Chapter 7 #3
“Saylor!” a voice I vaguely recognize calls out.
I turn. And I know her immediately.
The blond curls. The blue eyes. The small frame, barely five-three, now unmistakably pregnant in a way that her black funeral dress couldn’t quite conceal.
The last time I saw this woman, she was standing in my office doorway holding a tan legal envelope, tears welling in her eyes, telling me she was really glad to meet me.
Raven. She spots us and makes a beeline for the booth, sliding in next to Saylor with the easy familiarity of someone who has decided they belong here and isn’t interested in waiting for an invitation.
“Hi.” She beams at me across the table with an intensity that borders on unhinged. “Oh my God, Celeste, your speech was incredible. I was sobbing. Like, full ugly-cry. Whitney would’ve loved every second of it. She would have been so proud of you.”
I look at Saylor. His expression is carefully neutral, but his shoulders rise almost imperceptibly before settling back down, like he’s bracing for impact and hiding it badly.
I look back at Raven. The woman from my office. The legal courier from Valcott & Finch. The one who handed me the envelope that brought me here. Who is now sitting in Whitney’s booth, at Whitney’s restaurant, talking about Whitney like she knew her.
“Raven,” I say slowly. “You delivered the documents to my office.”
“Yes!” She reaches for a roll, dunks it in dip, and pops it in her mouth with the enthusiasm of someone who has been nauseous for four months and is currently experiencing a window of tolerance. “I can’t believe you remember me.”
“I’ve got a knack for remembering names. I thought you didn’t know Whitney. Yet, you attended the service?” I don’t say it unkindly. But I am aware, suddenly, that something is very wrong with this picture. Or very right with it. I can’t tell yet.
“Right. Yeah. That was—” She waves a hand. “A lie.”
She ends her sentence as if it needs no further explanation. She is very incorrect.
“I’m sorry. How do you two know each other?” This time I’m pointing between her and Saylor like a detective connecting pins on a board.
“We just met. At the funeral,” Saylor answers. Carefully.
“And you’re already this chummy?” I silence that quiet bitch named jealousy. First Greg, now Saylor. I remember when men so quickly wanted to be my friend too. Roughly more than a decade ago.
“We bonded aggressively,” Raven adds with zero carefulness. “He held my hair while I threw up in the men’s bathroom. So we have just met, but I’d say our friendship intensity is at least a year old.”
“The men’s bathroom?”
“The signs were very confusing,” Saylor adds.
I file this away. Something is building in the air between the three of us—a pressure change, like the deceptive warmth mere minutes before a hellacious storm breaks.
Saylor is too still. Raven is too animated.
And the thing Saylor has been trying to tell me all afternoon—the big thing, the thing that required a separate location and a third party—is sitting across from me with blond curls and a slight baby bump.
“Raven,” I say. “What do you do? At Valcott and Finch?”
The roll Raven helped herself to freezes halfway to her mouth. She glances at Saylor. He gives her the smallest nod.
“Okay.” Raven sets down the bread and takes a breath that seems to require her whole body. “I don’t work at Valcott and Finch. That was one of the lies.”
“One of them?”
“One of many,” Saylor chimes in. Raven shoots him a pointed look that seems to say: don’t you dare throw me under the bus, buddy, because I’ll take you with me.
“I don’t work there. I’ve never worked there. I just was familiar with that firm because of the Traces.”
The booth feels very small. The chalkboard burger with the cowboy hat grins at me from across the room.
“Then who are you?” I ask. Calm. Too calm. The kind of calm that precedes either an epiphany or a felony.
Raven’s hands drift to her stomach. That gesture again—protective, automatic, the same one she made in my office when I asked her how her pregnancy was going.
She looks at me and her light eyes fill with tears, and for the first time since she sat down, her energy shifts from manic to something raw and frightened and desperately honest.
“My name is Raven Pecker. And I’m a surrogate.”
“Pecker?” Saylor whips his head toward Raven, his brows narrowing in concern. “That’s your actual last name?”
Raven returns to her prior chirpy demeanor. “Oh, it sucks. And, my mother’s maiden name is Drews. After my parents got divorced she insisted I hyphenate, so for the longest time everyone made fun of me because my last name was—”
“Drew’s Pecker. Oh that sucks, Raven.” Saylor releases a sympathetic chuckle. “I’m sorry.”
Okay, this is bizarre. I realize Saylor flirts for a living, but no way he went to a funeral with me, found a stranger, struck up a whirlwind romance, mere minutes before asking me out all earnest and adorable. None of this is adding up. Why is Saylor suddenly so invested in…
Oh.
My eyes land shamelessly on Raven’s stomach as a thought scuttles into my mind. But there’s no way…right? No fucking way.
“Raven.” I say her name like a full sentence, effectively silencing her and Saylor. “Whose baby are you carrying?”
She exchanges a nervous glance with Saylor, further confirming my suspicions.
“Whitney’s. Well, Whitney and Donor Zero-two-five-three-three-seven.
” She examines my expressionless face, frozen in place as if her words are Botox.
She apparently feels the need to fill the uncomfortable silence.
“I just made up the donor number. That’s probably not accurate.
I only mean to say there’s no official dad.
So, it’s just Whitney’s. Well, and yours. ”
“I’m sorry?” I barely recognize the pitchy, strained sound that squeaks out of my throat, like someone’s stepped on a deflating balloon.
The world tilts.
Not dramatically—not a fainting, cinematic swoon. More like the moment on a boat when you realize the dock is moving and you’re standing still, and everything you thought was stable is actually floating.
Whitney’s baby.
Whitney was having a baby.
Whitney—for whom motherhood was never a question of if but when, who would wake me up with midnight texts about whether “Juniper” was too hipster or “Matilda” too old-fashioned, who carried a small notebook just for jotting down DIY nursery ideas.
The Whitney who was already trying to master the perfect after-school chocolate-chip cookie.
She was already a mother, she just didn’t have her baby yet.
I thought that ship had sailed for her.
How is this possible?
Whitney was going to be a mother. And I didn’t know.
“She wanted to tell you,” Raven says, as if she can hear my internal thought.
“She talked about you all the time. Almost every time I saw her. She’d tell me stories about you—how talented and smart you are, how beautiful and kind.
I didn’t realize you guys weren’t talking.
No one would’ve ever gotten that impression based on the way she talked about you.
She said she was going to surprise you with the baby news soon when she officially asked you to be her godmother—”
“Raven.” Saylor’s voice is gentle but firm. “Slow down. Let her breathe.”
But I don’t need to breathe. I need to understand.
“Whitney left the baby to me,” I say. It’s not a question.
The pieces have been assembling themselves since the moment Raven sat down—actually, since before that.
My first red flag was in the courtyard when Eleanor asked what are you here to collect, since the kitchen when she looked at me like I was a threat she hadn’t anticipated. “Does Eleanor know about the baby?”
Raven nods.
“Does Eleanor know Whitney wanted me to take the baby if something happened to her?”
She nods again. “You’re in her will, Celeste.
Whitney told me the day we conceived. She said if anything happened to her, there was only one person in the world she trusted with her baby.
” Her chin trembles. “She said that person was you. She told me specifically the paperwork was already drawn up.”
“Raven, if that were true, the executors would’ve sent me a copy of the will. Maybe Whitney told you that, but she changed her mind. It’s possible in the end, Whitney chose her mother. That’s okay.”
But Raven’s head whips side to side with such vehemence that her blond curls become a blur. “Eleanor is playing dirty. You’re in the will, Celeste. Eleanor is trying to hide it from you.”
“That’s illegal,” Saylor says. “She could get in big trouble. I doubt she’d do that and risk the consequences.”
“She’s not risking anything,” I muse to myself. How do I explain to Saylor and Raven that at a certain net worth, you start thinking you can operate above the law?
Saylor reaches across the table and collects my fingers in his. “You okay?”
I nod, but my fingers tell a different story as they grip his hand like it’s the only solid thing in a tilting world. “So I wasn’t actually invited to the service?”
Raven shrugs innocently. “I mean, I invited you. I don’t know if carrying Whitney’s baby gives me that authority, but I did it anyway.”
No wonder Eleanor looked like she saw a ghost when I appeared in that kitchen.
She was trying to gauge if I knew what she knew.
If I wanted what she apparently wants. But Eleanor?
With a baby? That can’t be right. Eleanor approaches motherhood like a surgeon performing an appendectomy with an oversized oven mitt—technically possible, but fundamentally disastrous for everyone involved.