The room erupted. London jumped up nearly knocking over her makeup artist and pulled him into a tight hug. Nicole squealed from the corner loud enough to rattle the mirror. Paris pressed her hand to her chest.
I just smiled and let the room have him. He had been sitting on that news all morning waiting for the right moment and he deserved every reaction he was getting right now.
The questions flew.When did you decide? Who is carrying it? Has she done it before?Nel answered everything with easy pride.
When the room finally settled back into getting ready, the glam team resuming their work and the champagne being refilled, London got quiet in that particular way she got when she was sitting on something.
Paris noticed first. “London.”
London looked around at all of us, her eyes already watering. “Okay,” she said, laughing through it. “Since we’re sharing baby news.” She took a breath. “Eli and I are on baby number two. I’m pregnant.”
Another eruption. Louder than the first. London disappeared into a pile of hugs and happy tears, and Nicole was somewhere in the middle of it all hollering loud enough for the whole resort to hear.
I watched Paris from across the room. She was smiling, hugging London, saying all the right things, but I knew her face. I had known her face my whole life. That smile was real but there was something sitting just underneath it that she was working very hard to hold down.
A few minutes later she slipped out quietly. Just said she needed some air and was gone before anyone could ask if she was okay.
I gave it a few seconds then followed her.
I found her in the lobby bathroom leaning over the marble sink with her eyes closed, breathing through her nose like she was trying to keep herself together by sheer force of will.
"I know you're not about to cry already," Isaid softly, letting the door click shut behind me. “We paid too much for these beat faces.”
She didn’t respond. Just gripped the edge of the counter until her knuckles went white. I stood back and let the silence sit. She had the look of someone drowning in a room full of people celebrating the water.
“Paris,” I said when she didn’t speak. “Talk to me.”
“When Kyson finds out London and Eli are on baby number two, he’s going to start the pressure again Nique,” she whispered, her voice barely holding. “He’s going to be relentless.”
“At this point Paris maybe you and him should consider a surrogate too,” I said. “Or adopt. There are so many ways to be a mother.”
“There’s a chance I can conceive,” she said, finally looking at me in the mirror. “The doctor said there’s a small chance.”
“Cousin,” I said carefully. “It’s a slim chance and you know it.”
Back in college when things between her and Kyson had fallen apart for a stretch, she had made a choice she never fully recovered from. She had gotten pregnant by someone else, panicked, and had a procedure that left damage she didn’t find out about until years later when she and Kyson started trying. I was the only person she had ever told. I had held that secret for her ever since.
“I can’t let Kyson down,” she said.
“I’m sure after all these years he understands,” I told her.
Paris went quiet. The kind of quiet that meant something was coming.
“I’ve never told him about the abortion,” she whispered.
I turned to look at her directly. “What?”
“I just couldn’t Nique.”
“Paris, why not? It’s not like you abortedhisbaby.”
She let out a broken sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “That’s the problem. He doesn’t know I was with someone else much less that I got pregnant.”
“Y’all were broken up,” I reminded her.
“I know that, but I never told him. To this day he thinks he’s the only man I’ve ever been with.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “You know how it is. A man can sleep with half the city and it’s just something that happened. You sleep with somebody else one time and suddenly you’re a hoe. When we got back together things moved fast and then he proposed and I just.” She shook her head. “I told myself I would take it to my grave.”
“Damn P,” I said quietly.