Chapter 10
DAISY
The ceiling is white. The lights are fluorescent. The smell is antiseptic and industrial soap and the particular staleness of recirculated air, and I’m lying on my back in a hospital bed in Cork, Idaho, and the man sitting in the chair beside me is Anton Almazov.
I’m not surprised.
I should be. I should be asking how he found me, how he got here, why he’s sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital in a town he’s never heard of in a state he once asked me to describe over dinner.
But I’m not surprised because I have spent two months carrying the weight of him inside me, not just the pregnancy, though that too, but the weight of his absence, which turns out to be heavier than his presence ever was, and some part of me has been waiting for this chair and this man and this fluorescent ceiling since the parking lot asphalt met my cheek.
He’s sitting very still. His hands are on his knees. He’s wearing clothes I’ve never seen, dark jeans, a grey pullover, no suit, no tie, no Ace Royale armour, and he hasn’t shaved and his eyes are bloodshot and he’s the most beautiful thing in this ugly room and I hate that he is.
“You know, don’t you.”
Not a question. I can see it in the tension along his forearms and the tightness around his mouth and the particular quality of stillness he carries, which isn’t the stillness of composure but the stillness of a man who is holding himself together with his hands on his knees.
His jaw tightens. “Yes. You’re pregnant with my child.”
I don’t cry. I’ve done my crying. I cried on a bus from Nice and I cried in my childhood bedroom and I cried in a grocery store parking lot, and I’m finished with crying in front of men who break me.
“How long have you known?”
He looks at his hands. It’s the first time I’ve seen him unable to meet my eyes, and the inability does something to me that I push away.
“I’ve had someone checking on you. Not surveillance—” He stops. Tries again. “Making sure you’re safe. That you had what you needed. The report came three days ago. I was on a plane within the hour.”
Three days. He has known for three days that I’m carrying his child and he flew across an ocean and is sitting in a plastic chair in Cork and his hands are on his knees and his eyes are bloodshot and he hasn’t shaved. I file all of this and I don’t let it mean what it wants to mean.
“I don’t want your money,” I tell him.
“I know.”
“I don’t want your penthouse.”
“I know.”
“I want my baby to have a father. That’s the only reason I’m talking to you.”
Something crosses his face. Pain, or gratitude, or the particular ache of a man who is being given less than he wants and more than he deserves. He nods.
“Whatever you need,” he tells me. “However you want this to work. I’ll agree to everything.”
I believe him. That’s the terrible part. For the first time since I met him, I believe every word coming out of his mouth, and the believing is worse than the doubt because the doubt protected me and the belief leaves me open and I can’t afford to be open. Not with him. Not again.
“I’ll come back to Monaco,” I say. “On my terms.”
“Your terms.”
“My own space. My own door. My own life. You don’t get to decide how close we are. You don’t get to charm your way past boundaries I set. If I say stop, it stops. If I say leave, you leave.”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
His eyes come to mine. Grey and wrecked and unshielded and true, and I’ve never seen this version of him, the version without performance, without charm, without the half-lift or the full smile or any of the architecture he’s built between himself and the world.
This is just Anton. Just the man underneath.
“I promise,” he says.
THE WHIRLWIND.
That’s the only word for it. Within days I’m back in Monaco.
Within weeks I’m living in a unit two floors below his penthouse in a building on the coast road, and the unit has my own front door and my own kitchen and my own bedroom with a lock I’ve tested twice, and the view from my window is the harbour and the yachts and the same Mediterranean that was burning past his car window the first time he drove me somewhere, and I stand at my window and I press my hand against the glass and I don’t let myself think about what floor he’s on.
The doctor’s appointments begin. He drives me.
He doesn’t speak in the car unless I speak first. He opens my door and he doesn’t touch me when I get out and he sits in the waiting room with his hands on his knees and when the doctor calls us in together he listens to every word and he takes notes on his phone and he asks questions about nutrition and exercise and prenatal supplements with the focus of a man who has never done anything halfway in his life.
He brings me ginger tea for the nausea.
Not in person. I find it outside my door in the morning.
A thermos, stainless steel, warm to the touch.
The first morning I open my door and see it, I stand in the hallway a long moment holding the thermos and staring at it and my eyes burn and I carry it inside and I drink it and the ginger settles my stomach and I hate him for knowing what I need before I ask.
Prenatal vitamins appear in my kitchen. I don’t buy them.
They’re on the counter one afternoon when I come home from a walk, the right brand, the right dosage, the ones the doctor recommended by name in the appointment he took notes during.
He has a key to my unit, the building management gave him one as the owner, and he used it to leave vitamins on my counter and nothing else.
No note. No flowers. No apology tucked inside a gesture. Just vitamins.
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t charm. For the first time since I’ve known him, he just shows up. And it’s killing me.
Because every morning the ginger tea is there.
Every appointment he is in the waiting room.
Every evening I hear his footsteps two floors above me, a faint rhythm through the ceiling, and I know the rhythm the way I know my own pulse and I press my hand against the wall above my bed where the plaster vibrates with his pacing and I don’t let myself want what I want.
The elevator is the worst.
The building has one private lift. We share it.
And the encounters are accidental and unavoidable and each one is a small catastrophe.
He steps in, I step back. I press my floor, he presses his.
We stand in a glass box rising through a building in Monaco and we don’t speak and the distance between us is three feet and three feet in an elevator is nothing and everything.
His hand brushes mine reaching for the button.
My shoulder touches his when the lift jolts between floors.
He holds the door for me and his arm is above my head and I walk beneath it and his cologne catches me, cedar and smoke and the darker thing, and I’m carrying his child and I can’t breathe in a lift that smells like him and I grip my keys and I walk to my door and I don’t look back.
He never looks back either. But I hear him stand in the hallway after the lift doors close. I hear him not move. And then, after a pause that lasts exactly as long as it takes for a man to decide not to knock, I hear his footsteps return to the lift, and the doors open, and he goes up.
Every time. He almost knocks. Every time, he doesn’t.
And every morning, the ginger tea is there.
ANTON
She’s five months along and she’s glowing and I’m dying.
I make the tea before dawn. I carry it downstairs.
I set it outside her door. I go back up.
I make my own coffee and I drink it at the window and I count the minutes until I hear her door open below me, the sound carries through the building’s bones, a faint click and a pause and then the soft scrape of the thermos being lifted, and the pause is the part that guts me.
The pause where she stands in her doorway holding what I’ve left her and decides whether to carry it inside or pour it out.
She has never poured it out.
I hold on to that. In the dark hours between the tea and the morning, when I pace the penthouse and my footsteps echo and the harbour burns below me and I think about a girl who smiled at me in the aftermath of the worst thing I’ve ever done, I hold on to the fact that she has never poured out the tea.
The elevator encounters are exquisite torture.
Three feet. Glass walls. Her perfume and her growing belly and her hands gripping her keys and her eyes that find everything in the lift except me.
She is building a life two floors below mine and I can hear it through the ceiling, music sometimes, or the sound of her phone, or the particular rhythm of someone moving through rooms who is learning to be alone again, and I don’t interfere.
I’ve learned, at a cost I’ll carry for the rest of my life, that I don’t get to decide what she wants.
DAISY
Tuesday evening. The lobby.
I’m coming back from a walk. The air is good for the nausea and the movement is good for my back and the walks are getting longer because my body is changing and the changing requires movement and space and the freedom of streets that don’t belong to anyone.
I walk through the lobby doors and there is a man at the concierge desk.
Early thirties. Brown hair, open face, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
He’s carrying a box of books and talking to the concierge about a delivery, and when the lobby door closes behind me he turns and the box wobbles and three books slide off the top and I catch one before it hits the marble floor.
“Nice catch.” He grins. The grin is easy and warm and uncomplicated and doesn’t carry a single layer of subtext. “I’m Jeff. Just moved in. Ninth floor.”
My floor.
“Daisy,” I tell him. “Tenth floor, actually. They number oddly here.”
He laughs. I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it, a real laugh, the first one in months, and the sound of it surprises me so much that I laugh harder and Jeff laughs with me and the lobby fills with the sound of two people who have found something funny in a marble building that takes itself very seriously.
I don’t see Anton.
But he’s there. I learn later that he was coming through the back entrance from the car park.
That he stopped. That he stood in the corridor between the car park and the lobby and he saw me laughing, really laughing, with a man he’d never seen.
That the man touched my elbow to balance the box and the touch was familiar and easy and carried none of the weight that every touch between Anton and me has carried since the first day in the conference room.
I don’t know any of this yet.
I only know that I laughed, and it felt like breathing after a long time underwater, and the man on my floor has an easy grin and carries too many books and his name is Jeff Peterson and he doesn’t know who I am or what I’ve survived and the not-knowing is the most restful thing I’ve felt in months.
Chapter ****11