The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(35)

“Those fireworks are going to destroy that lawn. Seriously. That grass is never coming back.”





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22





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GRAHAM





I meet Keeley in the lobby of Julie’s office. It’s not her first sonogram, but it’s the first I’ll be present for, and I’m strangely nervous, though I’m not sure why.

“What do you want, anyway?” she asks as we wait. “A boy or a girl?”

“I don’t care as long as it’s healthy,” I tell her, though that’s not totally true. The real answer is that I want whatever won’t set my mom off, and there’s no way to know what that will be. The stuff that happened when Colin was a baby is always with us, somehow. “What about you?”

“I’d prefer a girl, but given my family curse, I guess I shouldn’t. Good news for you, or bad news depending on how much involvement you hoped to have with this kid: the O’Keefe women die really young.”

I swallow. She told me this before, though she doesn’t remember it. “If you hate me,” she’d said, “at least you won’t be stuck with me for long.”

I thought it was a joke at the time, and she’s still saying it like it’s a joke, but I’m starting to wonder—it’s a weird joke to make repeatedly.

“Just because your mom died young doesn’t mean you will.”

She laughs. “What if it’s my mom, my aunt, my grandmother, her sister, and my great-grandmother? Does that change your thoughts on the odds?”

She’s scrolling through something on her phone as if what she’s just said doesn’t matter. I reach for her arm to get her attention. “Did they all die of the same thing?”

She glances at me and away. “Everyone but my great-grandmother has died of cancer. Everyone. It’s the bit your internal medicine doc will gloss over: that you might just be genetically fucked and then all your efforts to stay healthy will be for naught.”

Her name is called and we rise to follow the nurse back to a room. “No offense, Keeley,” I say, “but I’m not sure you can claim you’re making a lot of effort.”

“Exactly. Because I watched my mother making green juice every morning and only eating salad, and look where it got her.”

I wonder how much of Keeley’s attitude toward life—her live-for-the-moment, who-cares-about-a-savings-account brand of joie de vivre—is related to this curse she seems to believe she’s under. And if that’s true, has having a kid changed it?

We are taken to a different room than usual, and this time there’s no undressing. Keeley simply reclines on a table and tugs her shirt up when Julie enters the room. Even the sight of her bare stomach is a wonder to me, with that unmistakable swell just beneath her skin.

Julie squirts a gel on Keeley’s stomach and starts moving a wand back and forth. An image appears on the screen—at first, it’s nothing discernible, just a mass of white and black, and then: a child. A child with long thin arms and legs, a nose—a single hand, fully formed.

Our child. It’s absolutely amazing. I never wanted a kid. I never wanted the responsibility of a kid. But I have it. And inside me, already, something has shifted. Something matters a million times more than my fears, my plans, and I’m looking at it right now.

“I’m assuming you don’t want to know the gender,” Julie says, which is when I realize Keeley is very intentionally not looking at the screen.

“You don’t want to know?” I ask. She’s desperate for a girl, and I’d have thought she’d want to know ASAP so she could blow every penny she makes on baby designer dresses.

“I’m not sure,” she says.

I do want to know. I want to plan. There’s a part of me that thinks the answer will help get it through Keeley’s head that this is happening, but there’s clearly more going on here than meets the eye. If Keeley isn’t ready for this, I’m not going to force the issue.

“Maybe they can write it down for us?” I suggest, looking at her. “And put it in an envelope?”

Keeley smiles up at me as if I’ve just done something heroic. It makes me wish I really had.





We walk to Whole Foods after the appointment because the overlap between healthy foods and foods Keeley is willing to eat is painfully small, and I’m running out of options.

She takes a seat on the patio while I go in to get our sandwiches. When I return, she’s holding the envelope up to the sun.

“Cut it out.” I snatch it away from her. “If you want to look, we’ll look, but you’re not going to do that and claim you discovered it by accident later on.”

Keeley barely seems to have heard me. She’s too busy tearing into her sandwich.

“Oh my God,” she groans. “It’s so good.”

I flinch and adjust myself. My life would be infinitely easier if she wouldn’t make everything sound so goddamn sexual. But maybe it’s just that every moan and groan and inhalation triggers a specific, filthy memory of her making those sounds beneath me.

“What do you think of the name Maddox for a boy, by the way?” she asks.