As Sophie watched the Upper West Side mothers walking their dogs along with their babies she realized that she wanted a dog. She’d have to ask Max if they could get one. She went and sat back on the couch and turned on the TV. She flickered through the channels and sighed. There was nothing good to watch and she was bored. She wanted to do something but she had no one to hang out with. Ella was her only real friend and she had cut her off. Sophie checked the wall clock and grabbed her bag before running out of the apartment. She was going to go over to the apartment she had shared with Ella until very recently and wait for her until she got home. She was fed up of Ella treating her like this. She needed Ella and Ella needed her; they had been friends for too long to let an affair with a married man come between them. Sophie bit her lip as she hailed a cab. She hoped that the only problem Ella had concerned Joseph because if she was upset that Sophie was dating her brother, then that would make things a lot more complicated.
She rode in the back of the cab in silence running her fingers through her long brown hair, which she was sure looked a frizzy mess. Ella would tell her to deep condition it. Or maybe she would have deep conditioned it for Sophie herself. They had played hairdresser for years, with Ella taking over the role as Sophie’s stylist in boarding school. Sophie had only been seven but she had always gone to class with the cutest shiny lips thanks to a dab of Ella’s lip-gloss. Sophie missed those days. Sometimes she lay in bed and just thought about all the tricks she and Ella had gotten in to. They’d been as thick as thieves and Ella had dragged Sophie into one stupid stunt after another. There was nothing Sophie would say no to. She’d clung to Ella like a child clung to its favorite teddy bear. Ella taking her in had made her feel whole. It was Ella who would come and hug her close when she would wake up in tears remembering her parents. She sometimes wondered what would have happened if her parents hadn’t died in that car crash. Would she ever have met Ella or Maxwell? She doubted it. And sometimes she didn’t know if she would have changed the past if she could. Would she have reversed her parents dying in the car crash if it meant she would never meet Maxwell? She tried to banish those thoughts from her mind. It wasn’t healthy for her or the baby. And it wasn’t like she would suddenly develop a gift to go back in time.
***
Sophie let herself into the apartment and looked around. It was dark, desolate and messy. She walked through the pile of clothes carefully, picking them up as she walked further into the apartment. She knocked on Ella’s bedroom door before she entered. “Ella. Ella, are you there?”
Silence greeted her as she pushed the door open. She wasn’t going to snoop. She just wanted to put the clothes on her bed. She stood there looking around the normally immaculate room and gasped. There was a broken mirror on one side and piles of empty take-out bags and empty tubs of ice cream. She screamed as something scurried across the room; she was pretty sure it was a cockroach. She bent down to start picking up the trash but then hesitated and stopped. If she cleaned up the room then Ella would know she had been in there, she may even think she was snooping. And Sophie didn’t want to know what Ella would do then. She decided to go to the living room and wait on the couch but as she passed the door she saw something in the trash that made her stop. It was a pregnancy test and as Sophie looked at it, she felt the color drain from her face. She was pretty sure she knew what those lines meant as she had just been witness to them herself very recently. She dropped the test back into the trash and walked back to the couch slowly unsure if she should say anything. It wasn’t like she was in any position to say anything. She wasn’t exactly the moral police.
She turned on the TV and occupied her mind with an old episode of ‘King of Queens’. She laughed as Doug and Carrie argued over how to get rid of an ugly piece of art and without realizing it, she fell asleep on the couch. She awoke a couple of hours later and Ella still hadn’t returned. She looked at her watch and sighed. She had to leave, Maxwell would be waiting for her, wondering where she was. Everything between them was still so new that she didn’t want to rock the boat and have him worried about her whereabouts. She turned off the TV and tried calling Ella again. She was worried about her friend. She knew that emotionally Ella was pretty fragile. She’d gone through a stage when they were freshmen where she slept with a lot of different guys. It was as if she thought sex would make them love her. For a confident beautiful girl, Ella had a lot of issues and Sophie was really worried about her. She only hoped that Ella wasn’t going to turn to sex with random strangers to help her get over Joseph. She tried calling Ella once more as she walked out of their apartment but once again there was no answer.
Chapter 2
Ella
Ella looked at her ringing phone and sighed as she saw Sophie’s name pop up again. She knew she should just answer but she was so angry and frustrated. And if she admitted it to herself, she was jealous. It just wasn’t fair that Maxwell and Sophie had paired up. Now she had no one. She’d lost her brother and her best friend and was all alone. Even Joseph was ignoring her. Now that she’d gotten him fired, he wanted nothing to do with her. She knew she should be happy that he had ended it once and for all. She didn’t want to be the other woman; but he had said that he was going to leave Lily. She’d counted on him leaving Lily. Why would he stay if he was so unhappy? It just didn’t make sense to her. She was young, rich and beautiful and Lily was a slob. Why would he stay with her?
She knew she was acting like a bitch. But she couldn’t help it. She just felt so sorry for herself. She didn’t understand why he didn’t love her like she loved him. How could he have made love to her so tenderly if he didn’t love her? She picked up her phone and tried Joseph’s number again. It rang twice and then went to voicemail. He had sent her to voicemail on purpose, she was positive of it. “Thanks for being an ass, Joseph. You better call me back. I think I’m pregnant.” She hung up quickly and sat back in the park bench. She looked at the kids on the swings and sighed. If that voicemail didn’t get him to call her then nothing would. It wasn’t a complete lie. She had thought she was pregnant when she took the test last week but then she had gotten her period and gone to the doctor and taken another test. And he had told her that she was definitely not pregnant. And then he’d given her a handful of condoms. She’d wanted to giggle as he handed them to her but she didn’t think he would appreciate the humor in the situation. She’d been buying boxes of condoms since she was in high school, she didn’t need a lecture on how important they were.