The Lies That Bind(97)

As I pass St. George’s, the church where I once hoped to marry Matthew, I feel detached pity for the twentysomething girl I used to be. The girl who hadn’t yet learned to trust her gut. Who cared so much about what others thought and couldn’t make a move without consulting her friends. Who wanted the fairy tale more than actual fulfillment.

    I no longer think much about Matthew, but I do so now, remembering the day we got back the paternity test results when Alice was just a few weeks old. We both received copies of the report and opened our envelopes together, over the phone. It was filled with complicated scientific data, but the conclusion was clear, underlined and in boldface, that Matthew was “excluded as the biological father.”

We both cried on the phone—perhaps for different reasons. But I think underlying the sense of loss, at least for me, was a profound feeling of relief. It was so much cleaner and easier this way. We said we would stay in touch and always remain friends, and I think we both meant it in the moment. But the days turned into weeks, then months, and neither of us ever reached out to the other. Jasmine, who is now working at The New York Times, ran into him at a restaurant in Tribeca about a year ago. She said he was with a date and they looked happy, but she hadn’t noticed whether either was wearing a ring. It crossed my mind to google him—check for an engagement or wedding announcement. But I wasn’t curious enough and never got around to it.

As I now reach Fourteenth Street, I turn left, heading east toward the river, the same path I took on that fateful night I met Grant. It’s something else I don’t think about much anymore, preferring to focus on what happened after his sentence at a low-security federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Fortunately for him, the judge had been pretty lenient. He gave Grant only fifteen months, taking into consideration all the circumstances, specifically his reason for committing the crime, what he’d spent the money on, and the fact that he had turned himself in.

He wrote me letters from prison every week, and he called me on the day Alice arrived by a planned C-section. He wanted to know everything—not only what she looked like, but all about the entire birthing experience. I told him she was beautiful, and it was all so incredible. I told him that I’d let Matthew come for the birth—just in case she turned out to be his—but that he was planning to leave the next day. “He’s so lucky,” Grant said, then promised he would come see us as soon as he got out. He told me he was living for that moment. I could tell he meant it, and it made me cry. Of course, everything made me cry in the hours and days after Alice was born—her arrival was just so miraculous. I had never felt love like that before.

    Still, our first few months together were rough, even with so much help from my family. It didn’t scare me being alone, but it was lonely being alone. The bright side was that I felt stronger than I ever did in New York, and really liked the new version of myself. I was more assertive at work, which resulted in better assignments, and I began to learn that the world treats you the way you demand to be treated.

Grant ended up getting out of prison four months early, paroled for good behavior, serving only eleven months of his sentence. He kept his word, taking a bus to Wisconsin, then a taxi to the condo I was sharing with Scottie. I will never forget the moment he first held her in his arms, the way he looked at her. It was love at first sight—even before I told him the news I had waited so long to deliver in person: Alice was his daughter. He was her father. We cried and embraced her together.

At first my family seemed worried by Grant’s arrival. My mother was especially concerned, likely having trouble with the whole notion of an ex-con—an ex-con whom Scottie and I had agreed to allow to crash on our sofa. But after several weeks of watching him do the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, to say nothing of his obvious bonding with Alice, they couldn’t help but warm to him.

“So what’s your plan?” I heard my dad ask him about two weeks into his stay, as we were all gathered at my parents’ house for our weekly Sunday dinner. “You can’t work in the financial industry anymore, can you?”

    I kept loading the dishwasher, craning to hear Grant’s reply, as we still hadn’t really talked about the future.

“No, sir. I can’t,” he said, bouncing Alice on his knee. “But I wouldn’t want to do that again anyway. I’ve applied for some jobs in upstate New York—where I have contacts—and also for a few here. I’d like to be with your daughter one day. But regardless of what happens with us, I want to be a father to Alice.”

I welled up, then walked out of the kitchen, still too emotional to think about all of that.

But just a few weeks later, when Grant told me he had accepted a position with the Wisconsin chapter of the ALS Association and would be looking for apartments in the area, I was finally ready to talk. Really talk.

“Are you sure that’s what you want?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, looking right into my eyes. “I want to be wherever you and Alice are. That’s all I want.”

“Even if you and I aren’t together?” I said. “As a couple?”

“Even if…But I believe in my heart we will be. I’ll put in the time—as much time as it takes. I’ll show you, Cecily….”

I had already forgiven him—that happened while he was still in prison—but in that moment, I started to trust him again. Suddenly, instead of seeing the world in black and white terms, I saw before me a good person who had simply done some bad things. And I was no different. We had both made mistakes and told lies—some bigger than others—but those mistakes and lies didn’t have to define us. We could embrace the shades of gray and begin again, together.