She caught me off-guard with that. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to beg for reason.

“I don’t want to take too much of your time, I just want to know if it was true or not,” I commented.

“If what is true?”

She knew damn well what I was talking about, and I didn’t have to speak in code anymore.

“If you were once pregnant with a child of mine,” I asked her.

“What if I was? Can you change it? And would you have wanted me to have it?”

I nodded my head and swallowed hard on the reality. It was true. Andrea had never been good at lying. She wore her emotions on her sleeve.

I said, “So it is true?” just to confirm it.

“Is it? You tell me.”

She still wanted to be difficult.

I said, “How come you never even told me.”

“For what? You had made up your mind already that you didn’t want to be with me.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with you, I just didn’t want to be pushed into being so serious so soon.”

“Yeah, well, I had some decisions of my own to make, and the last thing I wanted to have was a screaming and yelling relationship with my child’s father, because that’s where we were headed if I decided to take that road.”

“And you never thought once of telling me?”

She said, “Of course I did. Then I thought about how you would respond to it. And I came to the conclusion that you would have thought I was trying to trap you. Which I wasn’t, but that’s how it would look to you. And I still wanted my career at the time anyway.”

I said, “But you showed me that guy’s ring,” reminding her of how she tried to put pressure on me to take things more seriously. “You could have kept pushing for your career without him.”

“But if I told you that I was pregnant…” She stopped mid-sentence. “And I surely couldn’t go into a relationship with Jayson that way, so it was all for the best.”

“But why did you tell my sister of all people? You should have known it would get back to me sooner or later.”

I slipped up and put Juanita out there anyway.

Andrea said, “And look how long it took. But basically, if you were against it, you would have been happy with my decision, and if you were not, you would have felt how I wanted you to feel.”

“And how is that, betrayed?”

She hesitated with her answer. “How did you think I felt?” she asked me.

It was a good point.

She said, “So, with you calling me about this now, what does that mean? Where are you trying to go with the information?”

I told her, “I just needed closure on whether it was true or not, that’s all. So, what about that money-grubbing husband of yours, are you still with him?” I figured I may as well get all of the answers at once, while I still had her on the phone.