42. Daisy
42
DAISY
I wanted to avoid all this.
I will never be his perfect wife Audrey with her immaculate nails and her flat-ironed hair and the way she knew things I never would—the best airline to take to Dubai or the difference between champagne and prosecco—but I’d thought I could hide the uglier parts of myself, and now he’s going to see those too. He had eighty percent of me this summer, and he liked it well enough. But I’ve never been able to see how he could cope with the twenty percent that remains when I still can’t.
“The guy I told you about? Christian?” I can no longer meet his eye. “Well, he ended things right before Thanksgiving, and I found out I was pregnant a few weeks later.”
He grows entirely still. I can’t let myself think about what that might mean right now. My throat is tight as I continue, the words hoarse. “I wanted to keep it.” It’s all I can get out before the tears start to roll down my face. “I wanted to and—”
I only exist because my mother didn’t make the decision I did. I want to explain what happened before Harrison distances himself and I’m crying too hard to do it .
He pulls me to his chest, crooning my name as if I’m young and injured, and he can barely stand that for me. “I’m so sorry. Daisy. I wish I’d known.”
My chest is still raw but the gentleness in his voice is a balm. He doesn’t even know why I did it and he’s already not holding it against me. It’s the kind of forgiveness I haven’t even been able to offer myself.
“Christian accused me of doing it on purpose. He called me a gold digger. And when I told my mom I’d bombed my finals, she just completely fell apart. I just couldn’t stand to disappoint her.”
“How could you have been so careless? Don’t you know how lucky you are?” she’d cried and I just couldn’t imagine telling her that I was pregnant on top of it. That I was about to be a single mom, just like her. That I probably wouldn’t graduate at all.
“I’m so sorry you went through it all alone,” he says pressing a kiss to the top of my head.
I’m crying again and it’s half grief over what happened, but it’s also relief. He truly doesn’t hate me for it the way I’ve been hating myself.
“Afterward it was like I was in this hole I couldn’t climb out of, and that I’d given something up that I actually wanted, but I still wasn’t going to be able to make my mom happy. I got really depressed and I just couldn’t shake it off.”
His hand runs over my back. “Did you talk to anyone?”
“The school tried to give me the same antidepressants that caused a reaction in my dad.” I laugh miserably. “I have no clue if I’d be wandering the streets now like he is if I’d taken them. Or if it’s something that’s just going to happen down the line, whether I take them or not. I couldn’t get out of bed, and eventually, I dropped all my classes. I—” My tongue prods my cheek. Should I keep talking or leave the rest held inside me?
His hand curves around my hip. “You…? ”
“I’d go to sleep hoping I didn’t wake because I knew all my lies were going to catch up with me. I still don’t know if they’re letting me back into school, and how the hell do I tell my mother I might not be graduating because I couldn’t get out of bed? I can’t even explain it to myself.”
“She might understand better than you think. People go through this stuff. I mean…when you arrived, I was blackout drunk and had lied to everyone rather than admitting that my wife left me.”
I laugh through my tears. “Yeah, yours is worse.” After a moment, though, I sober again. “You fixed things, Harrison. You’re back at work. I kept loan money for a semester of school I didn’t attend, and I postponed the hearing about getting back into school when my mom asked me to come home, so I’ve got no idea if I’m returning.” It was so fucking stupid.
“And it’s been weighing on you this entire time,” he concludes.
God, I’ve made such a fucking mess of everything, and it sounds even worse spoken aloud than it did in my head. “I think I was just scared of what they’d say. There’s a significant possibility that they won’t let me come back, and I’m already getting mail about the loans.”
He tips my chin up to face him. “I happen to know a lawyer who could accompany you to this hearing.”
I raise my eyes to him. “Really? I mean…do you think it would help?”
“Daisy, you were a frightened student to whom the school did not provide appropriate guidance. They put a struggling, emotionally damaged kid—”
“I don’t love being described as emotionally damaged .”
He presses his lips to the top of my head. “I don’t care if you were the most psychologically stable human in the last forty years. For the purposes of my argument, you were a struggling, emotionally damaged student who was placed in a really unfortunate position and was offered no fucking help when she asked for it. They will definitely be letting you back into the goddamn school, especially once they know you’ve got a lawyer involved.”
I’m relieved. And I’m also horrified.
Because I told him most of the story. Just not all of it. Not the part he’ll hate.
I provide Harrison copies of all the relevant documents: my grades, the report from the health center, the receipt from Planned Parenthood, and the letters regarding my student loans. He gets the hearing scheduled for Friday. As much as I’d like to put it off, I can’t come up with a good reason to do so. It’s not as if I can tell him that my biggest fear is no longer that the school will kick me out but that the school will press for answers, answers I’ll have to provide in front of him .
I tell my mom I’m surfing with friends for a long weekend—we’ll only be in DC for one full day, but there’s no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth. If I’m going to lie about a trip away, I might as well make the lie big enough to encompass a night or two at Harrison’s while I’m at it.
Harrison sleeps soundly on the red-eye to DC while I remain awake, a nervous wreck.
Dear God, just let us get this over with. Let it all turn out okay.
My entire future is riding on what takes place over the course of the coming day. Twenty-four hours from now, I could still be the woman Harrison respects. A college senior nearly done with her degree, ready to make her mother proud.
Or I could be none of those things.
When we land in DC, he instructs the driver to take us to the Mandarin Oriental. I glance up at him. “Why are we going to a hotel? ”
“The hearing isn’t until one,” he says. “I need to shower and get a suit on. And you need to do whatever’s necessary to look innocent, lost, and scared.”
I give a sad laugh. Most of those things are already true. Though I guess innocent is a stretch, under the circumstances.
We check into our room and take turns showering. By the time I emerge, wrapped in a towel, he’s already buttoning up his shirt. I glance at the bed and raise a brow.
He laughs. “Absolutely not. We’ve got the whole weekend for that once this is behind us, and I need to focus, while you need to look as if you weren’t fucked within an inch of your life by your attorney.”
I remove the towel. “You wouldn’t have said it that graphicly if you weren’t already thinking about it.”
His nostrils flare, and he adjusts himself. “Daisy, I’m always thinking about it, but this matters too much to take a risk. Get some clothes on, and then we’ll go over everything one last time.”
Reluctantly, I do as I’m told. My most innocent dress is probably not innocent enough, so I cover it with a cardigan. It’s brutally hot and stiflingly humid outside, the way it always is in DC during the summer, which means I’m going to be sweating my ass off the whole way there.
“Take a seat,” Harrison says when I come back out, fully clothed. “I just want to get my facts straight.”
I go to the desk chair, my stomach in knots, as he paces with a notepad in front of him. “You dated Christian all semester?” he asks.
“Most of it,” I reply. I haven’t lied, but it already feels as if I have.
“And he broke up with you by text,” Harrison confirms. “What exactly did he say?”
I swallow. “Just that he felt things had run their course, and since the semester was ending, it was a good breaking point. ”
“And you had no idea prior to this that he was going to end things?”
I hitch a shoulder. “We’d just gone away together before Thanksgiving. It seemed like everything was fine until we were on the way home. I thought maybe he was annoyed that I’d referenced winter break, but until then, I didn’t have a clue.”
I’d looked back on it, of course, and seen the small signs. The way he’d snapped at me over dinner the week before. His brief irritation with me in class over something minor. But that’s the problem when someone is losing interest: you can convince yourself of anything. You can convince yourself his irritation is just a sign that he’s comfortable with you, or that he’s finally realizing something you’ve known all along—that you’re not that great and don’t deserve the care and consideration he showered you with at the start.
“You were ill for how long prior to the onset of finals?” he asks.
“I’d been under the weather for a few weeks. I started throwing up about three days before finals began.”
“I’m going to ask you, when we’re in there, to tell us verbatim what they said at the health center and what happened at the clinic when you went. I’m also going to ask you to describe your father’s history of mental illness and what you went through during the spring. I need you not to minimize it, okay?”
I nod, clutching my clasped hands to my stomach.
“Great,” he says, glancing at his notepad again. “You discovered Christian had been lying to you about the girlfriend and went into a tailspin while he walked away scot-free. I presume he’s now graduated?”
I stare at him, frozen.
The truth could ruin things, but lying about it and getting caught definitely would ruin things. And what if the hearing committee demands names and numbers and addresses and texts? I have to tell him the truth. As much as I don’t want to, there’s really no choice.
“I never said he was a student,” I whisper.
Harrison freezes. “What?”
I bury my face in my hands. “He wasn’t a student. He was my professor.”