, I don’t, but… what’s up with that? Have you been following her?”

“You’re the one who suggested It’s a Wrap,” Zachary reminded her.

“And you’re the one who didn’t object and say that you didn’t want to run into your ex there. You didn’t answer my question. Are you following her?”

“It’s a small world. We still have friends in common. We both still live in town. We’re going to run into each other.”

She stared at him, waiting for a straight answer. Zachary struggled to come up with something she would understand.

“That’s not how it is.”

She used silence as a weapon. Zachary shifted and picked a few M&Ms out of the snack mix. He chewed on his lip.

“I might have… driven past her house a time or two, making sure she was okay. Or I might have seen her car downtown. I miss her.” He shook his head and blinked to prevent tears from forming in his hot, prickling eyes. “I loved her very much. The break-up was such a shock. It was so traumatic.”

“What happened?”

He tried to think of how to tell it without getting cut up over it all over again. The silence gathered around them.

“She was pregnant,” he said finally.

Kenzie nodded slowly. “And you weren’t ready for a baby?”

“I was. I was over the moon about it, but she didn’t want it. We were using birth control. She didn’t want a baby. I wanted a family of my own, but she… she wouldn’t budge.”

“That’s tough,” Kenzie sympathized.

“Yeah. That was the beginning. She said I didn’t have any right to dictate… that I had no rights over the pregnancy… over her… It was her body, her choice…”

“And legally, she’s right.”

“But we were in a relationship. That kind of thing… it’s supposed to be something you decide together. You talk about it. You come to some kind of decision together. It was my baby too.”

Kenzie just nodded. Her dark eyes were intense, drinking him in. Zachary’s heart pounded painfully in his chest as if it were happening all over again.

“She decided it didn’t matter what I wanted. She was going to get an abortion. As soon as possible.”

Kenzie continued to watch him. Zachary popped another pretzel in his mouth, but it was as dry as chalk. He couldn’t even taste it, and it turned to glue in his mouth. With difficulty, he washed it down with a large amount of beer.

“The doctor said that the good news was, she wasn’t pregnant. It was one of those point-one percent of cases where the pregnancy test was wrong. A false positive.”

Kenzie gave a little intake of breath that Zachary knew meant that with her medical background, she had an idea what was coming next.

“The bad news was that she had cancer. An HCG-producing tumor in her ovary. That was what triggered the false positive on the pregnancy test.”

They both sat in silence.

“So that’s it,” Zachary said finally. “There was no pregnancy. No baby. No need for an abortion. Instead, she had to have the ovary removed, and chemotherapy.”

“And a big elephant in the room.”

“Oh, we talked about it,” Zachary said. “We talked about it constantly. How I wasn’t ready to be a father but thought I was. How she was the responsible one, the one who had to make the hard choices. How she would kill a baby to avoid responsibility. How I was trying to make her feel guilty while she was going through chemotherapy and should only be having positive thoughts. I tried to help her through her treatments, but she didn’t even want me in the room. She didn’t want anything to do with me.”

He sat there in silence.

“What a mess,” Kenzie said finally. “I understand what you mean about it being a traumatic break-up.”

Zachary nodded. Sweat dribbled down his back. He tried to wash away the lump in his throat with a few more swallows of beer.

“But you have to move on,” Kenzie said. “You can’t be hanging around her house or following her around. She’s right; that is creepy. You could end up in jail if you keep it up.”

“I know.”

“Then stop it.”

He didn’t tell her that it wasn’t that easy. Not for him. It was so hard for him to maintain a relationship in the first place; letting go of what had been a successful one was more than he could handle.

Chapter Ten

The evening with Kenzie had ended unsatisfactorily. As much as they had tried to move on to more natural topics, neither one could seem to maintain a conversation that didn’t lead either to the Bond case or Zachary’s relationship with Bridget. They turned on a movie on the TV and cuddled on the couch, but in the end, neither