The Plan (Off-Limits Romance, #4)(32)
6
Marley
Sometime after 2 AM, I give up on sleep and dive into a book on my phone’s Kindle app. Historical romance where the hero has to find a noble wife or risk losing his title and his land. Sometime around 5, I’ve learned all the things and can envision the coming conflict: the woman he married is not actually a noble, and the lord’s enemies know. He’s going to have to pick between the woman he loves and his family’s estate.
I don’t know when I finally drift off, but Mama wakes me around 6 with a ring of the little bell I gave her, whispering that she needs help getting to the restroom. I help her, and then when she can’t sleep, I make us oatmeal. After that, I help her bathe and help her change her clothes, and when, as I help her into her recliner, she glances up at me and tells me I’m “starting to wrinkle” I pretend I didn’t hear her.
Soon enough, one of Zach’s friends’ wives shows up to keep Mom company, and I drive the short distance home under craggy, mostly leafless winter trees. I realize that it’s Halloween tonight and make a mental note to buy some candy. As I get out of the car, I wish to see him on the stairs. I want to go back to that day I wrapped my arms around him. God, I want to talk to him and ask if he’s okay. But I did that already, and he told me “no.” An honest answer.
God.
All day at work—where I see two three-year-old girls—I’m haunted by what I found out. I’m heartbroken for Gabe. Just shocked and heartbroken and sad. Even though we aren’t best friends or lovers. Even though we’re only neighbors who shared one very inappropriate, very weirdly timed sexual encounter. My throat stings for him, and my eyes leak for him, and only as I drive to WalMart for candy do I realize I’m crying for my own lost child as much as his.
*
Gabe
Maybe the worst thing is, I’m not sure what to do with pictures. Do I put them in a drawer, or everywhere? Do I build a shrine or do I erase her from my heart? I could never. I would never want to. But to look at her is agony.
I get texts weekly on Sundays from Madeline. Long ones—sometimes three or four—updating me on Geneva, reassuring me that she’s okay.
Her thinking is brutal and not completely void of logic. She wasn’t going to keep on with me, wanted to marry Oliver and live in Portugal or Spain while he danced there—Oliver is a famous ballet dancer—and since apparently he sired Geneva, and I didn’t, and, as she put it, Gen is “young enough to forget” me, she decided to initiate that plan whether I liked it or not.
Oddly, I’m not sure she realized I would still want to father Gen the same way as I always have once I found out she’s not my biological child. But that’s Madeline for you. Self-involved, oblivious, not very good at empathy regardless of how much she wants to be. What’s best for Geneva? Well—we know that. Court precedent for married couples who made their children with their own genes is tilted in favor of joint custody, as research shows that’s what works best and what scars children least.
But Madeline is selfish. And she was mad at me, I think. Mad I didn’t care more when she told me she loved Oliver, when she told me she’d been seeing him at intervals since Gen was born.
“You were never free or open to me! You are a closed door,” she yelled in Spanish when she and Gen landed in Portugal that first day they were gone.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” I’d told her, and Mad had sobbed, “She isn’t yours, Gabriel. And neither am I! I wanted you to marry me! I wanted you more than him, but you told me no, no, no!”
“Is Gen right there? You shouldn’t—”
But my input was useless. Madeline never asked for it again.
It’s Halloween when I go through my old photos and find one from last year, when Gen dressed as a bumble bee. All of a sudden, I just have to have it on my fridge. I have to be her dad in this one way. I put it on a USB drive, throw some clean shorts, socks, and a long-sleeved shirt on, leash up Cora, and start toward the nearest pharmacy with my heart tearing in my chest.
It’s never going to get easier. I know that now. I almost don’t want it to. Gen is my baby. She always will be. When this year passes, and she’s more used to Oliver, I’ll fly anywhere to see her. I’ll be an uncle to her, if the court rules that I have to, but I’ll be the best uncle she ever fucking had. And in the meantime, Christ, I hope that fuck is good to her. I hope he loves her when she whines and cheers when she markers in her Peppa coloring books. I hope he loves the way she says that she’s a “gurl” and takes his time brushing her hair when it gets tangled. I hope he understands she hates ground beef and milk and vegetables in pasta, and if he gives her an apple, watch out, because she’ll gnaw and gnaw until she’s biting on the core. I hope he doesn’t tell her Legos are for boys or that she can’t become a “rocket woman” when she grows up. And I really hope he or Madeline wakes when she has nightmares. Madeline is a hard sleeper, so that part was always me.
By the time I reach the drug store, I can’t even go inside. I run back toward the house and through the cemetery, down the path that leads down to the boardwalk, where I sit there with my legs hanging over the lake and hold onto the USB drive.
Why does it hurt so much?