“I know that.” I expel as much of the frustration as I can on a long breath. “If this is my baby, you know I’ll support you, but we won’t be together.” I look at her directly so she can see the finality on my face. “Not again. And not just because of Kimba. I hadn’t even seen Kimba when we broke up. You and I ending things was the right thing to do, for all of us. It still is.”

“But it hasn’t happened.” She crosses the room, presses her palms to the desk and leans forward. “It hasn’t happened because Noah doesn’t know. Our families, our friends don’t know. When Noah comes home, we tell him he’s going to have a little brother or sister and he’ll be ecstatic. Things go back to normal.”

“I don’t want normal. I want Kimba.”

Hurt shows in her sharply drawn breath, in the tears that fill her eyes right away.

“Ko,” I say, deliberately gentling my tone. “I told you before you left that I wanted one person I could love for the rest of my life. That person is Kimba, and I know it seems soon to you, but I’ve known her since we were babies. Even when we were separated, I never stopped knowing her.”

“If I ask you a question, will you answer honestly?”

“Always.”

“Did I ever even really have a chance?”

I give the question the consideration it deserves and force myself to be honest with her while still being as kind as I can. “Probably the best chance anyone has ever had. If you’d said yes when I asked to marry you, I would have found a way to keep my distance from Kimba when our paths crossed again.”

“You couldn’t have just been friends?”

I glance past her toward the kitchen, the mudroom, and flash back to that night when Kimba and I first made love. The wild sounds we made. The desperate craving that hung in the air. That absolute long-sought rightness of being inside her for the first time.

“No, I don’t think I could have been just her friend, even though I fooled myself that I could have.”

“When did you fall in love with her?”

I feel the cold metal around my finger again. Smell the freshly cut grass in my back yard. Hear the glass breaking on the rocks.

“I was six years old.” I chuckle humorlessly and touch my empty ring finger. “And again when I was seven. Eight. Nine and ten. I think I fell in love with her every day for the first thirteen years of my life, and as soon as I saw her again, my heart just remembered.”

She watches me, her face pinched, but some semblance of acceptance finally entering her eyes. My cell phone buzzes on the desk, breaking the poignant, painful mood.