Chapter Fourteen
Casey
THE HOLLINGSFORD ESTATE looks the same as I remember it, which means it looks like money that’s been here long enough to stop trying to impress anyone.
The hedges are trimmed to architectural precision.
The driveway curves through them like a statement about how much road you can own before it becomes a street.
We parked behind a silver sedan the first time Sterling brought me here to meet his mother. Today, I park behind a black SUV that wasn’t here four years ago.
Sienna is asleep in the back seat with Bart tucked under her chin, her auburn hair pressed against the car seat on one side. She fell asleep twenty minutes outside Charlotte, but she’s four, sick, and easily exhausted despite her most recent transfusion.
I’ve been sitting in this driveway for three minutes watching her sleep because the moment I open this car door, I’m inside Sterling Hollingsford’s life again, and I need three minutes to remember I’m Casey Weaver, not Hollingsford.
I’m Sienna’s mother, and I’m a nurse. I’m no longer his wife, though the paperwork says otherwise until I can file for divorce.
Now that he knows about her, there’s no reason to put off filing once the medical issues are sorted.
Most importantly, I’m here because my daughter needs a bone marrow transplant.
That’s the list. If I remember that, I can get through the next few months.
I unbuckle Sienna. She wakes up partway, mumbles something about Bart’s trunk, and settles against my shoulder.
I carry her up the front steps, because I’m not waking a sick four-year-old to walk into a house she’s never seen.
Sterling opens the door before I knock. He’s been watching from somewhere, a window maybe, but more likely a camera, and that he was monitoring my arrival tells me everything about how this arrangement will work. He’s not welcoming me. He’s tracking me.
“Casey.”
“Sterling.”
He looks at Sienna against my shoulder, then looks again as though the first glance wasn’t enough to make her real.
For a second, raw crosses his face. Then it’s gone, replaced by the expression I remember from boardrooms and term sheets.
He steps aside, nodding to a man in a suit nearby.
“Priory, arrange for someone to bring their luggage.”
The butler, different from the one almost five years ago, nods. “Yes, sir.”
The foyer is marble and high-ceilinged, and it smells like the same expensive nothing it smelled like the night Gretchen took me apart over lamb.
I’ve been inside this house three times over a period of a few months, after their return from Tuscany, and hated every one.
The house is beautiful in the way expensive things are beautiful, with everything chosen, nothing accidental, and none of it warm.
I’m sure that was Gretchen’s intention when she hired a decorator.
Sterling walks ahead of me toward the stairs.
He’s wearing dark slacks and a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm.
He looks like he slept about as well as I did, which isn’t at all, and underneath the exhaustion is a coldness I haven’t seen before.
He’s looking at me the way he’d look at an opposing counsel he’s been forced to negotiate with.
“I’ve had a room prepared for her,” he says. Not asking what Sienna needs. Announcing what he’s decided. “The transplant coordinator will call at ten tomorrow. I’ve arranged a consult with Osgood for Wednesday.”
I don’t bother arguing. I had planned to call Dr. Osgood myself today. “Show me.”
He leads me upstairs. The room is at the end of a hallway I’ve walked once before, when I went upstairs to freshen up during my last visit here. I was feeling nauseated but hadn’t yet connected it to pregnancy. At the time, I’d thought it was the rich food we’d been served for dinner.
The hallway is the same, with cream walls, hardwood floors, and an ornate runner.
There are photographs on the walls of Sterling with his mother at some charity event, and another of her with Brittany in a landscape that might be Tuscany at their summer house.
There are no photographs of me. There never were, but had there been, Gretchen would have ordered them taken down before I made it to the interstate when I left five years ago.
The room is beautiful. It’s been furnished by someone with a catalog, an unlimited budget, and no idea who Sienna is.
The bed has a canopy. The walls are painted a soft lavender.
There’s a bookshelf with new books arranged by height, and a rocking chair by the window that looks like an antique.
Everything matches. Everything coordinates.
She likes lavender well enough, but she prefers bright, primary colors.
There’s no art station anywhere, which makes sense with the ridiculous white rug. Who puts white rugs in a child’s room?
It looks like a room designed for a child who exists in theory, a child someone read about and tried to prepare for without understanding that preparing for Sienna requires knowing that she won’t sleep without Bart, won’t eat green things except peas, and counts to twenty in a pattern that skips fourteen because fourteen is, in her words, boring.
There’s a huge stuffed elephant on the bed. It’s cream-colored, silk-eared, and probably cost eighty dollars. It’s significantly nicer than Bart.
I set Sienna on the bed. She stirs, opens her eyes, and looks at the elephant. She picks it up, examines it with the critical eye of a four-year-old who has exacting standards in elephant companions, and sets it on the nightstand.
She keeps Bart.
Sterling watches from the doorway. I can see him working through it, the rejection of the elephant he (or his decorator) chose, and the preference for the battered one she brought. I can almost see him comparing the two elephants, trying to understand why the newer one lost.
He’s wrong. Explaining why would require explaining eighteen months of hospital rooms, blood draws, and nights when the only thing between my daughter and terror was a stuffed elephant with one loose ear and a stain on his trunk from when she dropped him in a pudding cup.
Bart isn’t a toy. He’s a record of survival and a best friend all in one.
The silk elephant on the nightstand has never been to a hospital. It doesn’t know anything.
“The room is fine. Thank you.”
Sterling looks at the silk elephant one more time.
He doesn’t pick it up or move it. He leaves it where Sienna put it.
He doesn’t understand, but he won’t ask either.
Asking me would mean treating me as an authority on my own daughter, and Sterling Hollingsford doesn’t grant authority to people he considers adversaries.
“There’s a room for you as well. Down the hall.” He says it the way you’d direct a contractor to the guest quarters. The implication is clear. Sienna’s room is the point. Mine is a concession.
“Thanks, but I’ll sleep in here with Sienna.”
His mouth thins. He was probably expecting that but hearing it is different.
The pause before he nods tells me that. I picture the room he designated for me, stripped to the floorboards, with a plank for a bed, and a bucket in the corner.
My lips twitch, but I fight back a smile.
I’m sure he’d love to do that, but the optics of giving his ex-wife such accommodations wouldn’t fit with his family’s expectations.
Wife not ex, reminds an annoying voice in the back of my mind as the necklace shifts on my neck, briefly pressing the ring against my chest.
The house is too quiet around us. The Myers Park house has always been too quiet with thick walls and tall ceilings.
The hush of a place designed to absorb sound is like a tomb, not a home.
My apartment in Asheville has street noise, neighbor noise, and the constant low hum of a life being lived in a building with thin walls.
Even the penthouse I shared with Sterling had more life.
This house absorbs everything. Sienna’s breathing is the loudest thing in the room.
I sit on the edge of the canopy bed, watching Sienna doze against the pillow with Bart in her arms. Sterling is in the doorway, staring at me with a grim expression.
“We need to talk about how this works,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Sienna’s medical decisions go through me. Every appointment, every lab draw, and every change in protocol. I approve it or it doesn’t happen.”
He pauses but nods. “Agreed.”
“Sienna’s schedule goes through me. When she eats, when she sleeps, and when she takes her meds.
I’ve been managing her care for eighteen months, and I’m a nurse.
You don’t get to rearrange it because you have a bigger house, or you have someone who says differently.
The only one who makes changes besides me is her medical team that I’ve already approved. ”
His lips tighten. “Agreed.”
“You get time with Sienna when Sienna wants it. She doesn’t know you. She met you once on a porch, and you didn’t speak. You don’t get to force a relationship with a sick four-year-old because you feel guilty about four years you missed.”
The muscle in Sterling’s jaw works once. He wants to argue, I can see it forming behind his eyes, the counterpoint about his rights and the time he lost. After a glance at her, as though afraid he’ll waking her, he says, “Agreed,” stiffly.
I turn to look at him, underscoring the seriousness. “The petition doesn’t get filed. The records work stops. If either happens, or you decided to do something like file for full custody, Danielle handles everything from that point forward, and this arrangement ends.”
His eyes widen. He clearly didn’t expect me to know about the visitation petition or records search already. I softened the full custody petition as a possibility to protect Mr. Yoon, who was kind enough to give a heads-up.
“I understand.” He says it carefully.