“Almost two months. A little over six weeks.”

He winced visibly. He shook his head, then seemed to try to refocus on her eyes. “They’re mine,” he said.

She felt that old snap of panic in her gut. There it was at last. A little later she was going to be glad this part was over. This wasn’t the way she had planned it. She nodded rather lamely.

“Were you going to tell me? Ever?”

She swallowed once and looked over her shoulder to make sure her mother and the brigade couldn’t hear. “That’s the main reason I wanted to come back…even though I thought you were married… I knew I had to tell you that they—”

“Damn!”

“John,” she said pleadingly, “I didn’t know you didn’t know. Until we met at the Steak House and you couldn’t understand why Max felt betrayed… All these years I thought when you heard about them you would instantly know it was you.”

“Know? Know and not even care? How could you have thought that?”

“You were adamant! You didn’t want a commitment or children. Later, when I came back, you seemed so oblivious to it all. Even when you knew about them, the impact seemed lost on you.”

The look of pain that crossed his features was unmistakable. “You thought I was too stupid to figure it out.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, I just didn’t understand. I mean, sometimes I understood. When I came back here pregnant as a cow and found you were married, I understood that you never knew I was pregnant.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“I know…I know…I didn’t want to tell you until my divorce was final because, frankly, I didn’t think the divorce was going to precede the birth. I had made such a mess of things. Even though I hadn’t been with my husband in over a year, I was still legally married and pregnant. My divorce did come through before they were born, and then I was too late. And—”

“Come on, come on… That was then. What about now?”

“Well, after thinking about it, I realized that you probably didn’t know all the details of childbirth, of how twins usually come a little early, of—”

“But you didn’t hurry to explain, did you?”

“Hey, John!” Mitch yelled.

“Practice, I said!” he shouted back, an angry tone in his voice. “Why didn’t you tell me right away? Right away!”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to. And I thought this was better.”

“What?”