Chapter 24
Jules
“Mommy, when are we going to Dawson’s?” Gus asks, appearing in the hallway outside my bedroom. I blink at him, realizing I’ve been lost in my thoughts.
“Soon,” I promise, returning to the hairbrush and blow dryer on the vanity in front of me. “I just have to finish getting ready.”
I’m not going—after Ettie saw what happened on the Today, Tomorrow show, she’d offered to watch Gus for me so I could have a day off. I guess I didn’t keep it together as much as I thought I had on camera.
I thought the entire son being on TV and announcing to the world that he wants a dad for Christmas might have been enough to distract me from Russell’s birthmark, but it hasn’t been.
Even though I followed that guy’s suggestion and made an Instagram for Gus, and it’s been getting tens of thousands of views, I still can’t stop thinking about Russell and my mystery man.
And, more specifically, how they might be the same person.
Especially not when, breaking down on the side of the set, Russell was right there with his arms around me, comforting me through it. And all I could think about, while pressed against his chest, was Gus’s father.
The man from the masquerade party.
It was the best fuck of my life, and more than that, he’d read me so well, and so instantly, that it scared me.
I’d run off, thinking that would be the end of it.
After the break-up with Dax—finding out he had a whole wife and family—the last thing I needed was to get involved with a guy who could look right past my defenses.
Only later, when I found out I was pregnant, did I realize how impossible and embarrassing it would be to try and figure out his identity.
Sure, I could have gone to the gala organizers and asked around, described him—but to what end? Hey, guy in a fit suit, black mask—we fucked on the balcony and now I’m pregnant with his kid.
Not possible. I didn’t even have a name, and I wasn’t about to put an ad in the newspaper, or on one of those missed connection sites.
I thought I would never see him again.
I thought I would never see that birthmark again. But it was identical—it’s been seared into my memory, its shape and location. What’s the likelihood that two men both roughly the same age and height would have that mark behind their ear?
Russell’s dad was there. And I still remember the quick read I’d made on my mystery man, what I’d said to him that night, before we went to the balcony together.
Surgeon. You’ve got the ego for it. And you grew up wealthy, if not just like, completely loaded. You expect everyone to like you automatically.
Because you’re handsome, and you know you are. Not just handsome, but so conventionally attractive. But none of this is the real you. You’re putting on an act. Hiding something that makes you feel like you’re not enough.
I’m good at reading people. And if I got it right back then, and that man really was Russell, it was a spot-on read. He is a surgeon. And that thing he was hiding was the infertility, his history with the ex-fiancée.
“Mommy?” Gus prompts again, and I turn off the blow dryer, realizing my hair has passed dry and is not a frizz-fest. Sighing, I run my hands over it and nod at him, grabbing my bag from the bed.
I’m just walking him down the hall to Ettie’s, then maybe grabbing something from the deli downstairs and burrowing into the couch for the rest of the night.
“Okay, okay, let’s go,” I laugh, following him out of the apartment and down the hall. He laughs and swings his bag, and I can’t stop myself from searching him for pieces of someone else.
Pieces of Russell.
But it can’t be. It’s impossible. Russell told me himself—his last engagement ended over it.
I’m infertile.
Russell can’t have biological children. He made it clear, said he looked over the tests himself.
I have no idea what a test like that would look like, but it hits me now that he’s never worried about a condom for contraceptive.
Never commented about my birth control or even asked if I was making sure to take it.
Nothing about him contradicts the truth of what he told me.
“Jules.”
“Shit sorry,” I laugh, blinking and realizing Gus has already run inside Ettie’s, and she’s standing at the door, waving a hand in my face.
“Take the night off, seriously,” she says, shooing me away. “Please, try and sleep it off, girl.”
“I will,” I laugh, waving to her as I turn and head for the stairs, planning to go to the deli and get something for dinner. If I’m being honest, it will probably end up being chicken noodle soup, because Russell has me hooked on it. Now, that soup makes me think of him.
As though the thought of him summons the text, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
Russell: What are you doing tonight?
Jules: Gus is with Ettie, I’m just going to binge watch some Gilmore Girls. Aren’t you supposed to be in surgery?
Russell: It was canceled. Want to binge at my place instead?
Jules: Sure, when were you thinking?
I stop in the lobby, phone in my hand, and when I look up through the glass, I see Russell stopped on the street outside, his hand resting on the steering wheel as he texts me back.
When he looks up and catches my gaze, I’m torn through with too many different feelings. First, wanting to straight-up ask him if he was having sex with a stranger that night five years ago. Second, knowing that if I go to his place right now, I’ll be binging, but just not a TV show.
“Jules,” he says, leaving his car and meeting me at the door, a smile stretched over his face and making his dimples pop. “Come on, I already ordered our food.”
Russell’s place is, somehow, even better than what I could have imagined.
He greets the woman at the front desk—who’s in full red lipstick and a sleek paneled dress—and ushers me over to a private elevator, which we ride upward for longer than what feels realistically possible.
“I’m starting to think this is the elevator from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” I whisper, right before the gentle chime that alerts us we’ve reached the right floor.
“I declined the self-ejection feature,” he murmurs, and when the elevator doors slide open, I let out an embarrassing gasp.
His building is in River North, one block back from the water but tall enough to easily capture the view.
The moment we step out of the elevator, I feel a wave of vertigo, the floor-to-ceiling windows and wrap-around deck giving me the sense that I could just walk right off the side of the living room and plummet to the ground below.
“It will pass,” Russell laughs, skimming his hand over my arm and guiding me inside. “Made me dizzy the first time I came up here, too.”
“And now? How can you stand it?”
“Just wait until the morning, and you’ll realize it has its perks.”
“I mean,” I say, swallowing, stepping into the living room and past the couch, getting as close to the windows as I dare. Chicago stretches out and around us, dark but for the blinking, shimmering lights. “This is pretty fucking perky.”
“Want anything to drink?” he asks, pulling open a cabinet that’s actually a fridge. I stare at him, swallowing at the sight of him in the sleek white and bamboo kitchen, standing so casually in a room that must have cost more than my entire apartment building.
When I don’t answer, he closes that door, then opens another to reveal a wine fridge, pulling out a bottle and setting it on the counter.
I’m turning in a slow circle, heart hammering as I take it in.
Last year, for my birthday, Ettie got me a suite at one of the fanciest hotels in Chicago. We had a great time wrapping ourselves up in the fluffy robes and rolling around in the king-sized bed while the kids stayed with a flustered Sienna. I thought that was the pinnacle of luxury.
But now, standing in his apartment, I’m breathless with the reality he lives. I’ve seen it, through his clothes and his car, the way he throws money at Gus and me like it’s nothing, but this is different. I can no longer deny that there’s something fundamentally different about me and him.
“Juliette?” he asks, stretching out my whole name. I turn to look at him, swallowing at the sight of his socked feet on the floor. I’ve touched him, held him, let him do what he wants with me, and yet, the sight of him in nothing but socks is making me feel suddenly like this is far too intimate.
The question is on the tip of my tongue—and should be easy to ask. Were you at the ball? The night your dad announced his diagnosis, did you…?
But how can I ask something like that? I like to tell myself that I’m not ashamed of what happened that night—I was a grown woman with a grown man. I was on birth control. Yes, it was an accident, but Gus is still the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
And yet, I don’t want to ask Russell if he was there, because it would be revealing the truth of how Gus was conceived. Being reckless and sleeping with a man I’d just met—a man whose name I didn’t even know.
“Do you want a tour?” Russell asks, surprising me out of my thoughts, and I think—yes, of course I want a tour of your stupidly grand apartment.
“Yes, of course I want a tour of this stupidly expensive apartment,” I say, which isn’t much of an improvement, but it makes him laugh and turn, abandoning the wine on the counter to show me around.
A double fireplace, half inside the unit and half outside on the patio. Two separate living rooms, an exercise space, and in the center of it all, somehow, a staircase I hadn’t even noticed.
“A two-story apartment,” I mutter, shaking my head.
“Technically, it’s a condo,” he says, and when I roll my eyes at him, he grabs my hip and pulls me toward him, and it makes my stomach flip.
Four bedrooms on the second floor, and another sitting room.
“Three guest rooms,” I mutter, to which Russell responds, “I told you I had room for you and Gus.”