“Especially a baby Coolidge.”
“Oh God.” Dara covered her mouth as her lunch threatened to come up. “She’s going to be pissed.”
“You never told her, did you? About the embryos?”
Dropping her hand, she shook her head. “I couldn’t. She’d have been furious that I spent that much money on it, and if she knew I’d put off my treatments so I could do that…” Dara grimaced.
“Moms are weird.”
She couldn’t help laughing at that. “Our moms especially.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Promise me you won’t turn into either of our moms.”
“Oh. Matt.” She eyed him. “If I do, you have my permission to call in a priest, because it means I’ve been possessed by demons.”
Matt laughed. “Duly noted.” He patted her shoulder, then withdrew his hand.
“So.” She muffled a cough. “What do we do now?”
He chewed his lip for a moment. “When are you due?”
“November. I’m nine weeks along right now.”
“Shit. All this has happened in nine weeks?”
“Seven, actually.” She sighed. “For whatever reason, they start counting two weeks before the actual conception, so…” She waved a hand. “Anyway. Yeah. It’s all happened really, really fast.”
“Sounds like it.” Matt swallowed. “But it means we have time, right? To figure out…well, whatever we’re going to do next?” He paused. “Don’t most people wait until, what, three months to break the news?”
Dara nodded. “To be honest, though, I’ve been itching to tell my folks just to get it off my chest. It was…” She sighed. “I just can’t believe how this turned out. We tried for two damned years, and when it finally happened, it should’ve been something to be excited about and shout from the rooftops.” Swiping at her eyes, she muttered, “And now it’s probably going to go over as well as it would’ve if I’d gotten knocked up in high school.”
“I doubt that,” he said softly. “Even if your folks still don’t like me, it isn’t like you were out sleeping around and got pregnant. You were married, and you thought you were going to stay that way.”
Dara winced. “Yeah. I mean, we had our problems”—oh, honey, what an understatement—“but I didn’t think…” She deflated, brushing a few stray strands of hair out of her face. “I didn’t think the baby would fix it, but I thought a lot of the problems would go away once we weren’t so damned stressed about the whole process of getting pregnant in the first place. And now this?”
“God, I am so sorry to hear things turned out this way.”
“It is what it is. I just hate the idea of having to cringe when I tell my parents I’m pregnant. I’m thirty-five years old, damn it!”
Matt nodded. “Well, when you’re ready to tell them, you have my full support.” He paused. “Maybe we should tell my folks first. They’ll take it worse than yours, and I don’t want them catching it through the grapevine.”
“Yeah, good idea.”
“Why don’t I set up dinner with them at my place, and we can tell them together?”
Dara hesitated. “Matt, they can’t stand me.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yes, and we all know how forgiving your mother is.”
Matt flinched. “Good point.”
She had hoped he might insist the woman had changed, but that was wishful thinking at its finest. Mrs. Coolidge had a memory like an elephant and held grudges like a mobster, and the day she’d taken the family’s name, she’d taken on their grudge against the Marleys. Even if she had grandbaby fever now, she wasn’t likely to forget that Dara’s grandfather had once screwed Matt’s grandfather out of some money. Though she had always seemed to conveniently forget that around the same time, Matt’s great aunt had promised to wait for Dara’s great uncle while he went to Germany during the war, only to turn around and marry some lawyer from Goldmount six months later. The wedding announcement had appeared in the newspaper the same day as the great uncle’s obituary, and that had sealed the Coolidge-Marley rivalry. To say there was bad blood between them was like saying the Hatfields and the McCoys had a little misunderstanding.
Dara shook her head. “You know what? Let’s just tell them. We’re adults, and if they don’t like this, they can fucking suck it.”
Matt laughed. “Holy shit. Now that’s the Dara I haven’t seen in way too long.”