Trespassing(51)

My phone chimes with a different tone. This one alerts me to an incoming text. I glance at my phone. The text is from Claudette. She sent a picture of my house at the Shadowlands. A redheaded figure is on my doorstep.

I tap the screen to enlarge the photo. Blink to ensure I’m seeing things correctly.

But there’s no mistaking that red hair.

She’s at my house.

Natasha Markham is standing on my doorstep.





Chapter 24

Suddenly the entire world is a tornado rush of colors—the rosy-pink froth spilling across the table from Elizabella’s souvenir cup, the purple monkeys adorning it, the green of palm trees, which I see only when I spin to find a member of the waitstaff, in search of a towel. And the memory of the bright-auburn tresses of a woman I last saw in the rearview mirror of Micah’s old, beat-up Bronco, rumbling off campus after graduation.

Sticky mess in my lap.

“Mommy’s fault, Nini! Mommy’s fault!”

Maybe it was. Did I knock over her cup?

With one hand gripping my phone, and the other yanking my daughter out of the booth, as she’s now swimming up to her elbows in the mess, a cramping sensation wrings in my pelvis and my lower back strains every time I lift her. She’ll have to walk. Out of nowhere, it amplifies into the same stabbing, slashing pain I felt moments before miscarrying the twins.

My knees buckle.

I manage to catch myself with a hand on the back of the booth bench.

Lord.

It’s happening now, the dreaded first period—usually god-awful, messy, and painful—after egg retrieval.

A server wedges himself between me and the table.

My eyes lock on his white towel, now bleeding through with reddish-pink slushy.

“Ladies’ room?”

“Right behind you, ma’am.” He hardly glances over his shoulder at me. “Down the hall.”

I give Elizabella a tug in that direction.

“Mommy! Nini isn’t—”

“She’ll catch up, Ellie-Belle,” I whisper.

“No! Nini’s still at the table. Stranger danger!”

“Mommy has an emergency.”

A blinding pain surges in my abdomen. For a split second, the sensation renders me immobile. Just a breath or so, but it’s a productive one.

Bella ricochets off a wall of man—off Christian Renwick’s long legs—and lands back against me, gripping my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter to Christian, who’s now standing at the edge of the booth. I hope he isn’t drenched with slushy now, too.

Maybe it’s the slushy that’s wet in my lap, or maybe it’s a bloody mess in my panties, but either way, I need to go. Now.

Elizabella shrieks about Nini not following us when I lead her toward the ladies’ room.

“Stop, Bella. Please.” Tears prick in my eyes. “Just stop.”

My phone is ringing again.

I offer only a glance in Christian’s direction before disappearing down the hallway to the ladies’ room.

Bella’s wail of “Niniiiiiii!” echoes throughout the corridor.

I tighten my grip on her, lest she attempt to escape again, and soon we’re in the sanctuary of a blue-and-yellow tiled bathroom. Her snivels and sobs bounce off the walls here, too.

I tend to her first, propping her on the countertop and guiding her hands under a stream of water. Her breaths are staccato, as if she’s having trouble inhaling over her tears.

Or maybe that’s me.

I gauge my reflection to confirm that I, too, am a sobbing mess of girl covered in sticky red and pink.

And suddenly, I realize how ridiculous we must look, crying over a spill—or so it might seem to the diners beyond the door—and I’m laughing.

And Bella’s laughing, too, a moment after I start.

Her brown eyes, wet and rimming with tears, sparkle when she smiles. She tosses her little arms over my shoulders, and I hold her tight to me.

“Love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too, Bella. To the moon and back a hundred billion times plus infinity.”

“Is that a lot?” she asks.

“It is a lot, baby.” I kiss away the tears lingering on her cheeks. “But I think I love you even more than that.”

“Ronis,” she says.

I laugh even harder and lower my forehead to hers. “Oh, Bella.”

Her still-soiled sleeves are wet against the back of my neck.

“You have to stop misbehaving.”

“It was Nini’s fault.”

“Nini has to be a good girl, or she can’t stay with us.”

After a beat, her little voice sounds: “Nini will try.”

“How I miss your daddy.” When I close my eyes, I see sun filtering through stained glass, slanting over my mother’s casket at Fourth Presbyterian. To think someday Elizabella will be standing alone over a box containing my body . . .

I shove the thought out of my head.

My mother chose to leave me the moment she swallowed the handful of pills in the bathtub with the water running—and then again, later, with her more successful incident with the knife. I don’t want to think about that, either.

I’m going to live a long, fruitful life, and by the time I kick it, Bella will be married with droves of children of her own. “You’ll never be alone,” I promise. “Not for a single second. We’ll always have each other.”