The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes - 22

Boston

1900

Eva stood outside the newspaper building, staring up at the brick edifice. Her hand drifted down to her stomach, grazing her growing bump.

On the ship from Havana, seasickness plagued her. Months earlier when she had made the same journey to Boston, the voyage had been an adventure. Pregnant, it was an entirely different story, but then she was learning that everything was different now. Foods that she had once enjoyed no longer suited her; activities that had once been easy now made her incredibly tired. She was always tired, a fact that routinely surprised her, considering her pregnancy was barely showing.

The trip had been far harder than she imagined, but she had to come here.

She wrote James, just like they’d promised each other.

The first letters had been filled with her return to Cuba, to teaching, lines about how she missed James.

No response arrived.

And then, the truth became inescapable, the absence of her monthly courses, the changes in her body undeniable.

The tenor of her next letter was filled with desperation.

And met with silence.

So here she was.

Eva walked into the newspaper building.

It was the noise that hit her first.

She’d always been curious about James’s writing career, about what drew someone to become a journalist. His workplace was both everything and nothing like she had imagined.

It was busy, the newsroom filled with men working away on typewriters, occasionally shouting things at one another across the aisle. She scanned the room, her heart in her throat, searching for James, but she didn’t see him.

“Pardon me,” she said to the man at the desk closest to her. “Is James Webber here?”

The man glanced up from the paper he was reading. “James? He’s in the back probably.” He jerked his head toward a hallway at the rear of the room. “If you head down there, you should find him.” He studied her carefully, and something in her expression must have sparked some journalistic instinct in him. “You have a story for him?”

“Something like that.”

Eva hurried past him, a few of the other journalists looking up from their work to watch her walk past.

When she reached the hallway, she followed it down until she came to a little room filled with what appeared to be old editions of newspapers.

James sat in the middle of them, hunched over a stack, blessedly alone.

She’d thought about this moment for so long, that now that he was before her, she had to reach out, holding on to the doorframe for support.

Maybe the letters had never reached him at his rooms at the boardinghouse where he stayed. Perhaps this was a misunderstanding, and he’d be happy to see her, excited about the baby, would realize that she had come all this way because she loved him.

James glanced up from his newspapers and her dreams fell away.

Shock—not joy—flashed across his face, then something that could best be described as panic transformed his expression completely.

Eva stepped into the little room, closing the door behind her. Her hands moved to her stomach.

James’s gaze followed the movement, lingering there before slowly dragging back to her face.

“What are you doing here?”

It was a miracle that he couldn’t hear her heart cracking in two.

“Did you receive my letters?” Eva asked, ignoring his question.

She’d come a long way. She was going to get the answers she needed.

“No.” He hesitated. “I’m not—I’m not staying there anymore.”

“You didn’t write.”

James glanced over her shoulder, fixating on the door behind her. “This isn’t a good time, isn’t a good place for us to talk.”

“I didn’t know where else to go. I needed to see you.” She took a deep breath. “I’m pregnant.”

“What do you mean? How can you be pregnant?”

“The usual way, I imagine,” she replied, a terrible calm settling over her.

“I took precautions,” he hissed, grabbing her arm, and pulling her closer to him, his voice a low whisper. “Besides—I can’t have children. It can’t be mine.”

“The precautions didn’t work. And the baby is yours. There was no one else,” she replied, tugging away from him.

Eva leaned against the door, grateful for the distance between them. Her hand returned to her stomach as she studied him, trying to understand how this had all gone so terribly wrong. The man that she thought she’d loved, the man she had felt at ease around, the man she had trusted was nowhere to be found.

She’d known before she came here. She’d known when she’d written him and he hadn’t answered, when he’d never shown up on her doorstep with a ring in hand. She’d known that this was how their affair was going to end before she’d even boarded the ship to Boston, and still she’d come here because she refused to let him cast her aside so easily, as though she had meant nothing, as though this baby meant nothing.

“I’m married.”

He said it angrily, as though it were somehow an indictment on her rather than on him.

Shock filled her. “Since when? Recently? Or were you always married? Were you lying from the beginning?”

He looked away. “Five years.”

Five years.

If she were a different person, if she’d lived a different life, one that hadn’t been defined by war, death, and the kind of pervasive insecurity that instilled a fear you never quite could shake, this would have been the moment when she fell apart.

If she hadn’t already known unspeakable losses, then maybe she would have collapsed down to the floor, or screamed, or wept, or beat her fists against his chest as she railed against him in anger. And for a moment, she did. For an instant, she allowed all those emotions to flood her, to overwhelm her, and gave in to the pain and grief that assailed her.

But only for an instant.

After all, life had taught her that she was stronger than the troubles it threw her way no matter how insurmountable they seemed.

She would endure. Somehow.

And still—there were cracks in the armor she’d built around herself. How could it be otherwise?

She’d been a fool to trust him.

No—she couldn’t blame herself. Wouldn’t blame herself.

What sort of man deceived a woman as he had done? What sort of man refused to take responsibility for his actions?

“How could you? After everything, after you swore to me that you would be honest with me, when you promised me I could trust you, how could you do this?”

He didn’t say anything. Didn’t even bother to give her a response.

How could he have lied to her so skillfully? How could he have gone home to his wife each time after seeing Eva?

She couldn’t fathom it.

Maybe that was the blessing in all of this—the fact that she could never, would never understand how someone could be so craven in their actions, so heartless.

That was why he was never affectionate with her in public, and the few times he was, he instantly stopped as soon as someone came near them. She’d thought at the time that it was a sign of his respect for her, that he did it to protect her and to honor her desire for privacy. All those times he’d taken her to someone else’s house, someone else’s boat, he’d been creating distance between her and his life.

“Does she know? Does she know about me?”

“No. No.” He took a step toward her, anger flashing in his eyes. “She can never know. My father-in-law owns this paper. I would be ruined if she found out. I would lose my job; I would lose everything.”

“I’m ruined,” she hissed. “Because I was foolish enough to believe in you, in the promises you spun. I’ve lost everything.”

“We had a summer together. That was all it was supposed to be. It was fun while we were together. I enjoyed our time. But we always knew it was going to end eventually.”

He turned away from her.

“Until you suggested otherwise,” Eva protested. “You were the one who proposed coming to see me in Havana, the one who said that you didn’t know how to let me go. I believed you. You didn’t have to tell me those things. But you wanted to seduce me, didn’t you? You hadn’t fully gotten what you wanted from me, so you told me what you thought I needed to hear to get me into your bed—sorry, your cousin’s bed.”

“It was your choice. You wanted me. You said that you loved me. I thought you understood the rules, understood what was happening between us.”

“No, you didn’t. You kept the fact that you were married from me. You led me on. You took what you wanted and then you walked away like it meant nothing to you, because it didn’t, did it? There was nothing special in what we had.”

“You don’t understand. You’ve never been married, never had that kind of responsibility, that kind of commitment. When I met you—it was like a fresh start. I could be a different person when I was with you. I didn’t have to worry about the things that were waiting for me when I came home. I didn’t lie when I told you that I cared about you, that I enjoyed our time together.”

“No, you just lied about everything else. You weren’t just a different person; you pretended to be someone who didn’t exist. It was all a lie.”

He sagged against the table. “What do you want from me? You came here for—what? I can’t marry you. I have a little bit of money. I can give you that, but I don’t have anything else for you. I’m sorry you’ve found yourself in this condition—”

Nausea rose up inside her, mixing with the bile she tasted on her lips.

She wouldn’t be sick in front of this man, wouldn’t let him see her brought low.

“I don’t need anything from you.”

She’d endured a war, survived in the world on her own. Perhaps if she hadn’t, she would have fallen apart in the face of such loss. But she’d managed to outlast the Spanish, and she certainly wasn’t going to be destroyed by a liar and a fraud.

“Eva—”

She didn’t give him a chance to finish what he was going to say.

Eva held it together as she walked through the newsroom, past the curious eyes following her retreat. Had they seen this play out with other women in the past? Now that she understood the ease with which he had lied, she didn’t doubt there had been other women who he had similarly charmed, deceived, and discarded.

She promptly vomited in an alley as soon as she reached the street.

What was she going to do?

The question plagued her during the long walk back to her hotel, as she sat in bed staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep for the worry gnawing at her.

Finally, when midnight had passed and she still hadn’t worked things out in her mind, when she was unsuccessful in silencing all the fears pummeling her, she did the only thing she knew to do in times like these.

She wrote.