Back with His Twins for Christmas

Chapter 4

* Seven Years Ago. Valentine's Day *

For the last few days I can’t stop replaying that damned day after New Year's Eve.

I left that mansion with Tom, as if victorious, but defeated.

The drive home was mostly quiet. Tom held my hand across the center console, apologizing again and again, promising things would be different this time. His words washed over me meaninglessly while my heart continued its silent implosion.

"I don't deserve another chance. I know that." He squeezed my fingers. “But believe me this one last time, please.”

"New year," I said flatly, "new beginning. Right?"

So when he parked somewhere on the middle road to my house among pine trees, I kissed him. Really kissed him, with tongue and teeth and a desperation that had nothing to do with wanting him.

I needed to erase Dean's touch from my skin.

Needed to seal this lie so thoroughly that even I could believe it.

Tom responded eagerly, pulling me across the console.

I didn't stop him when his hands found the hem of my sweater. Didn't stop him when he reclined his seat, when the windows fogged with our breath, when he fumbled with his belt in the cramped space.

I let him inside me with my eyes squeezed shut and Dean's name carved like a wound behind my teeth.

It was fast and graceless and nothing like last night. Tom whispered my name against my throat, told me he loved me, and I said it back because the words cost me nothing anymore.

Afterward, he held me in the awkward tangle of the front seat, stroking my hair like I was something precious.

"I'm going to be better, Lottie," he murmured. “I promise."

I let him believe it. I let myself believe that this—this clumsy coupling in a parked car—was the only thing that had happened.

That Dean Sawyer and his cruel bet were nothing but a fever dream I'd already begun to forget.

And now, more than a month later, the filet mignon sat untouched on my plate. A seventy-dollar piece of meat I couldn't have swallowed if my life depended on it.

Across the candlelit table at Pine Ridge's only attempt at fine dining Tom gestured expansively with his fork, his words washing over me in meaningless waves.

"—early admission, can you believe it? My father made some calls, of course, but the essay was all me. Harvard, Lottie. This is going to change everything."

My hands trembled beneath the white linen tablecloth.

The pregnancy test from Sunday morning burned in my memory like a brand, those two pink lines seared permanently behind my eyelids.

Six weeks since New Year's Eve.

Six weeks of pretending everything was fine while my body quietly betrayed me.

"I'm pregnant."

The words fell out of my mouth mid-sentence, graceless and desperate, cutting through Tom's Harvard monologue.

Silence. The ambient restaurant noise seemed to amplify in the vacuum I'd created.

I watched Tom's face, bracing for fury, accusations, maybe even denial. The calculations I knew he was capable of when cornered.

Instead, his expression transformed into something I'd never seen before—genuine, unguarded joy that made him look even younger, softer. Almost like someone I could actually love again.

"That's... that's incredible, Charlotte." He reached across the table and captured my trembling hands in his warm, steady grip. "We're having a baby?"

The relief hit me so hard I couldn't breathe. I'd spent the last four days drowning in terror, and here was Tom Bradley—unreliable, unfaithful Tommy—looking at me like I'd just given him the greatest gift of his life.

"You're not angry?" My voice cracked on the question. "You're not going to ask if it's…"

"Of course it's mine. Whose else it possibly could be?"

He squeezed my fingers, already leaning forward with plans spilling from his lips like champagne from an uncorked bottle.

I let myself believe it. The timing was the day of our reconciliation in his car. I pushed down the memory of Dean's hands on my skin, his whispered confessions in that darkened bedroom.

The way he'd looked at me like I was something precious before proving I was nothing but a bet to be won.

This was Tom's baby. It had to be.

Because the alternative was unthinkable.

***

The mahogany door to my father's study had never felt heavier on the next day.

I'd practiced this moment a hundred times in my bathroom mirror. Calm. Composed. Adult. They'd be surprised, maybe mild disappointment quickly smoothed over by practical planning, but ultimately supportive. They always were.

My parents had always supported every decision I'd made, from ballet lessons to student council president. This would be no different.

Right?

"Come in," My father's voice carried through the wood after I knocked softly

They looked up from their afternoon tea—a tradition my mother had adopted after their anniversary trip to London. Dad set down his newspaper while Mom placed her china cup delicately on its saucer.

I moved into the room on unsteady legs, hyperaware of the ring's weight on my finger, of the secret growing inside me that was about to shatter this perfect tableau.

They exchanged a glance—that married couple telepathy that came from twenty-five years together.

"Is everything alright, darling?" Mom leaned forward, concern creasing her brow. "You look a bit pale. Are you feeling well?"

"I'm..." I swallowed hard, my practiced speech evaporating. "I need to tell you something."

"Of course." Dad settled back in his leather chair, giving me his full attention. "You know you can tell us anything."

Anything. The word hung between us like a promise about to be broken.

I lifted my hand and the diamond caught the afternoon light streaming through the windows, throwing rainbow prisms across the room like broken promises.

"I'm engaged." The words came out steady despite the earthquake in my chest. "Tom proposed last night. And… I'm pregnant."

The silence that followed wasn't just quiet—it was the complete absence of sound, as if the universe itself had stopped breathing.

"You're eighteen years old." Each word from my mother's mouth was a perfectly sharpened blade. The temperature in the room dropped twenty degrees. "Eighteen, Charlotte. A child."

"I'm not a child. I'm—"

"You're a little girl playing dress-up with that ring and this fantasy that you can have a baby and still have the life we've built for you!"

She rose from her chair with the kind of controlled violence that made me step backward.

"There are options. Discrete clinics in Denver. No one would ever have to know about this... mistake."

"It's not a mistake." My voice cracked, betraying me. "This baby is—"

"This baby is the end of everything we've worked for." My father's voice, usually warm as aged whiskey, had gone arctic. "And you're throwing it all away for what? A boy who can't keep his dick in his pants?"

I'd never heard my father use that kind of language.

Never seen his face flush that particular shade of rage-red that made the veins in his temple pulse visibly.

"Richard…" Mom started.

"No, Grace. She needs to hear this."

He stood, his six-foot frame suddenly towering, intimidating in a way I'd never experienced.

"We were thirty-six when we had you. After the business was established, after the house was built, after our wild years behind. We gave you everything because we could afford to—not just financially, but emotionally. Don't sacrifice your future for a mistake you made in the heat of the moment."

"This isn't a mistake." The words tore from somewhere deep in my chest, somewhere I hadn't known existed until that moment. "And I'm not sacrificing anything. I can do both—I can be a mother and still have a future. Women do it every day."

My mother's laugh was brittle, dismissive.

"Women with money do it, Charlotte. Women with support systems and flexible careers. You're barely out of high school. What will people say? The Evergreen’s daughter is pregnant at eighteen, throwing away every—"

"I don't care what people say!"

I was shouting now, something I'd never done in this house. Something that no one did before.

"I don't care about society's opinion or reputation or any of it. This is my life. My decision. My baby."

The fight that followed was the first real one we'd ever had—voices raised, accusations hurled, every unspoken tension from eighteen years of being the perfect daughter finally erupting.

When it ended, I stood alone in the foyer with my engagement ring catching the light and a decision crystallizing in my chest like ice.

I would leave.

Leave this small mountain town with its whispered judgments and narrow expectations. Leave for Seattle, for the big city with its anonymity and opportunity, where no one knew the Evergreen name or cared about the circumstances of my pregnancy.

I would start over. Build something new. Prove everyone—including myself—wrong.