Chapter 24 Martin
MARTIN
Outside her door, I pause for a moment before I knock. I know I have to be careful how I play this. I have a lot of explaining to do, but more than that, I’ve missed them all so much I don’t know how I’m going to contain it.
Lila seems to sense me there before I have a chance to gather my thoughts, and the door opens before me. She’s standing there, wearing a simple blue dress that falls to her knees and a warm smile that fills my chest with more comfort than I’m willing to admit.
“Hi,” she greets me, tucking a loose strand of hair back behind her ear.
I hold up the bags of takeout I brought with me. “Hope you don’t mind skipping the cooking tonight,” I remark to her as I carry them inside. “I stopped by Morton’s on the way here, got us a selection for tonight.”
“Oh, wow,” she murmurs, taking one of the bags from me and opening it—she inhales deeply, and her eyes practically roll back in bliss. “Damn, that smells good…come on, sit down, I’ll get this onto some plates and we can eat.”
As she drifts off to the kitchen, my attention turns to the twins.
Mathilda is on her playmat, Ross beside her toying with a small cuddly animal.
They both glance up at me as I draw a little closer, and I can’t keep the grin from my face.
No matter how complicated things have gotten, my adoration for them has stayed the same, and nothing will ever change that.
“Hey, you two,” I murmur, reaching out to see the toy Ross is holding. “What are you up to, eh…?”
I kneel on the floor beside them as Lila lays out the food for us, and when she emerges from the kitchen, she laughs.
“You should add babysitter to your resume,” she remarks. “The way they light up around you, it’s crazy.”
“I don’t think I’m allowed to call myself that when I’m their father,” I reply, straightening up and taking a plate from her. “But I’ll think about it. Could be a good side hustle when I get tired of the medical stuff, huh?”
She sinks into the couch, grinning, as the twins go back to entertaining themselves. Mathilda reaches over for the toy Ross has, and he holds it out to her, letting her get a better look at it.
“He’s already got such good manners,” I remark as I start in on the pizza I picked up from Morton’s.
“Yeah, he’s a little gentleman,” she agrees with a fond smile. “Not sure I can say the same about Matty, though…”
I laugh. “Why not? She got more of an attitude?”
“She’s definitely the one who calls the shots,” she replies with a nod. “I mean, I know they’re barely old enough to hold their heads up yet, but you know….you get a feel for these things early on, right?”
“Right,” I reply, and all at once, my stomach sinks slightly.
If these two were the only children I had out there, I might feel good about that statement, but I know it’s far from the truth.
And with the enormous weight of everything that has happened recently resting on my shoulders, I know we have to talk about it.
I can feel her watching me, no doubt sensing that my mind is somewhere else. She hesitates for a moment, but then, finally, she broaches the topic.
“Speaking of children,” she adds. “I…the police filled me in on a lot of the stuff you and Martha gave to them the other day.”
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I even did it, to be honest. Martha was crying the whole time we were handing over evidence, but she didn’t let it stop her.
In some ways, I wish I could have expressed my emotions that easily, but the protestant Irish in me kept it all under wraps.
Now, as I sit before Lila, I know I have to put it all out there, no matter how hard it is, no matter how much it might hurt. I draw in a deep breath and nod.
“Yeah, I didn’t know they were going to reach out to you about it,” I admit. “If I had, I would have let you know what we were planning in advance, but…”
“It’s okay,” she murmurs. “I’d glad I found out the way I did. Knowing that you and your ex had done that, it was like…it was easier for me to be honest about what he did to me.”
I wince. I’m still getting used to that part of it, the knowledge that my son hurt her so deeply.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, though it doesn’t feel like even close to enough to make up for the harm that he caused her.
“I should have done it a long time ago, going to the cops about what he was doing. Martha, my ex, she’s a good woman and all she wanted to do was protect him, so whenever it came up that he’d been involved in something heavy, she just found some way to make it vanish.
Nobody wanted to go against her or her social standing, and all the cases against him just… disappeared.”
“What changed her mind?” she asks curiously.
I look at her for a long moment, the twins playing in the corner of my vision.
“You did. You, and the twins.”
Her eyes widen. “You told her about us?”
“Part of it,” I reply. “I told her that he hurt you. That he kept you locked away from the world all that time, and that you were a mother now and he still wasn’t giving you or the children a break.”
She softens slightly. I guess she understands where Martha is coming from with all of this. At least, to some extent. I can understand a lot about parenthood, but there are aspects of being a mother that I’ll never be able to make sense of, and I’m all too aware of it.
“And that’s what changed her mind?”
I nod. “It wasn’t easy for her, but she did it,” I continue.
“I don’t know if she’s sure about it even now, but I think she can tell that she can’t let things go on like this.
He’s not our little boy anymore, some innocent who just let his temper get the better of him.
He hurt you, and God knows what he would have gone on to do if he’d had the chance.
It was the only thing we could do, at the end of the day. ”
“You have no idea how grateful I am for that,” she tells me, her voice dropping to almost a whisper. “And Martha too—I can’t even imagine how hard that was for her.” She looks away for a moment, and I notice the tears glistening in her eyes.
I reach over to touch her knee, concerned. “Hey, are you alright?”
She nods at once. “More than alright,” she replies, managing a smile as she wipes away the tear that has escaped the corner of her eye. “It’s just…overwhelming. Knowing that all of this is coming to an end. And knowing that…”
She takes a deep breath, her gaze locking with mine once more.
“Knowing that you chose me, after everything.”
“You think I would have chosen anyone else?” I reply, tightening my grip on her.
“No, it’s not that I thought you would—that you wouldn’t do the right thing, exactly,” she replies, furrowing her brow, as though she’s searching for the right words to express herself.
“It’s that I haven’t had a family before.
You know? Someone who was on my side, someone who was willing to go to bat for me when I needed it most.”
She glances over to the twins, her expression softening.
“I thought it would be enough to have it with them,” she continues. “Like, I could give them the childhood I had wanted for myself, and it would fix the fact that I’d never been able to experience it. But it wasn’t…it wasn’t that simple. There’s more to it than that.”
I stay silent, letting her speak. I can tell how important this is for her, almost as though she’s cracking herself open so I can get a look at what’s inside, and I don’t want to scare her into silence all of a sudden.
“My parents didn’t want me,” she explains. “And all the foster families I went through, none of them really saw me as anything other than a way to make a few easy bucks. I never felt like I had a place to call home, or a family of my own, or people who would choose me over anyone else. And you…”
She bites her lip.
“You did,” she finishes up, simply. “You did, Martin. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell you how much that means to me.”
I don’t reply, at least not in words. Reaching for her hand, I lift it to my lips, not breaking her gaze as I plant a kiss against her knuckles.
Hearing those words come out of her mouth, I see it now, how all of it falls into place.
All the pain she has suffered, the way it has ached through every part of her being, and how this gesture on my part helps to fill in some of those blanks.
For a moment, neither of us say a word. I’m not sure what there is to be said after such a candid confession. But I suppose it’s on me to tell her why I let things get the way they did, why I allowed by son free rein to do what he wanted and to cause her so much harm in the process.
“I’m just sorry I didn’t do it sooner,” I murmur to her. “And that I let him get away with so much—”
“You don’t have to apologize for that,” she counters. “You couldn’t have known what he was doing to me, practically nobody did—”
“No, I didn’t,” I agree. “But I knew that he was capable of terrible things. He has been since he was a boy, and when he started growing up, it only got worse. The way he treated people, his temper, how he lashed out when he didn’t get what he wanted, I should have known that he would eventually turn that on a partner.
But I suppose I just didn’t want to acknowledge that I could have raised a child who was so… ”
There aren’t words to describe the person that he is, and it would be an insult to her to try. For all that Martha and I have seen the depths of Thomas’s cruelty, I can’t even imagine how much worse the side of him that Lila saw was.
“I didn’t want to take responsibility for it, so I just looked the other way,” I tell her.
“And I know it caused so much harm. Not just for you, but for everyone he encountered. He never had to deal with the blowback from what he did and it just let him believe that he could get away with anything he wanted.”
“You don’t have to blame yourself for that,” she tries to comfort me. “He was a grown man when he did all of that to me. The choices he made, they were his choices to stand by, and—”
“That’s why I was so shocked when I found out about the twins,” I admit, before I can stop myself.
Now that I’ve unlocked this part of me, it feels impossible to hold it all back, and the words come spilling out.
“I—I was worried that I would do the same thing again. That whatever was in me that I passed down to him, I would have passed down to them too.”
“You know that isn’t how it works,” she protests. “You’re a doctor, right? You know there are so many factors that go into the way someone acts—”
“What I know and what I feel are on different sides of the damn planet,” I reply, forcing a smile to ease some of the tension.
“And it didn’t matter what I knew about child rearing and genetics and all of that.
I could only see myself making all the same mistakes again, and creating more children who were… like him.”
Her lips part in surprise, and she looks over to the twins, realizing that I’m talking about them. “You can’t seriously have thought that they could ever—”
“It isn’t what I thought they were capable of, or you, for that matter,” I admit. “It’s what I am capable of. Or not capable of. I couldn’t stop torturing myself, thinking about what might happen if the same thing went down again. If they turned out the same way because of my influence.”
Realization seems to dawn over her face as she begins to slot the pieces together, everything I’ve just told her falling in line with my actions up to this point.
“Is that why you tried to keep things so…formal when you first reached out to me?”
I nod. “I didn’t want to tell you the truth, and I should have just been honest from the start,” I concede. “But I didn’t want you to think less of me. Let my own ego get in the way, I guess.”
“God, Martin,” she murmurs, and she grips my hand a little tighter.
“I never thought of you that way. Never. The way you treated me that first night we met, how you looked after me when I was at my lowest, nobody had ever done something like that for me before, not in my life. If that’s all I’d ever known about you, it would have been enough, but then… ”
She tips her head to the side slightly.
“I got to know you,” she continues. “And I got to see how much sweetness there is under the surface. I got to see how kind you are, how you would go out of your way to look out for the twins, how you’d step up to do the right thing even when it wasn’t easy.
And now, the way you protected me against Thom, it’s just… ”
She draws in a deep breath, gathering every piece of it together.
“I just know that there’s nobody I’d rather have had these babies with than you. And that you’re going to be the most amazing father to them, Martin.”
The words cut deep in the best way possible, a balm that soothes the wound that has lain open within me since I saw the kind of man Thom turned out to be.
Hearing that from her, it’s everything I could have wanted and more—she’s the one person whose opinion I value above all others, because she’s the one who’s raising my children.
And if she believes that I’m worth keeping around them, then I suppose I have no choice but to believe her.
“Do you want to be in their lives?” she asks. “The twins, I mean? I know it’s complicated, but I would love for them to have their father around—”
“Of course I would,” I reply at once, before she even has a chance to finish.
A warmth settles over my chest at how certain I am of my answer.
I went back and forth for so long, unsure as to whether I was worth being part of their world, but hearing her take a stand on it the way she has, it’s impossible to deny.
“And what about…what about us?” she asks shyly, a strand of hair falling into her face once more, as though she’s trying to hide behind it. “I mean, I know that, with my past and everything, it’s not exactly going to be easy, but…”
I pull her toward me and plant a kiss against her lips. I don’t have the words to express how much I care about her, but I just have to hope that my touch is enough to convince her of everything I need her to know.
She catches her breath, leaning her forehead against mine for a moment as the smile curls up her lips. “Martin, I love you,” she murmurs.
And it shocks me, hearing those words, even though it shouldn’t. After everything we’ve been through, how could it? I’m not much of a believer in fate and the machinations of the universe, but if I was, I would believe that they had gone out of their way to bring us together like this.
“I love you too,” I reply.
As I plant my lips against hers, I find no doubt in my mind, nothing but the pure, sweet certainty that I mean every word of it. And that everything that’s brought us here has been worth it, if it has led us to this moment.