Chapter Ten #2
In a meaningful way. Not just by being the opposite.
Not just by trying to show her child her work ethic and passion for her job.
Because it was possible her child wouldn’t feel those things.
No. She was going to be different than her mother by loving the child she had.
Not wishing for a different one altogether.
Right as she got back home her cell phone rang.
“Hi, this is Noelle, the nurse who was at your ultrasound.”
“Oh, hi,” Sylvie said. “I promise you I’m fine.”
“I believe you. And I hope you’re doing well.”
“I am,” she said, looking around the empty penthouse, and all the changes she’d made. She still felt a hollow place inside of her when she thought of Christos. “I am.”
“The doctor was wondering if you wanted a follow-up ultrasound to determine the baby’s gender.”
“Oh. I… Yes. That would be great.”
“We can come by tomorrow.”
“Yes. That would be perfect.”
After establishing a time she got off the phone with Noelle. And she stared at her phone. She hadn’t heard from Christos at all. Not in nearly two months.
She pulled up a text bubble.
Kid: Getting an ultrasound to determine gender tomorrow. Do you want to know?
There was no response. She went into the kitchen and began to rifle around in the fridge.
Her phone buzzed.
Baby: Yes.
Kid: Should I wait for you to come back?
There was a pause.
Baby: No.
Kid: Are you ever coming back?
Baby: Of course I am. Do not be dramatic.
Kid: Oh, I’m sorry, is my two months long abandonment meant to feel normal?
Baby: You don’t even like me.
Kid: Do you care?
Baby: I don’t want you to be unhappy.
She stared at those words. She had a feeling that they were a large admission.
Kid: You said that you don’t have any friends. Why is that? Because you’re a very powerful man. And you’re charismatic, and I have a feeling that you could command the attention of any room that you wanted to. I’ve seen you do it. So why don’t you have friends?
Baby: An interesting question. Because I have found that it’s better to live life without connection.
Kid: You said something to me when I told you about the baby. About how people can die of loneliness.
Staring at the phone, she went and sat down on his couch. It mirrored the times that they had talked before. But this time, she could picture him.
And she had the very sudden, visceral realization that the man she had been talking to all this time wasn’t alive. He was Christos.
A part of him that he didn’t seem to be able to show in person, but he was very real.
It made her feel a strange longing in her chest.
This was what she had been longing for over the past two months. This connection.
Today, talking to her mother, she had realized something about herself, and somehow, that had moved enough stuff out of the way for her to finally see this. Finally understand it.
She missed him.
It had been so awful, so shocking to find out that the man of her dreams was Christos, because some part of her had known it would only break her heart.
She wished she knew why.
Why it was so…intense with him? And why he was just so hard to reach?
Baby: My mother died when I was very young. It changed my entire life.
Kid: I’m sorry.
Baby: It changed my father. It turned him into something that I didn’t recognize.
Kid: And you were lonely.
Baby: Yes. I learned that I could be entirely free of that feeling, of that suffering, if I simply expected to be alone.
Kid: That’s awful.
Baby: It worked very well. For a while. What made you text me that first time?
She frowned.
Kid: I guess I’m like you. I spent a lot of time feeling apart.
School was strange for me. I got sent to a boarding school because it was what my mother wanted.
Something prestigious. But everybody there was raised in that life, and I wasn’t.
I was an odd one out. Then my father decided he wanted me to come home, so I changed schools and I had trouble making friends there too.
It isn’t that I have none, it’s just that I’ve always felt like I was sitting somewhere in between two worlds.
Baby: That isn’t really the same.
Kid: It’s not, I guess. But I understand what you mean.
That feeling that you could die of loneliness.
I made the publishing company into something that I could love.
But still, that night, when I decided to text to make sure the person whose phone it was could contact me… I guess I just wanted to reach out.
She paused for a moment.
Kid: Why did you respond?
His answer was slow to come.
Baby: I have spent a great many years coming to terms with my life.
With who I am in this life. But there are nights, I believe they are called the dark nights of the soul?
There are nights like that. Still very dark.
And it seems like it won’t end. It was one of those nights.
I just wanted to reach out to somebody. But there was no one.
I was lonely most of my life through no fault of my own.
And now, I have fashioned for myself an entire life where I am lonely by design.
And that is fine. Mostly. But then, there is a wave of despair and you want to reach out for a hand and you realize there is no hand.
Her throat went tight, tears pushed at the backs of her eyes.
This was the same man. The one that she had talked to. The one that she had connected with.
He was there. It had all made perfect sense before she had known that he was Christos.
And then, because of the way Christos presented himself to the world, because of what she assumed about Christos, she had thought that it would be impossible to love him.
She had thought that it would be impossible for this to be real because she assumed that the man she saw in all those meetings, the one she had seen at publishing parties over the years, he was what was real.
No. It was the man who wrote to her. That was the most real, deep part of him. But for some reason he felt desperate to hide it when he was with her.
Kid: Why did you leave after we slept together?
Baby: I had planned to leave.
Kid: That’s a lie. I know it is.
Baby: I don’t know what you make me feel. The words started to come in fast. I don’t understand it. You ignited part of me before I had ever seen you. I cannot for the life of me understand what it is.
Kid: Human connection?
Baby: I never asked for it.
Kid: You did. When you texted me that first time, that’s what you were asking for.
He hadn’t known that it would become sexual.
She had a feeling that he was even now trying to distance himself from it by telling himself that it had been.
But she knew that it wasn’t. She knew that what he’d said first, what he had said just now about loneliness.
Isolation. Darkness, that was the truth.
He had reached out for a hand, and she had taken it.
Baby: Well, I don’t like it. I want to go back to before. I want to go back to who I was before.
Kid: Before you felt something?
Baby: I don’t even know what to call it.
Love. That word burned at the center of her chest. Was it possible?
Did she love Christos Onassis? Had she always?
It would make sense. It would make sense that she loved Christos Onassis, because from the moment she had first seen him she had been enraptured by him.
From the moment she had first met him, he had made her feel things that were great and terrible and conflicting.
They hadn’t been sexual, not initially, but over the years she had begun to recognize it as attraction.
And she had thought that the soft, emotional connection tempered by arousing virtual sex had been something entirely separate from Christos, but it hadn’t been. Because nothing could ever be wholly separate from Christos.
She loved him.
He was the hard, complicated, difficult man that she had known for years. And he was this wounded, insightful, caring man who had texted her for six months, who had gotten her through the trauma that he was causing.
She laughed. Because she really had no choice.
Kid: I want you to come back for the ultrasound.
Baby: I have work.
He was retreating. He was retreating because he felt like he had to, and she wished that she understood why.
Baby: If I were there, I would kiss you.
Kid: No. You don’t get to do that. We had virtual sex because we didn’t know who each other was.
But now we do. If you want that connection with me, then you need to be with me.
You don’t get to leave me alone. And you don’t get to distract from a serious conversation by trying to engage me that way.
Baby: I thought wives were supposed to make a man happy.
Kid: You clearly haven’t been paying attention to pop culture.
Baby: I already told you I didn’t.
True. He had. She had asked him if he had ever seen a Christmas movie, and he’d said he hadn’t. It was implied that he didn’t watch much of anything.
Kid: Christos, I’m trying to reach a hand out.
Baby: I have work. And once I’m finished I will be back.
And she felt like she had been dismissed. She also felt like she didn’t have to take this.
Christos had a private plane, she knew that. But it was probably where he was.
Of course, there were whole Reddit threads devoted to following the private jets of the wealthy. And with a quick search, she found tracking on Christos’s.
She laughed. He was in London. Great. Easy. He had offices there. She was sure that he had a residence nearby. And then she realized, she was his wife.
She contacted his personal assistant at his office in New York. “I want to go see my husband. Can we arrange a flight?”
She had that done within minutes. And then she contacted Noelle, her nurse and ally.
“Would you be interested in doing the ultrasound in London?”