Here With Me Read Online Free PDF

turned into
this? Okay, it wasn’t one lie and none of them were that little .
    She’d always gone home for Christmas. But she
hadn’t this past year. On the twentieth of December, when her
period, which always, always, came every twenty-eight days, was six
days late, she’d taken a home pregnancy test. She’d promptly gone
to the store and bought two more and repeated the test on the
twenty-first and twenty-second of December. All three of them had
said the same thing. She was pregnant. On the twenty-third of
December, still reeling from the shock, she’d called her
grandmother and told her that she had to work at the restaurant
over the holidays and wouldn’t be able to come home this year. That
had been the first lie.
    On the fifth of January, her grandmother had
called for her weekly chat. A day earlier, Melody had seen her
doctor and he’d confirmed that in late August or early September,
her child would be born. She’d left the doctor’s office and called
Alexander, the man she’d met a month after Miguel had died.
    When she’d told him about the pregnancy, he’d
gotten very quiet, not at all like the fun and carefree man who had
swept her off her feet when she was still reeling from grief. After
a minute, he’d blurted out that he already had a sixteen-year-old
and a nine-year-old. Oh yeah, and a wife, too. That had come up
some time later in the conversation. That’s when she’d felt really
stupid. Of course, he’d been fun and carefree with her. His worries
were back home in Ohio.
    So when her grandmother called less than
twelve hours later, hurt and fear and pure craziness had spilled
out of her mouth. She’d told her grandmother that an old boyfriend
had surfaced a few months earlier and that one thing had led to
another and they’d eloped on New Year’s Eve. Lie number two.
    Her grandmother had been surprised but
gracious, offering her congratulations first and then second,
demanding to know when she could meet the new husband. Melody had
promised soon, hung up the phone, and cried for an hour.
    In mid March, she’d played the we’re
pregnant card. In a rare moment of truth, she’d told her
grandmother that she was already almost fifteen weeks along. Her
grandmother had quickly done the math and realized that Melody had
already been a month pregnant on New Year’s Eve, when she’d eloped.
Her grandmother had taken the news in stride and Melody had
understood. It wasn’t important when she’d gotten pregnant. What
was important was that she was married now. The baby would have
legitimacy—something that her grandmother had never had.
    Her grandmother had begged her to come home
but she’d come up with one excuse after another. More lies. Her
plan had been to have the baby, and then, quietly, without much
fuss, claim irreconcilable differences and get a quick divorce. It
wasn’t perfect but it could have worked.
    But she hadn’t ever dreamed that her
grandmother was sick. There’d been no mention of it. When Tilly had
told her, the word cancer had seemed to vibrate in her ear,
to go on forever. When Tilly had said that grandmother wanted
Melody and her husband to come home now, Melody had agreed without
question. It was only hours later, when she’d finally stopped
crying and started thinking, that she’d realized what a truly
horrible predicament she was in.
    Then she’d met George, and now she was taking
her new husband home to meet the family. They were going to be
late, however, if he wouldn’t get out of the car. He had relaxed
his death grip but he continued to just sit and stare out the front
window at all the cars going past.
    “I told my aunt I’d be there for lunch,” she
reminded him. She started to reach for the door and stopped
suddenly when she felt the movement of new life. She’d first felt
the delicate flutter around twenty weeks and every day in the two
weeks since, the movements had become stronger, making it more
real.
    She pressed her hand to her stomach