She takes a bite and rolls her eyes in pleasure. “This is so good I’m going to call it the Cheesy Miracle.”

“That is an excellent name.”

I whip up a Cheesy Miracle for myself, and damn, it tastes good, and it’s almost enough—the dinner, and the banter—to make it seem like we are the same people we were this morning, or yesterday, or a week ago.

Almost.

But not quite.

Because as the hours turn into days, and the week ticks by, I start to feel uneasy, as if I’m living on borrowed time. Because that’s what we’re doing. We’re playing pretend, avoiding reality, talking about sandwiches and saying I love you so much we’re a broken record.

I want to live in this make-believe state forever and ever. But then time does what time does—it marches onward—and reality sets back in. The tape starts playing in my head, a highlight reel looped over and over, and I see myself at age fifteen with my baby brother, Will, dying in my arms when he was only three days old. His tiny chest, rising and falling for the last time. It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when he left this world. Everything had slowed, all his breaths, all his blood, and he slipped from life to death sometime as I held him, his tiny little body no longer working, his heart no longer pumping blood.

I didn’t even know him, and still, it hurt so damn much. It hurt like someone was shoveling out my heart, scooping out my organs, the metal edges grinding against my bones.

The aching, the awful aching emptiness of those days. Of that life. Of no one to talk about it with. I’ve worked so hard to move on: to live, to love. To not see death in front of my eyes every time someone says words like pregnancy or baby, but now it’s all I can see. It’s the picture I can’t stop looking at.

My mind starts to agitate like a washing machine stuck on an endless spin cycle, as I feel the hope and the happiness and the future draining out of me.

On the first day of her junior year of college, and my final semester, I walk her to campus. Her hand is in mine, and it feels so right to hold her hand, so I know—I fucking know—that I shouldn’t feel as if my blood is on speed. I try to settle my hyperdrive heart. I look down and see her fingers in mine, intertwined. See? It’s all fine, I tell myself. I can do this. I can manage. I can survive all my fears. I don’t have to be scared. We can keep doing what we’re doing.

I grip her hand tighter, needing the familiar, as we press past throngs of our fellow students returning to school, chattering about their summers away from New York, or their summers in New York, or the classes they took, and the jobs they tried on for size. A guy in a brown T-shirt has his arm draped over his dark-haired girlfriend and they turn the corner, debating whether to bestow six stars or seven to the movie they saw last night.

They’re not talking about the baby in her belly. The kid they’re going to have. The child they might lose.

My lungs are pinching, and it’s like my organs are being crammed into smaller-sized storage containers.

We reach the building where she has her creative writing class. “Go write something good about talking animals,” I say, and I flash a smile, trying to keep it light so she won’t know I’m withering inside.

“I always love writing about talking animals. Meet me after class?”

“Of course,” I say then I kiss her on the forehead, and she opens the door and disappears. When she’s gone, I slump against the wall and sink to the ground, my head resting on my knees.

My insides are threatening to pour out of me, to spill all sorts of fears, and that’s the last thing I want. I can’t handle that kind of mess right now. I clench my fists; I squeeze them tight. They’re a vise, holding in all the doubts that want to ensnare me. I picture the walls closing in, compacting this messy stew in my head.

Because I know how to shut down.

It is my greatest skill, it is the subject I’ve mastered, and the class I excel in. And, as I head off to my history seminar, it’s as if my veins have stopped pumping blood, and now there’s some kind of strange coolness flowing through them, as if the blood cells are made of blue liquid distance.

I don’t meet Harley after class. I don’t answer her calls. I send her a text telling her I forgot I’m meeting Jordan for lunch. I lie to her for the first time.

Then I do it again that night when she comes over after I return home from No Regrets. She tries to snuggle up close with me in bed, but I don’t want to be close to her, so I pretend I’m asleep. She wraps her arms tight around me, her warm little body against mine, and it’s almost enough for me to turn around and kiss her and tell her all the things I’m feeling, except I don’t want to feel anymore. Not a thing. Not for anyone.

Not at all.

Chapter Eight

Trey

There are five stages to grief: Denial. Bargaining. Depression. Anger. Acceptance.

I learned them all from Michele, my shrink. I went though some of them each time one of my three brothers died. I bypassed many of them.

But what the shrinks don’t tell you is that there is a sixth stage.

Faking it.

“Let’s break this down. Piece by piece, because that’s the only way to tackle something so big,” Michele says, folding her hands in her lap, taking my news so coolly, so calmly that I’d bet the house on her being on Xanax. How the hell else can you explain the fact that she’s not pulling out her hair, or sitting there with her jaw hanging down on the floor? She’s acting like this is all too normal. Have an emotion. Have a reaction. Fucking feel this with me.

Or don’t. Whatever. I don’t care. I can’t care. I don’t want to care.

“I need you to be straight with me right now, Trey.”

“Sure,” I say, settling into her couch. Her office, with its abstract paintings of red squares, yellow brushstrokes and blue lines, is my bomb shelter, safe from shrapnel. No bad news can hit me here. No one can touch me.

“I don’t want anything but the truth. Promise?”

“Got it,” I say, nodding.

“What is your biggest fear? Being a father? Committing to Harley? Or are you—”

I cut her off. “What? Committing to Harley? I’m committed. I’m with her. There’s no one else.”

She shakes her head, crosses her legs. “That’s not what I’m saying. But having a family and being parents is a huge step and it tethers you to someone for life. You’ve only just started having a relationship with her, it’s the first one you’ve ever had, and now this. You’re not even living together yet,” she says, leaning forward in her chair. “Did you ask her like you’d planned to?”

The window of her office is suddenly fascinating. The way the afternoon light slants through it. How the glass is spotless. “Do you clean that window every day?”

“No. The cleaning crew does.”

“Damn, they do a good job. Don’t you think?” I ask, turning back to her.

She gives me that look. The one that says she knows I’m stalling. “So, what did she say when you asked her?”

“I didn’t ask. I meant to. But it didn’t seem like the right time.”

She nods. “I can imagine. But then, maybe it would have been the best time. Are you afraid to ask her to move in now? Afraid to be close?”

I sneer. “No. Not afraid of that whatsoever. We’re already close. It’s just . . .” I say, but my voice trails off.

“Just what, Trey?”

“I just need space to process this, okay? It’s kind of like a big fucking deal.”

“Right,” she says firmly. “It. Is. Like, the biggest deal of your life. That’s what having a kid is. So are you pulling away from her?”

“No! I’d never do that to her.”

“Then I need to ask you the next question. We need to talk about the elephant in the room.”

My chest rises and falls. I know what’s coming. I don’t want to know what’s coming. I hold up a hand, but she asks anyway.