If it was the gift I’d been hoping for this whole past year, I knew I’d love it.


Di, who’d been dating a string of patently unsuitable men for the past several years, showed up alone at my parents’ house the next day. She had an odd cast to her complexion, part ashen, part edgy, part something else. It had me worried.

At the first opportunity, I cornered her in my childhood bedroom and closed the door. “What’s going on with you?” I asked. “You look weird.”

She laughed then kind of cringed. “That sounds like something I’d say.”

I nodded once and waited.

She blinked at me a few times before saying, “I think I’m pregnant.”

“WHAT?”

“I know you heard me, El.”

“What makes you say — I mean, do you know for sure? And who’s the — ” I stopped the pointless rush of words. I couldn’t speak any more. Hell, I could barely think.

“I don’t know for sure,” Di admitted. “It’s not like I peed on one of those little sticks or anything. I’m kinda scared to buy a box.” She sighed. “And as for the father, I don’t know that for sure either.”

Fuck.

“O-Oh, okay. Okay,” I croaked out. “Um, what can I do to help you? Do you want me to get you a test kit? I can just run over to the — ”

“It’s Christmas Day, sis,” she said wearily. “Everything’s closed.”

“Oh. Right.” My mind raced. “No. There’s got to be someplace that’s open. The hospital pharmacy! I’ll just drive there and — ”

Di rested a thin hand on my shoulder. “It’s all right. I can wait a day and, besides — ” she shrugged, “it’s not all bad news. If I am, I mean.”

She was serious.

And that was when I recognized the something else in her expression. Excitement. She seemed anxious, too, of course and, yeah, she looked pretty tired. But she’d also sloughed off the apathy that’d crept into her demeanor since her divorce from Alex. There was the thrill of anticipation lurking behind those cagey brown eyes, an energy buzz I hadn’t seen in her in a long time.

I gulped. “You want a baby?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me and grinned. “Don’t you?”

I nodded. I did, though I hated to admit it just then. “But what about — ”

“The father?” she finished for me.

“Yeah.”

“I made lots of bad choices in my life already, El. I don’t want to make another one. In the past few months there’ve been two guys. Problem is, neither of them would make a good dad. They’re not committed to me, and they don’t even have half the sense that Alex had, the dweeb.” She said his name almost affectionately. “And I’m just not going to settle.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

“But you can’t say anything to the folks until I know for sure. I don’t need them having a conniption or anything unless there’s a reason for it.”

I fought back a few tears. “Of course,” I assured her. But the damnable thing was that I wasn’t sure why I was crying. Yeah, I was worried about my sister and nervous about how our parents would take the news, but there was a niggle of another emotion, too. If pressed, I’d have to call it envy.

Di, who in her potentially sensitive state, might have guessed this, said, “So, is Tim finally gonna make an honest woman out of you? You guys have been practically living together for a freaking eternity. You need to get married and go multiply.”

I sniffled and laughed a little. “Well, he said my Christmas gift is something he picked out ages ago, and he thinks I’ll like it. So maybe it’ll be inside a little blue box and come with a proposal. But, Di, regardless, tomorrow we’ll go get you a pregnancy test kit. Deal?”

“Deal. It’ll probably take the both of us to figure out the directions anyway.”

I bit my lip. “You know, there’s always Gregory and Nadia. Maybe you could ask them some parenting questions.” Our brother and his wife had just had their second kid. Two squalling boys in less than three years. And they’d all flown in from Colorado Springs to visit us. Next to my limited experience, those two were experts.

Di grimaced. “I’m not that desperate for help.”

A few minutes later we rejoined the family in the living room, which included a lactating Nadia, our two young nephews and Tim, in addition to the original five of us.

“Put this on the tree,” Dad instructed the elder of the boys, three-year-old Wyatt.

Wyatt snatched the candy-cane ornament and toddled over to a Christmas tree branch, already drooping from his past hour of decorating. He added this latest treasure to the collection and ran back toward Grandpa for more. Only, he neglected to notice the barrage of toys he’d scattered on the carpet, tripped over a plastic lawnmower and went sprawling.

He bawled with practiced fury, and his mom leaped up to comfort him.

“Here,” Nadia said to my boyfriend, who was sitting on the sofa beside her. “Can you hold Bryce for a moment?” She dumped the squirming infant in Tim’s unsuspecting lap and didn’t give him a chance to answer.

Tim’s eyes widened into huge blue disks, but he held the baby and kind of bounced him. His gaze never left Bryce’s face, and Gregory, who should’ve stepped up to the plate to grab his son, stood back and just watched. Tim and Bryce were bonding.

My brother nodded slyly in my direction and Di shot me a saucy glance, although there were plenty of other emotions crossing her face as well. Mom’s eyes sparkled, and even Dad grinned a bit. I could sense the swell of collective familial anticipation. Another wedding could well be on the horizon with more babies to follow. Or so they thought.

Two hours later, my fingers shook as Tim handed me my Christmas gift. The package was a little larger and a bit heavier than I’d expected, but the look on his face shone with such enthusiasm that I figured maybe he’d disguised the ring somehow. Hidden it inside a kryptonite container, maybe.

I slit the pretty red ribbon and opened the box. Underneath the tissue sat a book. An old book. Pride and Prejudice, in fact, with an 1894 publication date.

“I — I don’t know what to say — ” I began.

“Don’t you love it?” Tim said. “I know what a huge Austen fan you are. It’s not the original release of the novel, of course. There was no way I could find anything from that far back — 1813, right?”

I nodded, and Jane whispered smugly, My first novel was published a full two years earlier, though. Do not let Mr. Farthington forget that.

I ignored Jane’s authorial pride for the time being. I wasn’t about to conduct a lecture on her books’ publication dates (although, yes, Sense and Sensibility, the novel that launched her career, had been published in 1811).

Instead, I nodded at Tim again, fighting off a disappointment I wasn’t sure I had the right to feel.

“But this one’s still a collector’s copy,” Tim continued, running his finger down Pride and Prejudice’s dark green spine. “It’s called a Peacock Edition because of the gold peacock etched on the cover, and the book’s illustrator, Hugh Thomson, was pretty famous for his work, I guess.”

“It — it’s beautiful,” I said, and I meant this. It was an incredibly thoughtful gesture. But, goddammit, it wasn’t a marriage proposal. Why wasn’t it a proposal?

“Oh, it’s imported from London, naturally, and George Saints-bury wrote the preface. I don’t know who he was, but the book dealer seemed impressed by this,” Tim added. He concluded his oration by pointing to a description of the book on the inside cover flap, written in pencil above the price in British pounds.

Expensive gift, I couldn’t help but notice. A few thousand dollars less than a diamond, however, not that I was ungrateful or that I even cared about the money side of it.

But why didn’t he want to marry me?

I flipped through the first chapter, a little overwhelmed by the antique paper, which was still in surprisingly fine condition, and stared at the intricate pen-and-ink drawings that brought Elizabeth and Darcy to life on the fragile pages. The famous opening line, so familiar to me, seemed to laugh in my face as I read it again:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

In Tim’s case, though, I was beginning to have my doubts.

A delightful gift, Jane commented, Tim’s choice undoubtedly elevating his character in her estimation.

“Thank you,” I said to Tim, giving him a light peck on the cheek. “You have no idea how much sentimental value I’ve attached to this particular novel.”

Everyone in my family nodded pleasantly at our exchange except for Di, who shot me A Very Serious Look. Then she narrowed her eyes at my longtime boyfriend with such repugnance that it almost made me chuckle. Her irreverence gave me the courage to make it through the next few hours with a thread of patience.

But, like it or not, Tim Farthington III was going to have to deal with a confrontation soon.

I wanted some answers.


That night, at my two-year-old townhouse, I poured him a glass of Chardonnay and sat next to him on the loveseat. I, by contrast, opted for bottled spring water. My plan was to loosen him up a bit, but I needed to be 100 percent sober myself.

I waited until he was three-quarters through his second glass before saying, “So, what’s your plan for the next few days? Any good ideas for a nearby getaway?”

He smiled, propping his sock-covered feet on the edge of my coffee table, the very image of contentedness and relaxation as he swallowed another mouthful of vino. “Dunno. We could tell everyone we’re going to Galena or Milwaukee or somewhere, but just hang out at your place for a couple days instead. Order carryout for every meal. Turn on the answering machine and turn off the cell phone. Keep each other company.” He traced a pattern on my knee with his fingertip and his smile broadened.