Trespassing(98)

Does this mean Micah knew the plane was going to crash? Is he responsible for the accident?

I open a drawer in the kitchen and pull out a stack of Bella’s drawings. I leaf through them. “She drew the crash. She explains by saying this is where the big house is”—I indicate to the left of the drawing I’m holding up, the way my daughter always does when interpreting this particular piece of artwork—“and this is the plane in the water.”

“She’s talking about the seaplane.”

There’s a faraway look in Natasha’s eyes, as she reminisces about a happy memory she shared with my husband. With my daughter.

“We took the kids by seaplane,” she continues, “to Dry Tortugas. The plane landed in the water, and Bella was amazed . . .” With a shake of her head and a shiver, she zaps out of her wonderland. “She wasn’t talking about a crash.”

“Oh.”

And Micah knew that, too. He could’ve put my mind at ease, assured me our daughter was referring to something else. Instead, he allowed me to worry about our daughter’s sanity.

The girls chatter over Bella’s crayons, a DVD playing in the background.

“So all this time, you’ve been in touch with Micah.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not what you think. You know, when Micah and I were dating, I was close with his mother. We stayed in touch.”

Jealousy burns inside me. I always assumed Mick was the reason Shell and I couldn’t be closer. Little did I know she’d already filled the daughter-in-law position with the woman her son neglected to nail down. “You and Shell stayed in touch?”

“I guess you could say we had a mutual friend, but Shell adores you, Veronica.”

I study her. I wonder how Mimi’s father, if he’s in the picture, feels about Natasha’s friendship with an ex-boyfriend’s mother. She’s wearing a thin, silver band adorned with a pear-shaped aquamarine on the fourth finger of her left hand. “Are you married?”

“No. We talked about it, but we hadn’t gotten around to it.”

I glance at the little girl whose name my daughter has been mispronouncing since they met. She’s beautiful, like her mother. Just as Elizabella has been insisting, she’s seven. Not little, at least to a three-year-old. The longer I look, I realize there are certain similarities in our girls’ appearances. Their brow lines, their smiles. Wait. “Who’s her father?”

“I was in a committed relationship—”

“With my husband?”

Her hand lands atop mine. “And we couldn’t have children. Miriam is a miracle . . . courtesy of artificial insemination. But yes,” she says. “Not the way you assume, but Micah is her father.”

I pull my hand away and try like hell to ward off tears. “So all this time . . . you’ve been in touch with my husband since college.”

“We reconnected a few years after graduation. There was a—”

“He didn’t tell me. Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Veronica, listen. There was a seminar, years ago, at Evanston Northwest. About help for couples who couldn’t conceive. Do you remember?”

“No.” But I think about it. Maybe I do. We were having trouble. Micah sought a solution to the problem. Maybe Shell suggested we go. Maybe she even planned the event. I vaguely remember something.

“It was before you were ready to take extra steps. Micah was there. He said he couldn’t talk you into coming, but he was there to learn about your options. I was there, too, for the same reason. God, don’t you know he wanted children so badly with you?”

“And apparently with you.”

“We needed a donor,” she explains and reaches for me despite my pulling away. “Micah offered. I would’ve preferred he tell you, but by then, he thought it would be too much for you to handle. It worked on the first try. We were lucky.”

And I was very far from lucky.

“Why AI?” I pull a melon from the far end of the counter and select a knife from the block. “Why not just do it the old-fashioned way?”

“Veronica, I—”

“No, Natasha.” I lower my voice so the girls can’t hear and slice into the melon. “Betrayal is betrayal. And after all we went through—you and I, I mean—you don’t think you owed me the courtesy to tell me that you and Micah were creating children together? I’d almost rather you’d given him one last roll than a child, considering all the trouble I was having getting it done.”

She presses her lips into a thin line, her weary eyes rimming with tears. “His name isn’t on the birth certificate. We didn’t anticipate his being involved in Mimi’s life; it just sort of . . . happened.”

“You kept your distance after Micah and I got together, and I understood that. But to find out, all these years later, that the two of you were sharing a secret of this magnitude . . .” I shake my head in disbelief. Slice, slice, slice.

She was my only friend. Losing her was necessary in order to explore a life with the man I loved. And now that I know Micah didn’t have to make the sacrifice in reverse, I could scream.

“I wanted to tell you,” she says.

“I hate to break it to you, but you’re not the only one.”