11. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
He’s up the stairs in thirty seconds.
Then my front door gives up.
I don’t see it. I’m on the terrace floor with my back against the railing and my legs out in front of me like a dropped doll, and all I get is the sound of it.
My landlord is going to have opinions.
Footsteps through the dark of my living room. They stop in the middle of it, because the bed is empty and the sheets are thrown back and there’s nobody in this apartment at all.
“Solenn-”
“Terrace. Try not to break anything else on the way.”
He’s across the room before I finish it, down on his knees on the concrete, hands going to my face, my shoulders, hovering over my stomach without landing.
“What happened?”
“Pain. It woke me up. I couldn’t get to my phone because I charge it across the room.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes? Fifteen?”
“Is it constant or is it coming in waves?”
I stop. Look at him properly for the first time.
“Waves.”
“Okay.” He’s already moving. “We’re going. Don’t stand up.”
“I can walk.”
“You’re not walking.”
And then he lifts me, one arm under my knees and one across my back, and stands up with me like I weigh nothing at all.
“This is ridiculous. I have functioning legs.”
“Noted.”
“This is very dramatic. Even for you.”
“Also noted.”
“Are you going to note everything I say?”
“If it keeps you talking, yes.”
Another one rolls through me and my fist closes in his shirt without permission.
“Fine. Carry me. But if you drop me I’m haunting you.”
“I’m not going to drop you.”
“That’s what they all say right before they drop someone.”
“Solenn.” Something goes through his voice. “Please. Let me do this.”
I stop arguing.
Five flights. He takes them two at a time and doesn’t slow down, and somewhere around the second floor I stop being a woman in pain long enough to notice that he isn’t breathing hard.
He’s counting.
Under his breath, barely there, matching my breaths and keeping them even. In on two, out on four. He’s doing it so I’ll copy him, and I do, and it works, and I resent that enormously.
“You know, if my building had a working elevator-”
“It’s been out since Thursday.”
“You know about my elevator?”
“I know about everything on this street.”
“That’s alarming.”
“You’re welcome.”
***
The car is running. He never turned it off.
There’s a folded blanket on the passenger seat, and a paper bag in the footwell, and he moves both without comment before he sets me down and does my seatbelt himself, low across my hips, the way you’re supposed to.
His hands are shaking. His voice isn’t.
“Talk to me. Anything.”
“You’re doing the thing where you’re calm at me.”
“Is it working?”
“Irritatingly.”
He drives like the speed limits are a suggestion somebody made once.
One hand on the wheel, one flat on my knee, and he takes the turn onto the highway without slowing and without hesitating, because he already knows the route to a hospital in a town he’s lived in for a few weeks because he owns it.
“If you say one word about the hospital,” I tell him, “I will get out of this car at speed.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Your silence is smug.”
“My silence is terrified.”
“Join the club. We have jackets.”
Somewhere between the parking lot and the doors his hand finds mine and stays.
“Still with me?”
Everything in me stops.
Those are the words he said in a penthouse the night he asked. The words he said at an altar with his mother in the front row in a dress that wasn’t quite white. Words that used to mean breathe, I’ve got the rest of it.
He hasn’t said them since.
“Solenn.” His voice comes apart on it. “Stay with me.”
I squeeze his hand, because it’s the only answer available.
“Where would I go? You’re driving.”
***
The doors open, and a woman in scrubs comes toward us with a chair, and Liam Sharpe does not shout at anybody. He doesn’t drop a name, or ask for a supervisor, or do a single one of the things a man like him does when he wants a room to rearrange itself.
He just talks.
“Solenn Alston, twenty-five. Seventeen weeks. Cramping and spotting, onset around two, coming in waves, no fall and no impact. Her doctor is Mendez. She’s A positive, she’s not allergic to anything, she takes a prenatal and nothing else.”
The nurse writes it down without looking up. “Any history?”
“Nothing. First pregnancy. Blood pressure ran high at her last appointment and she was told to watch it.”
And I sit in that chair in a nightgown at two in the morning with the whole bottom falling out of my life, and what I feel, absolutely inconveniently, is a hot slide under my ribs.
He knows my blood type.
Nobody told him my blood type. He went and found it, and he learned it, and he kept it in his head for the exact scenario in which somebody would ask him fast.
I have been trying for weeks not to notice this man’s face.
It turns out the face was never the problem.
***
The baby is fine. I make them say it three times.
“The baby is fine, Ms. Alston. Some bleeding, blood pressure up where I don’t like it, and both of those have already settled on the monitor.” Dr. Mendez doesn’t blink at me. “Totally fine. I promise.”
“Can I get that notarized?”
“I can print you the strip.”
“That might actually help.”
“I know.” She checks the numbers again, then glances at the door, where Liam has been standing since they wheeled me in, not quite inside the room, like a man waiting to be invited across a threshold.
“Do you want him to hear this part, or do you want him in the corridor? Either is fine and I won’t make it awkward. ”
I could send him out.
I’m too tired to want to, and there’s a smaller, stubborner thing underneath the tiredness that doesn’t want to either, and I don’t have the energy to interrogate.
“He can stay.”
Something happens in his face that I decide not to look at directly.
“Right.” Mendez turns on him. “Modified activity. That does not mean bed rest, and I want that clear before either of you starts building a hospital bed into a house. She works, she walks, she does not lift, she does not stand for more than ninety minutes without sitting down. Fluids. Iron with orange juice, never with tea. Weekly with me until I’m bored of her.
And if the bleeding comes back at all, she comes straight in, day or night. ”
He writes down every word. Actually writes it, in a small notebook out of his jacket, in handwriting so neat it makes me want to throw something.
“Are you taking minutes? Is this a board meeting?”
“I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Is there a quiz?”
“There might be.”
“Any questions, Mr. Sharpe?” says Mendez, who is enjoying herself.
“What counts as lifting. Is there a weight? Should she be off her feet at the desk or is sitting enough. What are the warning signs, in order, so I know which one means call you and which one means drive. How much water, in actual measurements, not glasses.”
“Liam.”
He stops.
“She said the baby’s fine.”
“I know.”
“Write it down. Baby. Fine. Underline it.”
He underlines it.
Mendez catches my eye on her way out and gives me a look that says, without any ambiguity whatsoever, this one is going to be a handful.
I don’t disagree.
***
The private room is absurd.
Windows to the floor, multiple couches for guests, flowers on every surface, and a television you could land a plane on. It’s like a premium hotel suite with a hospital bed.
“Did you design this room specifically?”
He drops into the chair beside the bed. “What?”
“Is there a plaque? The Solenn Alston Memorial Suite For Women Who Shouted At Their Ex-Husbands In Parking Lots?”
“There’s no plaque.”
“Yet.”
“…Yet.”
“I knew it. Gold?”
“Bronze. I’m being restrained.”
Laughing hurts, but it’s a different hurt than an hour ago. Then I see the paper bag on the chair by the door.
“What’s that?”
“Your things.”
“From where?”
“Your apartment. I went back for it while they were doing the scan.” He says it like it’s nothing. “Toothbrush, hairbrush, the cardigan off the back of your door, the charger, and the socks with the ducks on them, because the floors in here are cold and you’re always cold.”
I look at that bag for a while.
“You went back to my apartment.”
“Your door was open. I broke it. Then I tried placing the door back in the frame.”
“You broke my door and then packed me a bag.”
“I also called your landlord and left a message. He’s going to be extremely annoyed and I’ve offered to pay for it twice.”
There’s a small ugly lump arriving in my throat and I decline to give it anywhere to go.
“You’ve been sleeping in your car.”
He doesn’t deny it. “Some nights.”
“Liam. It’s been how many weeks.”
“There’s a motel.”
“Then why-”
“I have a room at it.” He looks at his hands. “Room ten. Paid weekly. There’s a bed and everything.”
“You have a bed and you sleep in the car?”
“From the room I can’t see your window.”
The silence goes on for a while after that.
“Do you want to know why I left?”
His hand stops on the notebook. “Yes.”
“Put the pen down. Don’t take notes on this.”
He puts the pen down.
“Your mother told me I looked like a maid. At the gala. Not the wife, the maid, and she said it kindly, in a room I had spent weeks building, wearing the only dress I owned that fit.”
He doesn’t move.
“I found you afterward and I tried to tell you what I’d done.
The florist quit two days out and I fixed it.
The caterer called me at midnight about shrimp.
And you told me you’d hired professionals for the planning, and that I should have spent more time getting ready, because I was representing the Sharpe family. ”
“Solenn-”
“You wanted this. Sit there.”
He sits there.
“Then I went out to the corridor to not cry in front of a few hundred people, and I put my hand on the wall, and I heard your mother ask you whether you loved me.” My voice does something I don’t authorize. “And I heard what you said.”
His face goes the color of the sheets.
“So I went home, and I went to bed, and you didn’t ask why. In the morning you were gone by six.” I hold up one finger. “And then I texted you that I needed space, and you wrote ok. One word. Two letters. No question mark anywhere in it.”
“I-”
“You didn’t ask where I was. You didn’t ask if I was coming back. You ignored me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I packed two suitcases in a penthouse that never once felt like mine, and I left everything you ever bought me on the hangers, and you didn’t notice I was gone until a man in a cheap suit put paper on your table.”
“I noticed on the first night.”
“Then why didn’t you call?”
“Because you asked for space.” He says it flatly, no defense in it at all. “And because taking you at your word cost me nothing, and I have spent my whole life doing whatever costs me nothing.”
That lands somewhere I wasn’t braced for.
He takes a breath.
“I said it. In the corridor. I told my mother I didn’t know if I was in love with you.” He’s looking straight at me now. “And I meant it when I said it.”
I close my eyes.
“That’s what makes it mine to fix. The distance between the man who said that and this one. That’s my responsibility. Not yours. Mine.”
“You can’t just-”
“I never courted you.”
I open my eyes.
“Two months of whatever that was. A fling. Something I didn’t have a name for and didn’t look for one.
Then you were pregnant and I proposed because it was the right thing to do, not because it was the real thing, and we got married with my mother glaring from the front row.
” He leans forward. “I never bought you flowers. I never took you to dinner that wasn’t work.
I never learned your favorite color or your music or how you take your coffee. ”
“Just black, actually.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. Write it down.”
His mouth twitches. He doesn’t let it get any further.
“I want to do it right. From the beginning. The way it should have gone.”
“We’re divorced.”
“I’m aware. I was in the room.”
“You can’t just decide to start over.”
“Court you?” he says. “Date you? Earn you? Watch me.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Whichever one gets a yes.”
He picks the notebook back up and turns it around so I can see the page.
“Dr. Mendez said reduced stress. I’m outsourcing yours to me.”
“That is not what she meant.”
“I’m interpreting liberally.”
“That’s a terrible legal position.”
“Good thing I’m not a lawyer.”
And then, with nothing in front of it and nothing after it to soften the landing.
“I love you.”
Simple. No speech attached.
“I didn’t know it until you were gone, and that’s mine to carry. But I know it now.”
“That’s very inconvenient timing.”
“Is it?”
“I’m in a hospital gown that’s open at the back.”
“It’s the best moment of my life.”
“Your life needs work.”
“That’s the entire point of the exercise.”
My eyes are burning and I refuse, absolutely refuse, to give him that.
“You don’t have to say it back.” He stands. “You don’t have to do anything at all. I wanted you to have it.”
I should remind him what we are on paper.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
He stops at the door. It is not a yes.
It is absolutely a yes.
“First date’s coming.” He doesn’t turn around. “Fair warning. I’ve been taking notes.”
“From the stalker notebook?”
“From your paperback that I took from your apartment. Chapter twelve has some excellent groveling in it.”
The door shuts. I lie there in the most expensive room I have ever been horizontal in, and I go through the paper bag with one hand, item by item, twice.
Toothbrush. Hairbrush. Cardigan. Charger. Ducks.
No book.
“That’s my book, you thief.”
Through the door, already halfway down the corridor, “Research.”