"There was more, I think, but it was gone by the time I woke up..."
Jude and Molly both let out a breath at the same time.
"Bella, it was only a dream. Dreams mean the opposite of what they show! How can you take it seriously?"
"This is the baby we've waited for so long. The proof of our love... Don't end it, all right?"
Jude's voice was actually shaking when he said it.
His eyes were full of pleading, of a man unwilling to let go.
If this baby were really mine, then even with him sneaking around with Molly, I wouldn't have it aborted.
Worst case, I'd take the child and leave the father behind.
"No. This pregnancy is ending. I don't want to carry it one more day."
The pleading froze on Jude's face, and something cold flickered in his eyes.
"Bella, it was just a nightmare. What exactly are you throwing a fit about?"
"I'm not throwing a fit. This baby kept me up all night. I don't want to have it anymore."
He suddenly gripped both my shoulders, hard enough to make me wince.
"Bella, can you stop being so willful? Do you have any idea how much money we spent and how much we both went through for this baby? You terminate now, and all of it is wasted. Do you know Mom prays every single day at home, just waiting to hold her grandchild?"
"If you get rid of this baby, you think Mom won't force us to divorce? By then you'll be crying too late to fix anything..."
Molly chimed in too.
"That's right, Bella. It was probably just your hormones giving you that nightmare. I'll write you a prescription for something to settle your nerves and you'll be fine. No need to end the pregnancy. Otherwise, if Mrs. Delgado finds out, she'll probably scold you all over again!"
At the mention of my mother-in-law, a flash of smugness crossed Molly's eyes.
Thanks to her, in three years of marriage to Jude, I had stayed childless.
And my mother-in-law had gone from liking me at the start to despising me.
Every holiday I went back, she'd order me around like a servant.
No matter how well I did, no matter how many gifts and red envelopes I gave her, she'd only sneer in roundabout jabs that I was a hen that couldn't lay eggs.
Last year she went further, saying it in front of every relative present:
"As a woman, if you can't even give your husband a child, then frankly, I'd have the decency to divorce him myself. Otherwise you're just a dog in the manger, cutting off another family's bloodline for nothing. Sooner or later that comes back on you!"
And all I could do was bow my head and work harder, so the relatives' pointing and whispering wouldn't get too loud.
The memory of those humiliations sent anger surging up in me, and my voice turned colder still.
"Even if we divorce, this pregnancy is ending!"
"I don't even care that everything I went through goes to waste. So what are the two of you in such a panic about?"
My eyes moved between the two of them, and then I gasped.
"Don't tell me the baby in my belly is yours? The two of you?"
"Bullshit!"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
Jude and Molly spoke as one.
But I knit my brows and pretended something had just come back to me.
"In the dream last night, I think I heard Dr. Lambert's voice too. What was it she said again?"
Molly and Jude's faces drained of color.
Terrified I'd remember more and finally realize it hadn't been a nightmare at all, Jude snatched up the pen and signed without hesitation.
"Molly, schedule her surgery as soon as you can."
"She wants a paternity test? Then she gets one!"
Humiliated and seething, he flung the surgical consent form in my face and said coldly,
"But if the results prove the baby is ours, then we divorce. And you walk away with nothing!"
Jude's shameless face was laid bare in that moment.
He was simply certain that with Molly in his corner, even a paternity test on this baby would only come back showing the child was mine.
What he didn't know was that I'd already had an amniocentesis done at Central Hospital.
