"Heh. If she had even half your sense, she wouldn't be picking fights with me over nothing."
Bartholomew turned to me. "Zelda, you heard all that? Even while you're causing me all this trouble, Kate's still sticking up for you. You really ought to take a page from her book. Anyway, we've got something urgent to deal with these next few days. Consider me generous, letting you two best friends carry on. But watch how far you push it. Provoke us for real, and I'll treat these papers as the real thing."
I'd thought I could face all of it calmly now.
But picturing the three of them and their sordid little arrangement, my heart clenched, again and again, aching.
Ever since I got together with Bartholomew, I'd swallowed everything, bent over backward for him at every turn. And in his eyes I still didn't measure up to that adopted sister of his, not by half.
"Did that son of a bitch say something ugly to you again? You're too soft on him. You shouldn't even take his calls! From now on, I'll answer them. I'll cuss him out till he drops dead!"
Coming from my best friend, the swearing sounded downright pleasant.
Over the days that followed, the two of us nursed ourselves back to health.
To my surprise, when we didn't reach out to them, they didn't reach out to us either.
When I really thought about it, it was pathetic.
I didn't know where those three had gone, but at least right now, in their eyes, we were still pregnant women.
And yet they could go more than a week without so much as calling their own pregnant wives.
It wasn't until that day, when Kate's posts popped up in my feed again, that we learned where they were.
They'd gone to a small-town chapel. The reason: to bury the dog that had been mauled to death, Kate's dog.
His adopted sister's dead dog mattered more to them than their pregnant wives.
Come to think of it, my best friend had cussed Bartholomew out perfectly: anyone who didn't know better would think the two of you gave birth to that dog!
This time, I laughed, and let it go.
All I wanted now was a quiet divorce.
After we'd finished the hospital discharge paperwork, I texted Bartholomew: "Bartholomew, tomorrow morning at ten, meet me outside the county clerk's office. Remember to bring your brother."
Bartholomew called me, but I didn't pick up. I hung up on the spot and blocked him on every channel right away.
Because everything I had left to say to him, I'd already said in that message.
As for my baby, and my best friend's, they couldn't just be gone like this, without a reckoning.
After leaving the hospital, we went to the police station.
If the yoga ball had burst because of something I did, then I'd chalk it up to bad luck and accept it.
But every movement I'd made was a set exercise the instructor had taught me.
