12. Branton
We’ve both finished a bowl and served ourselves a second of Blake’s chicken and vegetable soup when I start to talk. I didn’t lie. She needs to know all the skeletons in my graveyard.
Some will be easier than others to reveal and the coward that I am, I start with the easiest.
“I don’t remember it.”
Blake looks at me, her spoon halfway to her mouth. “What?”
“Fucking Celeste. Making Laura.”
She lowers the spoon back to her bowl. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Never been blackout drunk before.” The memories of waking in bed with Celeste plastered to my back and no recollection of how I got there, flashes through my head. “Or since.”
I can’t stand to stay in my seat, to look at her when I tell her the rest, so I shove my chair back and walk over to the deck railing. Wrapping my fingers around the wood, I stare off into the trees without really seeing them.
The emotions of that long ago morning assault me, and the sympathy in Blake’s eyes only add to the guilt I already feel. I don’t deserve her compassion. I don’t deserve anyone’s.
“Not even in the alcohol fueled days after I told the doctors they could kill Laura,” I mutter.
“Bran.”
Blake wraps her arms around me from behind. How she got so close without my knowledge, I don’t know, but the gentle strength of her hold eases some of the ache in my chest.
“You didn’t kill Laura. None of you killed Laura. She was already gone. The accident took her away long before you had to make that decision.”
“My brain knows that but…” I swallow the bile rising in my throat. “I gave them permission to turn the machines off.”
Blake’s hold tightens. “Without those machines, she wasn’t alive.”
“I know that. Except holding her…” I scrunch my eyes closed, try to wipe away the memories of Laura, her small body warm against my bare chest where I cradled her in my arms in those final moments. “She was so tiny. I was supposed to protect her.”
“You weren’t Laura’s only protector. She had her mother.”
And that’s the sticking point. Celeste never wanted her. Never wanted to be a mom. “She didn’t come to me to be a father to her child.”
“But—”
“She wanted me to pay for an abortion.” Those words, just the thought of what Celeste had planned, make me want to vomit.
“Oh.”
“I paid her to have the baby, to marry me. Stay married to me and have the baby.”
“Paid…”
“Yes. I paid for her to have the child.” I squeeze my eyes closed again. Can see the look of horror on Celeste’s face at my suggestion. “I paid her to marry me and have the baby. Then I paid her to put my name on the birth certificate. Once I’d paid for one thing, she had me over a barrel. It was going to cost me thirty million to get her to sign over parental rights. Another fifty to sign the divorce papers.”
“You were getting divorced?”
“Trying.” If only Celeste had waited longer than six weeks to step out. “She blew that up by hooking up with another player. Or attempting to, anyway.”
“I don’t understand why she would?—”
“She didn’t love me. I certainly didn’t love her. But the baby? The baby I loved with everything in me. I wanted her.”
“Of course you did. She was your child.”
“She was mine. In every way that counts.” I don’t want to go down that path. Not today. I want to explain why I married a woman I didn’t love when I hadn’t married the one I did. “She wouldn’t just take money to have the baby. She wanted marriage or she’d find a way to get the money to get rid of it, her words. It cost me. Everything cost me but that was what she wanted. A source of money she thought was unending.”
“That’s awful. But, Bran, you had no choice but to do what you did. For Laura.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we went to the closest court house and got all the paperwork sorted, went back the next day and made it official. We moved into a house I bought and turned it into a battlefield. Celeste fought me on everything. From the color on the walls to the car she wanted me to buy her. Everything.” A bark of laughter burst from my chest. “Even the brand of fucking toilet paper was an argument.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too. It could have been different. If she’d embraced being a mother but ultimately it wasn’t what she wanted and she blamed me for that too.”
“It takes two to make a baby. She had no right to blame you for getting pregnant.”
“No. She didn’t.” The urge to tell Blake why Celeste had no reason wells up, but I can’t go there yet. If I’m going to purge my guilt, free myself from the regret, I need to walk her through it from the beginning.
Fuck. Who am I kidding? I need to do it in stages or I’ll be reaching for the nearest bottle and not stopping until it’s empty and my hand is on the next.
“Her plan was to have the baby and leave after her six-week checkup. Except she never made that appointment. Instead, she snuck out of the house and met up with Carl Burgan, defense player for the Knights. I guess he thought it would be a quick hookup. They’d done it before, except Celeste’s body had changed. Carrying a baby is hard on a woman’s body. Carl wasn’t happy with the changes. Must have said some horrible things because she came home ranting and raving about us ruining her body, her life.”
“You married her, gave her a home, a daughter.”
“She’d take the house, not me, not the daughter.”
“What?”
“She wanted the house in the divorce, she didn’t want anything to do with Laura.”
I can feel Blake shake her head against my back where her forehead rested. “What mother doesn’t want?—”
“One who never wanted.” I have to take a deep breath to continue. “I paid her to have the baby, remember?”
“How much?”
“Ten million.”
“Bran.”
“I know. I dropped five on her to get her to the court house, ten to have the baby and I had to be on top of her because I’d given her money, money she could have used to abort the baby.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“She threatened to often enough I couldn’t be sure. There was always something she wanted or wanted to do, or me to do, it was easy to get my compliance with the threat of the baby.”
“You did it all for the baby.”
“I did. And I’d probably do it again.”
“What happened to stop her from signing the divorce papers? You said you were trying to get divorced.”
“Carl happened. Whatever he said made her think she would be better off staying with me. Not that we were together in any way other than on paper. I never touched her after we were married. I didn’t even kiss her at the ceremony. Barely held her hands during the quick service.”
“You didn’t…”
“No. I didn’t. I couldn’t. She wasn’t meant to be the woman with my ring on her finger. Wasn’t meant to be living in my house. I can’t to this day, stand referring to her as my wife. If I could wipe it all out, go back in time and erase it all, I would. In a heartbeat.”
“Bran.”
I turn, put my hands on Blake’s shoulders and push her back, finally look her in the eye. “I have never loved, will never love, anyone but you. I hate what I did, what I allowed to happen, hate it all with a bone deep burn that threatens to take me under every day. And it was all for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing. It was for Laura, your daughter. You’re not the type of man who could ever turn his back on his own flesh and blood.”
“No, I’m not.” I lock my gaze on Blake’s. I want her to see what I’m feeling when I tell her the rest. “I knew she wasn’t mine to keep. When Celeste opted for a c-section and attempted to keep me out of the birth, I knew it would always be like that. And when the nurse handed me the baby and I looked at her, I knew. She wasn’t going to be mine to keep but I vowed, with that first touch, that I would do everything I could to protect her for the rest of her life.”
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say out loud. I never told anyone. The doctors know a little of how Laura really got hurt but when Celeste took the easy way out and took her own life within hours of them telling us Laura had no neural function, no brain activity, I kept it inside. Hid the truth from the world because there was no one to punish.
No one but myself.
“The one person I didn’t know I had to protect Laura from was her own mother. You were right before. I wasn’t responsible for killing Laura. But it wasn’t an accident. Celeste killed her. Killed herself. And it wasn’t postpartum depression either. It was malicious and with the intent to hurt her, to hurt me.”