Chapter Eleven
Casey
EIGHT DAYS AFTER I send the letter, Sterling Hollingsford is standing on my doorstep in Asheville.
I know it’s him before I open the door, because I know his knock.
That’s a thing I didn’t realize I still knew, that Sterling Hollingsford knocks twice, firm, evenly spaced, with the confidence of a man who expects every door to open.
He knocked that way on my apartment door in Charlotte.
He knocked that way on the bathroom door the morning he proposed.
I haven’t heard it in four years, but I know the sound before I consciously think his name.
My pulse picks up. Not fear but an older instinct that lives in the part of me that was married to this man, shared his bed, and fell asleep listening to his breathing. Four years of trying to forget, and two knocks undid it.
I’m in pajama pants and a T-shirt with a bleach stain on the hem.
Sienna is asleep in the back bedroom with Bart tucked under her chin.
It’s 8:33 on a Saturday morning, I haven’t brushed my teeth, and the man who threw me out of his house four years ago is standing on my porch in Asheville even though I’m not ready to face him.
I open the door but don’t invite him in.
He looks different. Older, which is obvious, but older in a way that goes past the face.
There are lines around his eyes that weren’t there at twenty-nine.
His hair is shorter, cut with the aggressive precision of a man whose barber knows not to make conversation, and the gray at his temples is new.
He’s thinner, a runner’s build, maintained through punishment rather than pleasure.
It’s fanciful, but I imagine it’s the body of a man who exercises to exhaust himself. He deserves that.
The last time I saw this man, he was standing in a living room in Charlotte telling me to leave.
He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearms, and his face had the expression I later understood was relief, relief that the worst thing he’d been expecting had finally happened, because the waiting was over.
I packed one bag and drove away, and I haven’t seen him since.
Four years isn’t nothing. It’s an entire life, Sienna’s life, built from scratch in a city where nobody knew my married name, my husband’s net worth, or why I’d moved alone to a two-bedroom apartment in West Asheville at twenty-nine years old and seven weeks pregnant.
Four years of morning meds, insurance appeals, Hettie next door, and the chain under my shirt with the ring I haven’t looked at but still wear.
Now he’s standing on my porch, and the welcome mat has a cat on it wearing a hat. The welcome mat isn’t for him.
He looks at me, and his face shifts in a way I can’t name. It isn’t surprise or relief. An emotion older than both, one that starts in his eyes and stops at his mouth, as though his body wants to react and he’s overriding it in real time.
Then the override kicks in, and he’s Sterling again. He’s controlled, precise. Furious in the register that comes out as courtesy.
“Casey.”
“Sterling.”
“I got a letter from your attorney.”
“I’m aware. I told her to send it.”
“May I come in?”
“No.” I cross my arms over my chest.
He absorbs this and doesn’t push. He stands on my porch, expensive shoes on the welcome mat Sienna picked out at a craft fair last spring. It has a cat on it, wearing a hat. He looks at the doorframe, then at me.
“I have a daughter,” he says. He sounds skeptical.
“I have a daughter. You contributed DNA. You don’t have a relationship with her.”
His lip curls. “I have a daughter I didn’t know existed until eight days ago.”
“Yes.”
“She’s four.”
“She’s four years and five months.” He’ll want the firm facts so he can do the math.
“She’s sick?” He’s regarding me with suspicion, like I’ve invented all this for a payout. He has no trouble believing the worst about me.
“She has severe aplastic anemia. She’s been in treatment for eighteen months.
She needs a bone marrow transplant, and the registry hasn’t produced a match, which is why my attorney contacted you.
” I deliver it clinically, the same way I’d deliver it to a parent in a consult room, because clinical is the only way I can function right now.
If I step out of clinical, I’ll step into an emotion I haven’t let myself feel in four years, and I can’t afford that either.
“I want to see her.”
“No.”
“She’s my daughter.”
The word daughter in his mouth a second time hits somewhere I wasn’t braced for. I don’t let it show.
“She’s a four-year-old who’s asleep in her bedroom with a stuffed elephant, and she doesn’t know you exist. You don’t get to see her because you showed up on a Saturday morning without calling first.”
He scowls. He adjusts his cuff, a gesture I haven’t seen in four years and one I recognize immediately, adjusting because the conversation went differently than he planned. He gets more courteous when he’s angry. I remember that about him. I hate that I remember it.
“I’ll coordinate with the transplant team on the typing,” I tell him. “You can have your paternity test. My attorney will arrange it.”
His eyes narrow. “You knew I’d want one?”
“I knew you’d require one. There’s a difference, and you should think about what that means.”
His mouth thins. “You hid my daughter from me for four years.”
“You threw me out of our house on your mother’s word and your sister’s lie. You didn’t ask me a single question. You told me not to come back.” I don’t raise my voice. I deliver each sentence at the same volume and pace, because the truth is in my side. “You got what you asked for.”
My throat aches. The sentences came out steadily, but they cost me. I haven’t felt this kind of fury in years, and I’m not going to let him see it.
“That isn’t fair.”
“I didn’t promise you fair. I promised you the truth, once, in our living room. You chose your mother’s version. That was your decision, Sterling. You made it in front of me. I was there.”
He absorbs this. I remember what it looks like when Sterling processes something he can’t argue with, his eyes move, tracking the logic, testing it for weaknesses, and when he doesn’t find any, his whole posture shifts half an inch, as though the ground moved under him, and he’s adjusting his balance.
“You told me you were leaving with him,” he says.
His voice drops, and it isn’t an accusation.
A fact he’s held for four years, the foundation of every decision he’s made since, and I can hear it in his voice.
He needs this to be true. If it isn’t true, then everything he’s built on top of it collapses. I no longer care what he needs.
I look at my husband. He’s standing on my porch in Asheville, four years older, still married to me on paper, still believing the thing his mother planted in him that night. He’s looking at me with the expression of someone wronged.
He has been wronged, but he let himself be. Even worse, he wronged both of us and Sienna. He actively participated in destroying the future we could have had.
I don’t correct him. I don’t tell him what I meant.
I don’t explain the pregnancy or the OB appointment or the sentence I rehearsed the whole drive home that I never got to say.
He should have asked four years ago. He didn’t, so I’m not going to answer a question he never asked just because he’s standing on my porch now.
“You told me not to come back,” I say. “That’s all I have to say about it.”
“Casey—”
“Whatever rights you think you have, you’ll exercise them through a court. You don’t exercise them on my doorstep this early, unannounced, on a Saturday.”
He opens his mouth then closes it. He adjusts his cuff again. I remember a man who straightened papers when he was upset and squared folder edges when he was frightened. The memory sits in me like a stone.
“I’ll have Martin contact your attorney,” he says. He sounds like he’s concluding a meeting. “I’ll cooperate with the typing.”
“Good.”
“Casey, I —”
The hallway light comes on behind me. I hear small feet on the hardwood. Sienna appears at my side in her pajamas, Bart dangling from one arm, her auburn hair a disaster, her gray eyes. Sterling’s gray eyes, squinting against the porch light.
“Mommy, who’s that?”
Sterling looks at his daughter for the first time.
Recognition clearly hits him, then shock, then grief arriving four years late. She has his eyes. She has his jaw. She has the exact shape of his mouth, compressed into a four-year-old’s face.
She’s looking up at him with total unconcern, because she’s four and he’s a stranger in a doorway.
The central line scar is visible above the neckline of her pajama top.
Sterling’s gaze goes to it, and he pales when it registers what it means.
Not the medical detail, which he doesn’t understand yet, but the fact of it.
The evidence of something hard that happened to this child, his child, while he far away in Charlotte.
“Hi,” Sienna says.
Sterling doesn’t speak. His mouth opens but nothing comes out. I watch a man who has never been at a loss for words in his life stand on my porch and lose every one of them. He can’t even say hi to a four-year-old.
“He’s leaving.” I say it to Sienna, but I’m looking at Sterling, and my voice is steady because it has to be. “He came to talk to me about something, and now he’s leaving.”
Sterling looks at me. He looks at Sienna. He opens his mouth, and I think he’s going to say something to her, introduce himself, ask her name, or say the word that would reveal everything. I can see him forming the sentence
“He’s leaving,” I say again, firmer this time.
Sterling closes his mouth. He nods once, a small, precise movement that costs him effort I can see and he’s trying not to show.
Then he turns and walks down my porch steps, across the little yard, and gets into a car I don’t recognize.
He sits there for a long time before he starts the engine.
I close the door before I have to watch him drive away.
I lock the door. I pick up Sienna. She’s too light, with a sick body that doesn’t make enough blood, and I carry her back to her room.
She wraps her arms around my neck and rests her head against my shoulder.
She’s warm. She smells like strawberry shampoo and the sweetness that belongs only to young children.
“Mommy, who was he?”
“Someone I used to know.” The answer is true. It’s also wildly insufficient, but it’ll do for now.
“Was he sad?”
The question stops me. I set her down on her bed, tuck the blanket around her, and hand her Bart. She takes him by the trunk and settles him against her chest.
“Why do you think he was sad?” I ask.
“He had a sad face.” She pauses, considering. “Like when I’m scared at the hospital, but bigger.”
I sit on the edge of her bed. We finish the book we were reading last night, a story about a rabbit who plants a garden that grows too big for her yard.
“Mommy, can rabbits grow tomatoes?”
“Rabbits eat tomatoes. They don’t grow them.”
“Bart could grow tomatoes.”
“Bart doesn’t have opposable thumbs.”
She looks at me with the focused seriousness of a child encountering a new word. “What are opposable thumbs?”
I hold up my hand and wiggle my thumb against my fingers. “These. They let you grip things. Pick up seeds, hold a shovel, or turn the pages of a book.”
“Do elephants have them?”
“No. Elephants have trunks, which are better.”
She considers this, running her thumb across Bart’s trunk. “Bart has a trunk and thumbs.”
“Bart’s an overachiever.”
I read the whole book a second time when she asks.
My voice is fine. It doesn’t shake or crack.
I’ve been holding this together for four years.
I’ll hold it together for as long as it takes.
The man on the porch doesn’t change that, his face when he saw her doesn’t change that, and that he looked at her and knew doesn’t change anything at all.
I close the book and tuck the blanket around her shoulders. She just woke up, but she’s still clearly tired. She’ll need another transfusion soon despite the one last week.
“I love you, baby.”
“I love you, Mommy.” She pulls Bart closer. “Bart loves you too.”
“Tell Bart I love him back.”
She whispers into Bart’s ear, then nods. “He says okay.”
I kiss her forehead and close her door, leaving her to nap.
I go into the bathroom and turn on the fan. I put my back against the door and slide down until I’m sitting on the tile floor with my knees drawn up.
The tile is cold. The fan hums. My teeth are chattering, which is ridiculous since the apartment is seventy-two degrees. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried. I didn’t try, because there was a four-year-old in the next room. Now I’m not in the next room. I’m not holding anything.
I sat on this floor the night Sienna was diagnosed. I sat here the night her first treatment failed, and they started the second. I sat here the night I couldn’t get her fever below one-oh-three and Hettie drove us to the ER at two in the morning.
I’ve sat on this floor a lot. It’s where I go when I’ve held everything together for as long as I can and need somewhere to put it down for five minutes.
Sterling looked at his daughter today, knew she was his, and clearly broke inside. I watched it happen, and a part of me broke too. I held it together because that’s what I do. Now I’m on the bathroom floor and the shaking won’t stop.
I sit there for a long time, but I don’t cry.