by Iris Trovao
“So you expect me to pretend it’s my baby?” He scrubbed his hands down his face. “Pretend at work that I’m excited? Pretend that I did this when we have to tell your family? Lie to the girls? What is wrong with you?”
For a split second, her calm and stiff mask faltered, and he thought she might burst into tears.
Instead, she blinked rapidly and pressed her lips into a thin line, taking a deep breath through her nose. “And you want to tell them that their parents are splitting up, and by the way they have a half-sibling on the way and here’s the father?”
“No, I don’t want to tell them that, but I didn’t make those decisions!” Carson cried, leaning forward and gripping the edge of the island as if it were a lifeline. “You did this, and now we either have to tell them a horrible truth or drag out a horrible lie. Why couldn’t you just wait…” He groaned, looking at the ceiling.
Her hands curled into fists, and she stared down at them. “Wait for what?” she whispered. “How long have we been living this lie? What’s a little longer?”
He recoiled as if she’d slapped him. “It was never a lie for me,” he snapped. “I never stopped loving you. Even when you started pretending.”
Her mask cracked again, and her eyes went glassy. She blinked rapidly, but tears wormed their way down her cheeks.
She opened her mouth, and Carson thought that maybe she would try to defend herself, or maybe even apologize.
Apologize for not loving me anymore.
She didn’t.
Chapter Nineteen
Life sucks, Jolie typed, and then erased it.
What’s your favourite colour, she typed, and then erased it.
I miss you, she typed, and stared at it.
The letters pulsed on the screen, her tired and dehydrated eyeballs straining to see properly.
“Mrs. Hill?” the secretary asked sweetly. “Mr. Hill will see you now.”
Jolie pocketed her phone and stood, straightening her shoulders as best she could before opening the door to her father-in-law’s office. She'd only been to his work a handful of times over the years, and only because John had been stopping by for something.
It hadn’t changed at all. Caleb Hill was professional and stiff, and his space reflected it. Minimalist and cold, the room held no personal touch.
“Hi, Jolie,” he greeted.
The strain in his voice gave away his exhaustion. She studied him as she collapsed into the rock-hard chair in front of his desk, noting the deep bags underneath his eyes that rivalled her own.
“Hi,” she replied as she fidgeted with her fingers in her lap.
“Thank you for coming.” He folded his hands in front of him, focusing on her, and she fought the urge to shrivel from his gaze. He had never been an exceptionally attentive man, always on his phone or typing on a laptop, so to be the object of his full appraisal was unnerving, to say the least.
“Yeah.” What was I supposed to do, say no? Sorry I killed your son, don’t wanna talk about it?
“I asked you here privately to speak about John,” he said.
She bit her tongue, forcing back the words, No shit.
“I’ve given Alicia and Marissa ample time to grieve, but they’re both in denial about him not waking up.”
Jolie blinked at him. “Ample time?” she blurted. “It hasn’t even been a week.”
He sighed and pulled his glasses from his face before pinching the bridge of his nose. “I chose my words poorly,” he admitted, pulling a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his starched charcoal suit. “They are not going to be able to properly grieve with him still hooked up to that machine. If it were up to my wife, she’d keep him on life support until he dies of old age. Alicia I think would come around with time…but we can’t just leave him like that.”
She swallowed hard as he meticulously wiped the lenses of his glasses with the silky white cloth, the circling of his fingers almost mesmerizing.
When he finally stopped, she blinked rapidly as if coming out of a trance and raised her gaze to his as he slid the glasses back up his nose.
“I know this situation is…delicate,” he said slowly. “But you’ve got power of attorney and the decision rests on you, despite what the rest of us want for him.”
Jolie gnawed on her lower lip until it burned. Why the fuck did you make me power of attorney, you asshole? she asked her husband in her mind. It should have been this man here, should have been his decision.
She picked at the hem of her oversized sweater, finding something crusty there and looking down at a spot of dried gunk on the fabric. Her first thought was vomit from the hospital…but surely she’d changed her clothes since then. Right?
“I know this puts you in a difficult position, but I implore you—”
“Difficult is an understatement,” she murmured, and he pressed his lips into a thin line.
“I sound heartless.” The monotone words came out like a statement of fact, not a question. “I assure you, I just want what’s best for our family. That means you, too, Jolie.”
She finally picked the chunk of dried whatever from her sweater, and hunted for another to give herself something to focus on. “I agree with you. You don’t have to lawyer me about it.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, internally cringing at the thick fuzz coating them. “It’s not even that it’s a difficult decision. I believe the doctors when they say he’s not going to wake up. I just…” She groaned.
“You don’t want to be the bad guy,” Caleb finished.
Her heart skipped a beat and she looked up at him in shock.
“I know what that feels like,” he said. “Fathering those two as spirited children…” His voice cracked and he trailed off, his gaze shifting to a photo frame on his desk.
Jolie clenched her jaw so hard her teeth squeaked. Guess there is one personal touch, she thought as he reached out to gingerly touch the glass. She couldn’t see what was in it, but from the raw pain in his eyes, she assumed it was a picture of Alicia and John.
She cleared her throat. “So I guess your fatherly advice is that I just need to suck it up and do it.”
He took in a deep breath through his nose, folding his hands on his desk. His expression hardened back into the mask of indifferent professionalism he always wore, and he regarded her once again.
“Yes.” He nodded sharply. “I know you love my son. This needs to be done for him. And for all of us to properly grieve him.”
It’s my fault he died, she wanted to say. Would you be so calm with me if you knew? Would you be imploring me if you knew that your son and I have barely been in the same room in years because we don’t even know how to love each other?
She recoiled as if slapped.
“Jolie…” Caleb’s brow furrowed in concern, but she didn’t hear anything else he said.
She felt like she was underwater, drowning, his words gurgling and muffled as she sank lower and lower. We didn’t know how to love each other, she thought, because we stopped loving each other. I don’t love my husband, and now I’ve killed him, and I don’t love him.
“Jolie,” Caleb was closer this time.
She looked down at her hands, knuckles white from gripping the arms of the chair for dear life, and she pried them off, her fingers tingling as they relaxed.
“Are you alright?” he asked, leaning back a bit from her. He’d skirted the desk to check on her, and she imagined she must have looked like death itself during her disgusting revelation to have inspired him to do that.
No, I’m not fucking okay. I don’t think I’ll ever be okay. She nodded jerkily.
“I know the hospital talked to you about grief counselling,” he said, voice gentler than she’d ever heard it. “I managed to get Alicia and Marissa to go, but I don’t think you’ve made an appointment, have you?”
She shook her head, eyes glazed. She could still hear him, still understand the words, but her body was numb. Numb and rotten from the inside out. She was sure that if he
r skin broke, nothing but putrid black goo would ooze from her flesh.
“I can’t force you to do anything, but I think you should go,” he continued, moving back around his desk. He rummaged in a drawer and slid a business card across the smooth surface as he sat back down in his chair.
Jolie forced her arm to move to grab it, but it felt like she was pushing through jelly.
“Thank you,” she managed to croak around the golf ball in her throat.
“I, ah…” Caleb trailed off with a sigh and pressed his lips together as he regarded her.
Jolie knew what he wanted. “I’ll do it,” she said thickly. “John, I mean. Might not be today, but…I will do it.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She got to her feet, every ounce of her strength allocated towards not stumbling as she walked through mud to the door.
Chapter Twenty
Jane: I miss you.
The relief that flooded through Carson at that simple text was immediately chased by guilt. Guilt that he demonized Gina in his head so much for cheating on him, and yet he cared for this mystery woman he talked to behind her back.
But it was so good to know she was okay. And, if he were being honest with himself, it felt good to know that she’d missed him too.
God, what am I doing? He groaned and rubbed his forehead, taking in a deep, ragged breath.
“Dad?” Rose called from the kitchen. “Is there any more hot chocolate mix?”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling, struggling to control his warring emotions. “I think there’s a fresh can in the pantry,” he called back, forcing his tone to sound light. He stuffed his phone in between the couch cushions.
“Use your eyeballs, it’s right there,” Lily scolded from somewhere else in the kitchen, and Carson stifled a laugh at how much she sounded like her mother. How many times had she used those exact words when he or the girls couldn’t find something?
His chest clenched, and he put a hand there. As a doctor, he knew that there was no such thing as a literal broken heart, but hell if it didn’t feel as if his own were shattering within his chest.
He picked up the deck of cards from the coffee table, busying himself in shuffling them. He’d never been good at it, never been able to do any of the fancy shuffles. He decided to practice to try to keep his mind focused on something, anything other than his shattered life.
He cut the deck in half and braced them against the dark wood tabletop, prying up the corners in the centre and attempting to flutter them down gracefully. It didn’t work terribly well, but he shimmied them together anyway, curling both sides in his hands.
Something happened and the cards flew all over the place, one smacking him in the face.
“Oh my god, we should not have left you alone in here,” Lily quipped from the doorway, giggling as he attempted to gather up his mess. She bent down next to the fireplace, lifting up a queen of spades that had almost flown into the flames. “We’re going to need this one.”
“I still don’t understand how we’re going to play Hearts with three people,” he said as he pretzeled his body to reach beneath the table for an errant card.
Lily plopped herself down on the parallel sofa, sliding the queen across to him. “We just take out two of the diamonds, and each of us gets seventeen cards,” she explained. “It’s all good.”
“S’all good,” Carson said, doing his best impression of a cool teenager.
His daughter dissolved into a fit of giggles, falling back and pressing her palms to her cheeks. “Never do that again!”
“What, I’m not cool?” he asked, tentative joy blooming as he joked with his kid. One of the two lights of his life.
Speaking of the other light of my life, he thought as Rose walked into the room, slow and steady and intensely focused on the tray of mugs in her hand. She made it to the coffee table and ever-so-gently set the tray down, revealing three fat mugs containing more whipped cream topping than hot chocolate.
“No sprinkles?” Carson teased.
“Not after the Great Sprinkle Explosion of the twenty-first century,” Lily quipped.
Rose scowled. “That wasn’t even my fault! Somebody put the package in the cupboard upside-down and when I pulled it out—”
“Somebody,” Lily cut in, rolling her eyes.
“Yes, somebody,” her sister shot back, but there was less conviction in her voice and she sat down, clapping her hands together. “So, are we playing?”
Carson swallowed hard, forcing a smile. This time with his girls every week was precious. Did he really want to ruin their happiness by telling them the truth about Gina and the baby?
Could he suck it up and suffer through pretending it was his and going through the motions of preparing for his new baby? The longer he watched his girls, effortlessly beautiful, snarking at each other as they dealt the cards and drank whipped cream, the more he felt that Gina was right.
He couldn’t do this to them. He couldn’t let them experience the same misery and disappointment he was suffering.
“Dad, sugar!” Rose declared, pushing his mug towards him. “It’s game night, you have to have sugar with me!”
“It is decreed in the laws of game night,” Lily added, throwing him a wink.
He chuckled and brought the mug to his mouth, purposely tipping it enough that the whipped cream covered his nose. As the girls squealed with laughter and he feigned as if he didn’t know he had anything on his face, his resolve grew stronger and stronger…the knot of dread in his stomach growing tighter and tighter.
Carson stared at his phone, the fire crackling happily behind him as if it had no care in the world. The girls had long gone off to their rooms for the night, and he wasn’t ready to go up to his bed. Despite not having physically shared it with Gina in years, it still felt wrong, somehow, to sleep where she slept.
He chewed his lips as he read Jane’s text again. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to unload any of his life issues on her, but he didn’t have the energy to force levity, either. He’d worn that all out pretending with his girls like they were still a happy family.
I miss you, too, he typed. It was honest, at least. She’d been the one to reach out, so he could at least return the sentiment and see if she would lead the conversation.
He hit send.
Almost immediately, those three little dots appeared, and his breath hitched. Had she been waiting for him to text her back? It had been a few hours.
He rubbed his cheek as he waited, berating himself for acting like a teenager, and not for the first time. He poked fun at Lily for being a seventeen-year-old, but here he was, staring expectantly at his phone, wondering if he was going to get a text back from a pretty girl.
Pretty. He closed his eyes, taking in a deep breath. He didn’t know whether she was pretty or not. It doesn’t even matter if she’s pretty or not, he thought. His subconscious of course had created a version of her, in his dreams, built upon the personality he’d experienced in talking to her.
Jane: Tell me something interesting.
His brow furrowed, and he sent back, Like what? He wondered if she meant like when he’d accidentally sent her a medical fact. He hardly thought she really found that interesting, though. Maybe she’s after more gory details from the ER, he thought, and hoped not.
Jane: I dunno, my brain is fried.
Jane: Tell me a story.
Carson blinked at the phone. A story? Are you drunk, he typed, and then erased it. She’d finally texted him for the first time in days. He didn’t want to ruin it by sounding accusatory.
Instead he sent back, What kind of story? Then he racked his brain for something he could spin, something that wasn’t a kid’s tale he’d have made up for one of his own when they were young and stalling bedtime.
Jane: Any kind. Come on, doc, get creative, huh?
He couldn’t help but smile, shaking his head that this strange girl could bring that out in him, during such a time in his life
.
“Well, you asked for it,” he murmured. Once upon a time… he typed, and hit send.
Jane: Omg seriously? A fairy tale?
He chuckled. Well, you said any kind of story, and this is what I have experience in.
Jane: Okkkkkk tell your damn fairy tale then.
He adjusted the pillow behind his head and pursed his lips in thought. Once upon a time, there was a sad queen that drank too much, he typed out, and hesitated before hitting send. With a burst of courage, he pushed the arrow and waited.
Jane: Holy fuck, going right for the jugular, doc.
Jane: Are these the kind of fairy tales you make up for your kids?
He shook his head. Definitely not, he sent back. I’m not very good at coming up with things on the spot. He paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard for a few moments. The court jester, finding it impossible to make the sad queen laugh, found her a magic mirror in hopes that she would use it to improve her self-worth.
Jane: Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the shittiest of em all?
He frowned. Instead of continuing his story, he sent, You ok?
Jane: No.
Jane: Sad fuckin queen over here.
Carson closed his eyes. He’d been so wrapped up in missing talking to her, and she’d been going through her own stuff too. Regret panged in his chest. They were friends now, weren’t they? They could have been leaning on each other. Or at least, he could have been helping her through whatever she was going through. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to have text evidence of his new baby’s parentage.
His phone buzzed, and he opened his eyes.
Jane: So what does she do with the mirror, then?
Chapter Twenty-One
Jolie reached for her whiskey glass blindly, still staring at her phone screen, and bumped it with her fingers.
“Fuck!” she hissed as the glass slid off of the side of the empty tub, toppling onto her jeans. She was less concerned about the spill and more about wasting half a glass of the amber liquid.
