10. Oliver
— ? —
Oliver
She’s still asleep when I leave the room.
But my body is seven hours of no sleep and no food stacked on top of two days of the same, and the nurse who comes in at six-thirty to check vitals gives me a look that communicates, politely and without words, that I’m in the way.
I step into the corridor. The fluorescent light is an assault after the monitor-glow of her room.
My body registers the transition in pieces: the stiffness in my back from the chair, the ache in my jaw that has settled into a permanent pulse, the hollowness behind my eyes that comes from spending a night awake watching a woman sleep and finding it more important than anything I’ve done in a boardroom.
I find a doctor at the nurses’ station, a woman with a clipboard and the measured patience of someone who’s been awake longer than I have.
“The bleeding has stopped,” she says. “The heartbeat is strong. We’ll monitor through the morning and if everything holds, she can be discharged by afternoon.”
She looks at my face, at the bruise I’ve stopped trying to hide, and adds nothing about it. “She needs rest. Real rest. Not whatever she’s been doing.”
I nod. The word heartbeat sits in my chest and does a thing I don’t have the capacity to examine right now.
The cafeteria is on the ground floor. I take the elevator because the stairs feel ambitious in my current state and stand in line behind a man in scrubs and a woman holding a sleeping toddler.
The coffee is bad. I drink it anyway. I don’t eat.
My stomach has forgotten the mechanics of food and the effort of relearning them in a hospital cafeteria at six in the morning feels insurmountable.
I’m walking back toward the elevator with the coffee cooling in my hand when I see him.
Drake is coming through the main entrance.
He’s carrying a paper bag in one hand and a coffee from somewhere better than the cafeteria in the other.
His jacket is zipped, his hair is damp from a shower or the morning air, and he walks with the unhurried purpose of a man who knows exactly where he’s going and what he’s bringing and who it’s for.
Breakfast. He brought her breakfast.
The specificity of it stops me mid-stride.
Not cafeteria food, not vending machine coffee.
He went out. Found a place she’d like, ordered what she’d eat, carried it through the rain or the cold or whatever the morning is doing outside because he knows her well enough to know that hospital food won’t do and she’ll need convincing to eat at all.
I’ve been sitting in a chair for seven hours. He’s been buying her breakfast.
The thought lands in the same place everything about Drake has been landing since the day his name first came out of my wife’s mouth at a dinner table, low and warm and unfamiliar, and the jealousy that rises to meet it is so fast and so complete that it bypasses every rational thought I assembled during the night and goes straight to the base of my spine.
He sees me. His stride doesn’t change. His face doesn’t arrange itself into the polite, guarded expression from the café or the gala. What’s there now is undisguised, and it’s not friendly.
“Drake.”
He stops. We’re in the corridor outside the elevator bank, the wing quiet this early, no one else in sight. The fluorescent lights hum overhead and the distance between us is about six feet and shrinking.
“I need to talk to you,” I say.
“No.” He adjusts the bag in his hand. “You don’t.”
“Please.”
The word costs me. Oliver Ellington does not say please to men he considers rivals in hallways at 6 a.m. But Oliver Ellington also doesn’t spend the night in hospital chairs or get punched by his own father or stand in corridors with bad coffee and a bruised jaw asking for conversations he hasn’t earned.
Drake stops walking. Turns. His eyes move over my face with the same measuring calculation I remember from the café, except now the calculation has been completed and the result isn’t generous.
“Two minutes,” he says. “Then I’m going to her room and you’re going to be somewhere else.”
I set the coffee down on the windowsill beside us. My hands need to be empty for this.
“I don’t care,” I say.
Drake’s eyebrow lifts.
“Whatever happened between you and Eloise. Whatever the photographs show, whatever the truth is. Whether you’re the father or not, I don’t care.”
The words come out raw and unpolished and nothing I’ve ever said at a boardroom table has cost me a fraction of what these are costing me in a hospital corridor.
“I want my wife. I want to be in that room. And if the child is yours, I will raise it. I’ll sign whatever needs to be signed, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.
But I’m done making decisions about my marriage based on what other people told me.
I’m asking you, directly, and I’ll take whatever answer you give me. ”
The corridor is quiet. A cart rolls past at the far end. A phone rings at the nurses’ station down the hall.
Drake stares at me. His jaw works once, twice, the same tell I recognize from my own face when the restraint is failing.
Then he laughs. Not the warm, easy laugh I heard at the café, the one that rearranged my wife’s entire face.
This one is hollow, incredulous, the laugh of a man who has just heard the most absurd thing ever spoken and can’t decide whether to respond with words or his fist.
“You don’t care,” he repeats. “You don’t care. That’s what you’re leading with right now? After everything you put her through?”
“I know what I put her through.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
He steps closer. The breakfast bag crinkles in his grip.
“You don’t know what she looked like when she showed up at my door at midnight in the rain with one bag and nothing else.
You don’t know what she sounded like trying to convince me she was fine while her hands were shaking so hard she couldn’t hold a cup of tea.
You don’t know what the past two weeks have been, watching her get up every morning and force herself to work and build and function like her whole life didn’t just collapse because her husband decided to believe a stranger over her. ”
“Drake.”
“I’m not done.” His voice drops, and the dropping is worse than the raising.
“I knew Ellie before you. I knew who she was. She was the woman who had a bright future ahead of her and lit up every room she walked into because she wasn’t afraid of a single thing in this world.
That’s who she was. And then she married you, and every year I watched a little more of her disappear. ”
He’s pacing now, three steps, back, restless.
“She made herself small, Oliver. She made herself fit inside your world, your schedule, your house, your family’s expectations, and you either didn’t notice or you noticed and didn’t care.
She chose to stay in a marriage that gave her nothing because she believed it could become a thing worth staying for.
She chose you, every single day, and the one time she needed you to choose her back, you didn’t. ”
The words hit the bruise on my jaw and the bruise underneath the bruise, the one my father’s fist couldn’t reach.
“And I don’t need her to tell me the details, Oliver.
” Drake stops pacing. Faces me. His voice is quieter now but the quiet is worse.
“Because there’s only one reason a man sends his pregnant wife out into the night, and it’s the same reason you’re standing in this corridor right now asking me if the child is mine. ”
He steps closer.
“You think she cheated on you? That’s what this is?
You couldn’t look at your own wife, the woman you’ve been married to, and trust her.
You never bothered to know her well enough to trust her, because if you had, if you’d spent a single hour in those years actually learning who she is instead of letting her orbit around you, the thought wouldn’t have crossed your mind. ”
My jaw aches. Not from the bruise. From clenching it shut.
“She was on the floor, Oliver.” His voice cracks on her name and he doesn’t bother sealing it.
“She was on the floor of my guest room at midnight, bleeding, and do you know whose name she called? Not mine. Yours. She’s on the floor and she’s reaching for you, and I’m the one holding her because you weren’t there. ”
The corridor tilts. I press my hand against the wall.
“So don’t stand here and tell me you don’t care whose baby it is. Don’t perform surrender after everything you put her through. You had every chance to know her. You threw them all away.”
“I know.” My voice comes out thin. “I know I did.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because she’s my wife and I can’t be anywhere else.”
The wrong answer. Or the right one delivered wrong, because Drake’s fist connects with my jaw before the sentence is finished.
Same side. Same bruise. The impact sends a flash of white across my vision and I stagger back into the wall and the coffee on the windowsill topples and spills across the floor.
My hand catches the railing along the corridor and I stay on my feet, barely, while the taste of copper fills my mouth for the third time in two days.
I don’t swing back.
My arms stay at my sides and I take it because he’s right and because my father was right to hit me too and because somewhere in the space between these two punches from two different men I’m starting to understand that the pain in my jaw is the smallest fraction of the pain I’ve caused.
“I’m just saying this for Ellie’s sake. Not that I owe you so listen carefully.”
Drake stands over me, breathing hard, his fist still curled. The breakfast bag is on the floor, contents spilled, and the coffee he brought her is rolling toward the baseboard trailing a brown streak across the tile.