“I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have called you,” Ricky said. “But what was I going to say, Angie? ‘Hey, I know I told you that we would talk about us, but my ex is pregnant and maybe I’m the baby daddy, so can you hang tight for a bit longer?’”
“Yes,” I supplied. “Exactly that.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “Angie, I . . .” He swallowed. “Camila’s planning on moving to Tucson to be close to her parents. If the baby turned out to be mine, I was going to go with her.”
It took me a moment to process what he meant, and once I did, I felt like I was going to be sick. I remembered when I’d first seen them together, how I’d thought they’d looked good together. They would make beautiful kids, I’d thought. A boy with her large eyes and his long face. A girl with his thick eyebrows and her sweet smile—
“So let me get this straight,” I said, rubbing my temples. “You didn’t call me because you knew that if, today, you found out the kid was yours, you would’ve ditched me and gotten back with your ex? I just would never have heard from you again?”
“No. That’s not—”
“Ricky,” I said flatly, “you just told me that you were getting ready to move across the country for her.”
“Not for her!” Ricky said, exasperated. “For our kid.” He scooted closer to me, grasping my hand and squeezing it beseechingly. “Angie, there’s nothing between me and Camila anymore. I’ll be honest. I was expecting to feel something when I saw her again. I thought it would at least hurt, given how long we were together. But it didn’t. I felt like I was talking to a stranger. Even at the obstetrician’s office—”
I snatched my hand back. At the obstetrician’s office?
“You went to her appointment?” I said, alarmed. During my ob-gyn rotation, so many of the women had come to their appointments unaccompanied that when I walked into their exam room to find an extra occupant there, I would be thrown off guard. Now the image of Ricky and Camila together came into sharp focus; Ricky standing next to the sonographer as she passed the ultrasound probe over Camila’s exposed belly, declaring that the baby was the size of a peanut—
Ricky looked up at me with wide eyes.
“Yeah, I did,” he said, just a bit defiantly. “I won’t apologize for that. That guy she was with ditched her the moment he found out she was keeping it. She was going to go alone.”
Even as my fury mounted, I understood. Of course Ricky went to her appointment. That was just who Ricky was. Always trying to do the right thing for everyone, all the time. Camila must have known this. As she lay down on the clinic table, spread-eagled and exposed, she must have prayed for her pregnancy to be older, for the chance that her child was also his. Maybe, had he told me what he was doing instead of letting me rot, he could have garnered my sympathy. But at this moment, all I could think of was how, even after all this time, Camila’s feelings still trumped mine.
I stood abruptly and pivoted toward my front door. The audacity of this man, really. The peace I had managed to build around myself had just been knocked down with a battering ram, but I would put it together again. There was always more wine, always more museums, always more Great British Bake Off. Just as soon as I got this berserker out of my home—
“Angie,” Ricky said, storming after me. “Angie, please.”
He grabbed my sleeve, and I swiveled to face him, my anger flaring as he closed the space between us. I’d never thought of him as especially tall, but in that moment, the four inches or so between us felt vast.
“You still care about her,” I declared.
“Not in the way you think,” he tried.
“Liar,” I spat, trying to hold back the tears that pricked the corners of my eyes, because enough—I had already cried enough over him. “Can you even hear yourself? You drove across the city to go to her appointment to play house and who knows what else, but you couldn’t pick up your phone and call me? Couldn’t even spare five minutes? Are you kidding me right now?”
“Angie, I—”
“I can’t believe that I thought . . .” My voice trailed off as I filled in the rest. That I thought he was different. That I thought what we had was special. That I’d spent the last month feeling so sure that we would work, thinking of him not just as my potential partner, but as my friend—
“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I was stupid. I felt stuck. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I know that doesn’t change the fact that I did, but . . .”