Weather Girl(40)

“I’m okay for now. Thank you.” I drop the phone to the bed next to me and let out a laugh I immediately regret, given the way it makes my chest ache. “I feel like I’m going to run out of different ways to thank you. You really don’t have to do any of this. I’ll be okay for the rest of the night if you want to go meet up with everyone else.”

He must hear the longing in my voice, the truth that I don’t want him to go meet up with everyone else at all.

“I’m happy to stay,” he says. “I broke my arm playing hockey when I was in middle school. I was such a baby—my mom had to cut up my food and help me wrap my arm in plastic every time I took a shower.”

“That sounds adorable, your mom fawning over you.”

His mouth kicks into a grin. “I was a little shit about it. Definitely not adorable.” He shifts on the bed, his shirt stretching across the curve of his belly. “Seriously, though. Whatever you need.”

“Maybe you could just talk to me?” I don’t want to talk about Torrance or Seth or work. I just want to relax, which I guess is what we came all the way up here to do.

“I can do that.”

About five seconds of silence follow, and I burst out laughing, in spite of the pain.

“You put me on the spot! That was a lot of pressure!” he says, but he’s laughing, too.

“Can you . . . tell me about Elodie?” I say, worried for a moment that he’ll shut down, the way he did on the drive. I reach for a pack of Skittles, using my teeth to tear it open.

“Well . . .” He draws out the word, busies himself with opening the aforementioned carrot cake M&M’s. I’m convinced he’s going to change the subject, tiptoe around it. But he doesn’t. “She’s in drama, as you know. Ever since she was little, she’s loved the spotlight. She loves show tunes, and she can really sing. For her ninth birthday a few years ago, we went to New York and spent the whole week seeing shows.”

“She seems awesome. I haven’t spent much time around twelve-year-olds lately, but damn, she’s sharp. Are they all like that?”

“She and her friends definitely keep me on my toes. She’s a good kid, though. A great kid. Her bat mitzvah is coming up, too, and I thought she’d complain about having to get up early every Saturday, but she hasn’t, not even once.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’ve had only a few painful flashbacks to my own,” he says. “I’m excited for her. Liv isn’t Jewish, and we wanted Elodie to be able to decide for herself what she wanted to do, and she’s been focused on this for a while. I’m really proud of her for committing.”

I knew Russell had this whole other life as a father, but it’s not until this moment that it hits me how different his set of priorities is. He’s not just responsible for another human—he has this whole range of emotions reserved for only her, pride and awe and comfort. It’s staggering, really, to imagine what these past twelve years have been like for him.

A silence passes between us, during which I unearth a purple Skittle from the bag and chew it slowly.

“It felt like maybe you were upset with me,” I say. “In the car.”

“Ah. It may have seemed that way because . . . well, I’m not sure if I was upset, exactly. There’s just . . .” He becomes inordinately fascinated by the floral pattern of the bedspread, knotting his fingers with the tassels on the duvet. “It’s complicated.”

“We have all night. Or until these meds make me pass out. If you want to talk about it, that is.” I don’t want to force him, but I can’t explain how badly I want to know this side of him. How it feels like if I don’t, he’ll go back to being a work acquaintance, when I want him to be so much more than that. This has to be the first step—I’m certain of it.

His blue eyes flick up to mine, and then back down to the bed. “Elodie was born when I was seventeen.”

Oh.

“You just turned twenty-nine?” It’s not the first question on my list, but it’s the only one that comes out.

He nods, still not making eye contact. “Liv and I had been dating since freshman year of high school, and we’d known each other since we were kids. Our parents were best friends, and we even hid our relationship for the first few months we were dating because we didn’t want them to get too involved. Obviously the pregnancy wasn’t anything we were planning,” he says with a rough laugh. “We talked about it, and we weighed all the options, and ultimately it was her choice. She wanted to have the baby, and I wanted to be there for her any way I could.”

I’m still trying to process this, searching for the right thing to say. “I can’t imagine how hard that was,” I settle on.

“An understatement. The year she was born was the hardest of my life. We were teen parents. We had no fucking clue what we were doing. We were lucky that our parents supported her choice, and I know now that we both had a tremendous amount of privilege. Don’t get me wrong, they were furious, and they were disappointed. But they helped us out, both financially and as babysitters. Kids at school were considerably less understanding. Some of them tried, and some teachers, too, but there was so much judgment. Liv got the worst of it, and I felt terrible.

“And I did it, too, for a while,” he continues, and at this, he finally meets my gaze again. It’s not pain in his eyes, I don’t think—it might be weariness. “I judged myself so harshly. How could I have made this mistake that would irrevocably alter the course of my life? I’d wanted to go to college, maybe on a hockey scholarship, but I quit—I had to. It was expensive, something I’d been fortunate enough not to think about very much when my parents were footing the bill, but suddenly everything was expensive, and of course, there wasn’t enough time.”