“Not so ridiculous now, though, is it?” Neil shot back at his friend.
“I’m afraid to go home by myself,” Valerie admitted, so much shame and revulsion at herself in her tone that I couldn’t reconcile her with her usual, confident self. It was rare that she didn’t appear fully in control—or, at least, believed she was. Without the armor of her ego, she was more exposed than she could stand.
That’s why things couldn’t have worked between her and Neil; they were too alike, in all the wrong ways.
“I’ll stay with you tonight,” Rudy said firmly. “We’ll get the locks changed tonight, just in case. And in the morning, we’ll start packing.”
“I’ll call a moving company,” El-Mudad offered with an encouraging smile. “And help to unpack, if you need it. I’m unemployed, so my days are free.”
She laughed, a sad sound of gratitude. “I don’t deserve this. After what I’ve put you through. And what I’ve put Olivia through.” Though she covered her face again, Valerie couldn’t hide her sobs.
"You didn't do anything to Olivia. You were being threatened and coerced. For god's sake, Valerie, if we can see that, why can't you?" Neil practically begged. "We're going to get you out of there. You're going to rebuild everything you've worked to build. It will be difficult, and it will be scary. But we've done difficult and scary before. And I've never turned my back on you during those times. I'm not going to do it now."
After all the years we’d been together, I finally agreed with Neil on that point.
Chapter Fourteen
We left Rudy with Valerie—and the police she'd called to report Laurence's latest assault—and went back to the penthouse. As we entered the foyer, I wished we could return to the house. But we were all too exhausted to even think of getting back in the car, let alone onto a helicopter.
"That went so much better than I expected it to," Neil said quietly as we unpacked the food that waited on the kitchen counter.
"I miss Sue," I said wistfully. Not that the food wouldn't be divine. It had just been nicer to have a meal prepared in our kitchen, rather than dropped off by a service.
"As do I," Neil agreed. "But someone told me it would be ridiculous to keep a full-time housekeeper on staff if we no longer lived here full-time."
El-Mudad had been quiet on the ride over. He leaned on the counter, his fingers laced together, thumbs working anxiously around each other. "Do you think she'll be all right?"
Neil took an audible breath through his nose. "I think...she'll survive. Whether she'll be able to do more than that, I'm not sure. For the first time in my life, I'm not sure that she'll truly recover."
"I don't think you recover from something like this. The level of betrayal is..." My voice died away.
"He preyed on her at her weakest. You were right, Sophie." Neil shook his head, closing his eyes. "I can't believe I didn't see it."
"You weren't trained to look for it," I reminded him. "All those red flags? Women are warned constantly. In any other circumstances, maybe Valerie would have noticed them, too."
"I can't believe you suggested the guest house," El-Mudad's lips curved in a slight smile. "The woman you once described as having 'the most rip-out-able hair in Manhattan'."
"Don’t...don't remind me." My stomach churned at what I'd said about her haircut. The fact that she'd taken those small precautions and we'd all seen them as signs that she'd been coping with her grief sickened me. "You know, I complimented the short hair on her. If I had known—"
"But you didn't. And when you did know, what did you do?" Neil asked.
I didn't want to give myself credit for somehow "rescuing" Valerie. The fact that she'd had to accept help from me had to be a blow to her pride, one I might have loved striking years ago. Now, I hated that she was in a position where she had to rely on me for aid. "It's been a long night. I need to change the subject." I didn't care if I sounded selfish or uncaring; my husbands knew I wasn't, and they were the only ones present to judge me.
"Self-care time," El-Mudad proclaimed in agreement.
"Good idea. I think I'll catch up on a few episodes of Supernatural," Neil said.
El-Mudad and I stared at him.
Neil was unmoved by our silent shaming.
“There is just...one thing.” I winced at my own words. “When are we going to tell Valerie about the adoption?”
“Do we need to consult her?” Neil asked, in that tone he used when it was evident that he’d answered the question before he’d spoken it.
“Not consult, no,” I said cautiously. Maybe his goodwill toward Valerie was already used up. I didn’t want to reverse any of the work we’d done. “But I don’t want her to be blindsided by it.”
“The way she would have blindsided us by kidnapping her?” El-Mudad said quietly.
“That wasn’t—” I stopped myself. It was her fault, at least partially. She wasn’t at fault for Laurence’s actions against her, but she’d actively participated in trying to hurt us. “You know, I’ll bow to experience here. You guys are the dads. You probably know better than I do how she’ll react or what any of this means. Just tell me where to sign, I guess.”
“Sophie—” Neil began.
“Please don’t take that as me being passive-aggressive. You know I’d rather be aggressive-aggressive,” I quipped. “I’m just saying, out of the three of us, I’m the one who has the least wisdom on this subject.”
Neil gave me a closed-mouth smile, and El-Mudad scratched the back of his neck. In other words, they agreed that I was out of my depth.
I took my dinner to the home theater—Neil had already staked out the TV in the bedroom—and stuffed my face with bacon-wrapped, chorizo-stuffed figs washed down with Topo Chico to the soothing sounds of an old rerun of Cold Case Files. I was laying on my back on the big bed set in among the movie theater-style seats, shirt pulled up, and yoga pants pushed down to accommodate my late-term food baby, letting out the most maple-cured burps this side of the Canadian border when El-Mudad walked in.
“Shu hayda!” El-Mudad shouted from the doorway, feigning shock. “A hippopotamus in the cinema!”
“Shu hayda!” I pretended to be alarmed, as well. But I did it with my middle finger up. “A husband not minding his business!”
“Poor El-Mudad.” He walked into the room slowly, scuffing his bare toes on the carpet of each stair. “No one loves him.”
“Neil picked the Winchesters over you?” I pushed up on my elbows. “Did you call him a hippopotamus, too? Because not to critique your flirting—”
El-Mudad dropped heavily on the bed beside me. “Not a hippopotamus, then. A beautiful, gassy lady-Shrek.”
“Her name was Fiona. And I hope you weren’t coming in here for sex; I am too full to move.” I stifled another belch.
“Well, I was coming in here for sex, but you’ve cured me of my raging desire.” He snagged the remote. “Your punishment is cleaning up all these dishes and coming back for a cuddle.”
I would have argued that there was plenty of room to cuddle if we put the dishes on the floor, but I had to use the bathroom, anyway. “You’re lucky I was already going that way. Otherwise, you’d be in here by yourself.”
“And you’d be relaxing to autopsy reports in some other part of the house?” He grinned at me as I rolled from the bed. “What do you want to watch? I’ll get it ready.”
Since I was probably going to fall asleep no matter what he put on, I shrugged and said, “Your choice.”
I carried my plate, glass, and empty water bottle into the hall and paused. The door to Olivia’s nursery—Emma’s room—was slightly ajar. If Olivia had been inside, the small lamp atop the dresser would have spilled a beam of rosy light across the floor.
Ghosts were pretty low on my list of worries in life, but Emma’s room still gave me the heebie-jeebies, sometimes. She’d always been so present in this home that even when her physical presence had been removed, her energy was very much around. I’d brought it u
p to Holli, who had, of course, wanted to launch a full-scale paranormal investigation, which I’d smacked down as the tasteless idea it was. If ghosts were real, I didn’t want to think that Emma would be stuck in her dad’s penthouse in the afterlife.
I forced myself to walk past the door, my feet picking up speed a little bit as I did. I wasn’t afraid of being chased by anything. If Emma did haunt this place, she’d do it with withering jabs written in the fog on the mirrors or something. What I was afraid of wasn’t in that room.
It was what wasn’t in it.
Intervention aside, Valerie might still find some way to contest the adoption. Even with the law on our side, nothing in life was set in stone.
That room could stay dark and empty.
We could still lose.
I passed through the living room, navigating the familiar layout of the furnishings in the half-dark; the only light came from the fixture over the table in the dining room beyond the double French doors.
Right there was where Emma had been sitting when Neil announced our engagement. Over there, a basket of Olivia’s toys sat neatly tucked under a side-table.
I went to the kitchen, where dozens of photos of Emma’s childhood had once adorned the wall over the breakfast nook. Olivia’s booster was on the seat.
Memory can be overwhelming when one least expects it. A camera roll of horrors and happiness scrolled through my brain; Emma’s smug, fake smile when I’d stumbled into the kitchen that first moment that we’d met. The flowers that had overwhelmed the apartment in the days after her death. Neil cradling Olivia in one arm as he prepared a three a.m. bottle before he’d trusted the universe enough to hire a night nurse. The lip of the counter that had only recently become a danger to Olivia’s noggin as she’d grown over the past year.
There were too many glimpses into pain past and pain that might yet come scattered throughout the apartment.
There were too many ghosts.
Being Olivia’s guardian-but-not-mother didn’t mean I had to sit back and passively accept the outcomes of other people’s decisions. I’d spent so much time telling myself that Neil and El-Mudad knew best, that I should stay out of it because they were parents, and I wasn’t, that I’d started to believe it. But I did have a stake in this, and a huge one: Emma and Michael had named me, specifically, besides Neil in their will. Not just Neil. Not split with Valerie. Emma had wanted me to have a say in Olivia’s life because she’d thought I would know what I was doing. She’d believed I could. That I would.
Well, I was going to. Neil and El-Mudad might have been perfectly content pretending that we live in a bubble, but I knew better. If things were going to work out for all of us—Valerie included—then I was going to have to swim against the current Neil and El-Mudad had created for me.
I was going to do exactly what Emma would do.
Valerie stayed in the guest house for four days before I got the courage to go down and speak to her. To my surprise, she was in the side yard, doing yoga. I almost turned around to sneak away, but she spotted me and, to my surprise, smiled and waved.
"You certainly don't get this kind of outdoor peace and quiet in the city," she said as she picked up her mat from the grass and began rolling it up.
"I know. I missed that when I moved from Michigan to the city." I slipped my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and rocked on my heels. "You know, there's a path down to the ocean if you wanted to do yoga on the beach at sunrise or whatever it is you yoga people do."
She smiled as she shook her head. "The grass is fine, for now."
Her gaze pulled to the right; one of the security SUVs was parked discreetly down the driveway. I'd passed it on my walk down.
I couldn't dance around why she was with us. "It sucks that you have to be afraid."
"It does. But I don't feel afraid here." She pulled the elastic straps around the rolled mat to secure it, then picked up her Nalgene bottle from the grass. "Fancy a drink?"
"Oh, um, I don't—"
"Because of Neil, right." She flushed deeper crimson than her exercise had left her.
"Well, no. Because of the diabetes. But yeah, in a way, because of Neil." Because he didn't want me to die. Because he was tired of losing people he loved.
And that was why it was so crucial for Valerie to be here. He loved her. No, not in the way she wanted him to. But he would always feel a responsibility for her that, while illogical, would leave him devastated if anything happened.
"Well, I just wanted to see how you're settling in." I looked up at the windows of the house that had recently been my mother's. I wanted to stake some kind of claim for her out of loyalty. Now, who's illogical?
"Fine. I am fine, Sophie. But I would like to handle the rest of this privately." Valerie had always been good at drawing boundaries. Not necessarily respecting other peoples' but good at setting them for herself, at least, where I was concerned.
"I'm not going to pry. I know you'll come to us if you need anything." She would go to Rudy, who would tell us. I had a feeling we would never see Valerie in a weak moment, ever again.
Though my feet wanted to carry me back to the house in avoidance of the true reason for my visit, I couldn't put it off any longer. "Look, there's something I need to talk to you about. And I don't want it to upset you, but you have a right to know."
Her expression froze, and I could only imagine what horrible thing she was imagining. Or what horrible retort she would make.
But she didn't snipe at me. Instead, she nodded toward the house. "All right. Come inside."
Entering my guest house slash my mom's house slash Valerie's new, temporary home was strange as hell. Because Valerie now inhabited the space, it felt off-limits to me. That shouldn't have struck me as odd. After all, I was the one who'd promised that I would treat the place like Valerie's actual home and not regularly pop over. But I didn't know exactly how to behave in Valerie's space. I would have had no problem plopping down on the sofa and putting my feet up on the coffee table in the living room, as I would have when mom lived there. It was even the same sofa and the same coffee table. But it wasn't mom's anymore, and maybe Valerie had table-and-foot-related rules.
I sat stiffly on the edge of the couch, and Valerie took the armchair that had swiftly become Tony's once he'd moved in. She leaned over with her elbows on her knees and spread her hands. "All right. What did you need to upset me with?"
"It might not upset you."
It would upset her.
"El-Mudad is going to adopt Olivia."
Valerie's face registered confusion. "Pardon?"
Why was it more difficult to say the second time around? "After the CPS visit...when we were worried about what you—what Laurence—might do, we sat down with our lawyer. He told us that if something happened to Neil and me, El-Mudad wouldn't have any legal right to see her."
She looked down; I could tell she wanted to argue that it was unnecessary, but she couldn't possibly. We both knew that she absolutely would have tried to take Olivia from us while she'd been under Laurence's influence.
"I know you don't like him," I went on.
She stopped me. "It isn't that I don't like him. I understand why you and Neil do. He's attractive, and he's charming, and he's a good father. He comes with built-in kids for Neil." She shook her head and smiled fondly, but it quickly faded. "Olivia already has two guardians. You and Neil."
"And in the state of New York, a child can have more than two legal guardians. We're going to do that for Olivia. El-Mudad is a father to her already. There's no reason he shouldn't be legal." That was my argument, as plain and logical and unemotional as I could have presented it.
"Ah." Valerie nodded in understanding and cleared her throat. "So, she can have more than two legal guardians. And you chose El-Mudad."
"Yes. And if you feel like you have to challenge us, we were expecting that anyway. But we hoped that now, with Laurence out of the picture, you might..."
"Roll over on this?" She
sighed heavily. "I don't understand this. But I don't have the energy to fight you."
What didn't she understand? "We're just thinking about Olivia. About protecting her for the future."
"I wouldn't be protection enough for her?"
I'd severely misjudged her objections. "Wait, you're mad that it's El-Mudad and not you?"
"I'm not mad," she corrected me. "I'm disappointed."
We sat in an uncomfortable moment of silence.
"Sorry," she said. "That sounded rather parental, didn't it?"
"Cliché and parental." Hey, I was still smarting over her digs from the intervention.
"I didn't mean it that way. What I meant to say was, I'm disappointed that the three of you didn't think to protect my legal rights to my granddaughter. If something happens to you and Neil, where does it leave me? El-Mudad would have no obligation to share her. And he doesn't like me," she reminded me.
"He doesn't like you yet. He just doesn't know you. And he has to get through all his jealous, possessive of Neil stuff first. But family is important to him." I hesitated because I was about to make an offer that absolutely had to be made but hadn't been discussed yet. "But we'll work out a visitation schedule. A legally binding one, through a mediator or an arbitrator. I'm not well-versed in law stuff. You won't have any reason to fear that Olivia won't be a part of your life."
"I suggested that," she reminded me.
"You did. But you were with Laurence. That was the only reason we ever kept Olivia away from you. We didn't know what she would be exposed to or if she would be in danger." We probably should have explained that as soon as she'd made up her mind to leave him.
"Was that the only reason?" she asked.
I nodded firmly. "All we ever wanted out of this was for you to be safe and for you to be able to see Olivia again."
"If El-Mudad adopts Olivia, will she..." Valerie's eyes filled with tears that she tried to blink back. "Will she call him daddy?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. But I do know that we will never let Olivia forget Michael or Emma. We talk about them all the time. She asks about them, and I swear, they are as real to her as we could make them for a four-year-old."
Sophie (The Boss Book 8) Page 25
