Chapter 13 #2
“No, but I shoulda known. Everything was off. She was too ‘fectionate . . . gave me too much attention. Too much of her time. Shoulda realized.”
“That she was using you to try to get pregnant? C’mon, man.
No one could guess that. You’d been together for years.
She was fucking married. There could have been a hundred reasons she was giving you more of her time before you get down to sperm donor.
If that’s what you’re beating yourself up over, stop, Lo. ”
He stretches his head back and turns his neck from side to side until his spine pops. I wince. That sounds painful even from where I’m sitting.
“Beatin’ myself up ‘cause I’m saddling Emily with a baby that’s not even hers when we’ve been dating barely long enough to know each other’s middle names. I just fucking asked her to marry me and now I’m asking her to raise someone else’s kid.”
“First of all, congratulations.” I slap his back. “If you don’t ask me to be your best man, I’ll post your credit card numbers in every internet chatroom from here to Siberia.”
That draws a weak chuckle out of Logan.
“Second, you’re not asking her to raise someone else’s kid. You’re asking her to be part of raising your kid.”
“My kid with someone she hates.”
“Emmy won’t hold that against the baby. She’s not like that. C’mon, man. She’ll make an amazing mother, you know that.”
Logan drops his head forward to stare at his phone screen again, but he nods. “She will.”
“Look, kids don’t get to pick their families. They get the hand they’re dealt. If they’re lucky, they get one person in their lives who really cares about them. Your baby will get two people who would do anything for them. That’s all that matters, Lo.”
He swings his head back and forth again. “Can’t leave her with Miranda.”
“Of course not. That woman’s freaking toxic.”
“Manslaughter,” says Logan.
I can’t have heard him right. “What?”
He scrubs his hands through his hair. “When she was sixteen. Baby brother from her father’s second marriage. She was supposed to be babysitting. She went off with her friends. He drowned in a duck pond. Family hushed it up.”
“Fuck, Lo. How did you find out?”
“Told me when she was in subspace. Checked when I was visiting England. One of the family’s old neighbors . . . told me the whole story. Can’t leave my daughter with her.”
I rub my hand up and down his damp back. “Hell, no. I’ll help you. We’ll get you custody and make sure your baby’s safe with you and Emmy. Fuck, does Emmy know?”
Logan shakes his head. “No one knows. Can’t tell her, Max. Th’fuck she’d think of me, using somethin’ I learned that way against another subbie?”
If she had a childhood anything like mine, she’d think Logan’s a damn hero for making sure his daughter’s away from someone who puts her selfish desires before a kid’s safety.
But other than knowing Emily’s mother has dementia, I don’t know anything about Emmy’s family or upbringing.
I can see why Logan would be concerned about her reaction.
“Okay, so we don’t tell her. We treat you like any other client who hasn’t given us a waiver. Complete confidentiality. But we’re ready to use this if Miranda doesn’t give up custody.”
Logan snorts. “She won’t.”
“Then we use it.”
“Solicitor needs evidence. Can’t go to England right now.” He waves his hand at his head.
“I can,” I say.
“No, Maxie. Can’t ask that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling. I’ll find whatever I can online, but if you need me to track down the neighbor and get a statement, I will.
” I squeeze his shoulder. “You know about my Uncle Max, but you probably don’t know why he took me in.
He found me going through the dumpsters at the back of his bar because my mom hadn’t been home in three days and I’d run out of food.
I’m not saying Miranda would neglect your daughter, but I’m not giving her a chance to be like my mom.
I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you get custody. ”
Logan leans toward me like a bridge toppling. I wrap my arm over his back and hold on to him.
“Already owe you too much, Maxie.”
“There is no ‘too much’ between brothers,” I say, feeling the burn at the back of my eyes. “This is finally my chance to be there for you like you’ve been there for me.”
Logan rocks gently under my arm and I move with him, understanding his need for that most basic of comforts: the feeling of being rocked in another’s arms.
I’ve managed to get some food into him, in an attempt to soak up the alcohol in his guts, by the time Austin arrives. But as the EMT shines his phone’s light into Logan’s eyes, I’m worried it’s nowhere near enough.
Logan hasn’t said much since dropping the bombshell about Miranda.
He’s barely moved from the couch, sitting up when the food arrived, then slumping back down after we ate.
I put the news on for him, but I think he’s been looking at his phone and the life-changing letter still displayed there more than my TV.
Although he accepted my comfort and ate what I gave him, I can feel him sinking.
Into silence. Into despair.
I know what it looks like, because I’ve been there more than once.
Austin leaves after reassuring me that Logan’s drunk but not in danger. When the news changes over to a sitcom and I realize Logan hasn’t spoken in over an hour, I call in reinforcements.
Emily arrives without fanfare. A notification on my phone to say she’s outside. A soft knock after I tap the screen to buzz her in. But when I open the door, everything changes. All the gray misery that was wrapping tighter and tighter around Logan flees under the bright flurry that is Emily.
She throws herself across the room in a tumble of dark curls and a pale pink dress. Logan’s breath hitches as he rouses himself from the daze he’s fallen into.
“Baby doll—”
“Sh, Daddy,” she croons, flipping his phone over so the screen’s face-down and crawling into his lap. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.”
“It’ll never be okay again,” he murmurs, but he lets her draw his head down to her small, soft breasts. He collapses there like a building falling, his spine crumbling, muscles slumping. She curls around him, one hand cradling his head, the other rubbing his back.
I meet her eyes over the top of his head, nod, and withdraw into the loft to give them what privacy I can. It doesn’t stop me from hearing him crying, even when I put in my earbuds and put on some music.
Listening to Logan’s pain sparks a deep fury in me that I thought I’d mostly put away. I’ve had counseling. I’ve done the work so my anger over being neglected as a kid doesn’t consume me. But seeing the wreckage yet another mother’s selfishness has created reignites all that old ugliness.
I pick up my phone and check my message string with Cynnie. Still nothing. Angrily, I type,
I’m coming to see you tomorrow. If you don’t want to see me, tell me now.
As soon as I hit send, I regret it. I’m taking my anger at Logan’s pain out on Cynnie. But I don’t take it back. Yes, I’m displacing, but I’m also angry at Cynnie. Why has she ghosted me? Did I do anything so terrible? And if I did, why doesn’t she just tell me?
When the gray bubbles don’t immediately bounce, I flick over to a search engine and start digging.
It doesn’t take me long to find out the basics about Miranda Iris Porter.
She has almost no social media presence, maybe because she works for England’s public health care system.
My facial recognition program tags her in a few pictures of what look like girls’ days out in trendy London suburbs.
I make note of her friends’ names for later digging.
Her hospital has a basic bio on their site for her and that gets me the schools she attended.
When I start working my way into the student records of her high school, I need more than my phone.
I lift out my earbud cautiously.
It’s quiet downstairs. I steal out of my bedroom and down the stairs, ready to turn back if they still need privacy.
The living room’s dark, but there’s a light on in my kitchen and in its dim glow, I see Logan and Emily twined together on the couch.
She’s cradling his head to her breast. He’s clutching her slender body to him like Rose should have held on to Jack if she loved him so damn much. They’re both asleep.
I unfold one of the blankets from my abandoned nest and spread it over them gently. Emily draws up an edge of the blanket and tucks it around Logan’s shoulders. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t even wake up as she does it. I swallow hard against a lump in my throat.
Whatever Logan needs to get custody of his daughter, I’m going to make sure he has it. No matter the cost.
I pad silently into my office and start up my server with its custom cores that I’ll need for a deep hack.
Sometime after the morning commute’s started to buzz on the streets outside but before Emily and Logan wake, I fall asleep in my chair.
I still have several programs running as my eyes drift closed, but I’m happy with what I’ve unearthed so far.
Miranda’s family covered up Nicholas’s death, as Logan said.
The only public record was a two-line obituary in the local paper saying the baby died after a short illness.
But after just a few hours of digging, I’m already finding things to corroborate Logan’s story.
Miranda took a long leave of absence from school when she was sixteen—at a time when British kids are preparing for an important series of exams—and didn’t return for a year.
Her transcript includes a couple of strange credits from “Ecole d’anglais,” no address, indicating she passed a class in French.
She’d had decent grades before her leave but had been pursuing subjects that I’d consider frivolous: art, dance, and two languages.
She dropped those subjects when she returned.
She switched into science classes and then went into the pre-med program.
Was the sudden interest in saving lives to atone for letting her baby brother die?
She got a medical degree, graduating without distinction but from a good school in London, and again there was a leave of absence, during her third year.
There’s no explanation on her transcript; it’s just marked medical leave.
I’m still digging for her full employment records—the centralized British national health service dbase has better information security than Miranda deserves—but I can already see from a hack of the records held on the server at her hospital that she’s had several medical leaves of absence, including one that would have occurred shortly before she met Logan.
Is she just injury-prone, or is there something that makes her withdraw from the world periodically?
I have a list of questions for Logan when he wakes, and that’s at the top of my list.