Chapter Six #2
“Martin Yoon, my attorney, who’s become more like my second in command.
He was a junior associate at the firm my father used, and when Richard left, Martin was the only one who didn’t treat me like a child playing dress-up in the corner office.
He stayed. Everyone else waited to see whether I’d fail. ”
“You didn’t fail.” I’m confident because he’s shown he hasn’t, and he wouldn’t accept failure. That’s just how he is.
“I didn’t fail.” He pauses. “I also didn’t sleep for about two years, which I don’t recommend.”
I laugh softly. “I’m a night-shift nurse. I haven’t slept properly since clinical rotations. We’re very compatible in our dysfunction.”
He almost laughs. Almost. The laugh gets stuck somewhere between his chest and his throat, and what comes out is a breath that has a hint of a laugh without the sound.
It’s not the first time his laughter has failed to properly launch.
I suspect he has too many serious things on his mind in moments like these.
I hope to help him learn to relax more..
“Was there someone else?” I ask. “When he left, I mean? Was he leaving for someone?”
He doesn’t answer. The pause stretches long enough that I stop waiting for words. What matters is his expression, which has become grim.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know.”
“I’m asking because I want to understand you, not because I need the answer tonight.”
He turns his head and looks at me, and whatever is in his face right now is the thing that made his voice catch at the courthouse. Old damage. A wound he’s built walls around, not to protect it but to contain it, but tonight, one of the walls has a crack in it and I can see through.
“There was someone,” he says. “I’ll tell you the full story eventually, but not tonight.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not going to push?”
“I don’t want to ruin this moment, and I’m not going to push.
You’ll tell me when you’re ready. If you’re never ready, I’ll survive not knowing.
” I pause. “Although if you’re never ready, I’m going to assume the worst, and the worst in my imagination involves a lot of scenarios that are probably more dramatic than the truth. ”
“They’re not more dramatic than the truth.”
That sounds different than maybe he means it to. I can tell because his mouth thins. It’s not a flinch but more of a correction, as though he edged a quarter-inch past where he meant to stop. I don’t follow it. Following it tonight would be pushing, and I already told him I wouldn’t push.
“Okay,” I say again. I put my hand on his chest because I want him to feel me here, present, not going anywhere. His heartbeat is steady under my palm.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says.
I believe he means it. I also hear that saying it costs him, like a toll he pays every time he lets someone close enough to leave.
We lie there together without speaking for a while.
His breathing slows. Mine doesn’t, because my husband just told me his father disappeared to Fiji, and my brain is building a clinical picture from incomplete data.
Father left. Someone else involved. Sterling was twenty-three.
Sterling doesn’t finish sentences about it.
Sterling’s voice catches on forsaking all others.
“Sometimes, I wonder if you’d notice if I disappeared for a week,” he says. His voice is light, teasing, as though he’s asking whether I want coffee. He seems to be trying to redirect from the more somber discussion.
I laugh. “I’d notice by Tuesday. I’d be out of clean coffee mugs. Also, you’d miss three board meetings, and Martin would have a stroke.”
He laughs after a second. “Martin has survived worse.”
“Martin has survived you, which is worse than anything I can imagine.”
He grins against my hair. The conversation is over. I let it be over because it was a joke, and there’s no reason to treat it like anything else. Yet something prickles in the back of my mind. Was he joking?
I’m half-asleep with my face against his shoulder when words slip out that I hadn’t planned to utter tonight. “I want to meet your family.”
He stops stroking my back. “My mother’s in Tuscany until the fall. She and Brittany are traveling.”
“Brittany’s your sister?”
“Yes. She’s twenty-three.”
“You haven’t talked much about her.”
He shrugs. I can feel it in the darkness. “There isn’t much to talk about. She’s Brittany. She’s my mother’s project, and Gretchen Hollingsford has exacting standards.”
He says it without cruelty, which makes it worse.
The picture of a family I haven’t met yet is already forming.
Gretchen Hollingsford is a woman with exacting standards whose husband left her for Fiji and whose son married a nurse from Hickory without asking permission.
I don’t need to meet her to understand the situation.
“When do they get back?”
“October, probably. Maybe November.”
My stomach dips with anxiety, but I force it back.
We don’t need anyone’s permission to be married, and I can handle whatever his mother might throw at me if she doesn’t like me.
I try to tell myself she will, but she’s a billionaire with exacting standards.
I’m a night shift ED nurse. She’ll probably dislike what I am, but I’m hopeful I can win her over.
Most people end up liking me. “Then I’ll meet them when they get back. Both of them.”
He doesn’t say anything for long enough that I lift my head. His face is doing the thing it does when he’s running numbers, his eyes move, tracking numbers I can’t see. “We have time,” he says. He pulls me closer.
I close my eyes because I’m tired, married, and warm. I don’t understand why it sounds like a warning and am too tired to spend more energy worrying about it tonight.