Free From This Moment by Sean D. Young

nearness was making her feel closed in.
    “What are you talking about, Randall?”
    “Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Ivy,” he blurted, his voice raised.
    Ivy rushed to the door and closed it. She didn’t want anyone to hear his crazy accusation.
    “What the hell do you care?”
    “What happened to my baby?” he repeated.
    Gazing at the man she had once loved with all her heart, Ivy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He is the one who turned his back on her, and now he had the nerve to come and ask questions.
    “Randall, you don’t deserve to know.”
    Now in a rage, Randall pointed his finger at her. “I have a right as that child’s father.”
    Finally, she had had enough. “Shut up, Randall,” she said. Her words were deliberate, her tone uncompromising. “Just shut up.”
    Brushing aside Ivy’s demand, he kept talking: “I didn’t really want you to get rid of the baby. I was just shocked; a baby at that time wasn’t in our plans.”
    She pointed to a chair. “Sit down and shut up. I have more important things to do with my time than to argue with you about something that didn’t happen.”
    “Are you trying to deny me an explanation as to why you killed my child?”
    “I’m not denying you anything, Randall. I’m actually trying to set the record straight.”
    Collecting her thoughts, Ivy sat in the chair next to him. “See, this is what happened between us that last time. You never listen; you take things and twist them and don’t allow the other person to fully explain. Well, today you are going to hear the truth about what really happened the night I came to your apartment.”
    She waited a moment to see if he was going to interrupt her again.
    “Two days before I came to your apartment, I took a pregnancy test. When it came back positive, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t tell anyone, so I kept it to myself, trying to decide how I felt about it.”
    Randall started to speak, but Ivy held her hand up to silence him.
    “Let me finish. In my own way, I had to come to terms with the idea of having a baby. It was not in our plans, but things happen. I thought we loved each other and that love would be enough to love our child. I came over to your apartment that night to tell you. Your first words were ‘get rid of it.’ ”
    Leaning forward, Randall made a feeble effort to explain himself. “I didn’t mean what I said. I was just caught off guard, surprised.”
    “I think you have selective memory. You never said you were surprised, and you sure didn’t act like it.”
    Releasing a frustrated sigh, Randall reached over to touch Ivy’s hand.
    She snatched her hand away. “Don’t touch me, Randall. I need to finish what I have to say. Remember when you tried to stop me from leaving and I slipped?”
    “Yeah, I rushed to you, but you refused my help and got up and left. I even ran after you, but you kept moving without looking back.”
    “I know. I was fine until later on that night. I fell hard down that flight of stairs. My knee was paining and I hurt my elbow from the fall. During the night, my stomach started cramping and I knew I had to get to the hospital right away.”
    Rising, Ivy went over to the window as the pain of that evening came rushing back. Tears came to her eyes, despite her efforts to keep them back. She’d finally gotten the chance to tell him what happened, but she left out one little detail. She’d gone to her regular doctor as a follow-up and was told that she had a weak uterus and would have possibly lost the baby anyway without medical intervention.
    Randall came over and stood behind her. Gingerly, he began massaging her shoulders.
    “Please don’t tell Lauren about what happened between us.”
    Ivy jerked away from him, moving swiftly to her desk. “Do you think I could be that indiscreet, that insensitive, that unprofessional?”
    She picked up the files on her desk and began shuffling them aimlessly, finally