15. Carrie
FIFTEEN
CARRIE
The rest of the week was a reprieve for me; Cole was out of town for most of it, and when he did return, I wasn’t called up to his office.
The evenings were spent debriefing with Hailey and peppering Seth with questions about his lawyer friend who’d agreed to meet with me about potential custody issues.
For the moment, I was in limbo. I didn’t want to quit, and I didn’t want to do anything rash by telling Cole about Evie before I knew my rights—and the risks involved.
By Friday evening, I was wrecked, but I managed to leave work in time to pick Evie up from school. My daughter came running out of the gates, her bee backpack bouncing, a look of pure excitement on her face.
“Mom!” she cried, using my legs as a crash barrier to stop her forward momentum. “Mom, look!” She waved a piece of paper at me, bouncing on her toes. “Look! ”
I managed to snag the paper from her hands and uncrumpled it to see a flyer for a school-wide spelling bee.
“Miss Katie said anyone could sign up. The winner from every grade gets to go to the district spelling bee, and the prize for that one is five hundred dollars! And then she said there are competitions all the way to state and national level!”
My brows jumped. My daughter was nothing if not ambitious. “Wow. And you want to put your name down?”
“Duh!” Evie grinned at me and pointed at one of the bees buzzing around the top of the flyer. “I have to! It’s a spelling bee .”
Chuckling, I turned in the direction of home. “You know a spelling bee has nothing to do with actual bees, right?”
“Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes with enough sass to make me quake in fear of the teenage years to come. “Of course I know that. But I’m a good speller!”
Maybe it was like that phenomenon where people were drawn to careers related to their names—nominative determinism. Someone named Jane Judge would be more likely to end up working in law; Jane Cox, on the other hand, might be more likely to become a specialist in reproductive medicine. Or, you know, porn.
A little girl obsessed with bees might find herself a spelling bee champion.
“I’ll help you practice,” I promised.
“Miss Katie said we would have an in-class spelling bee every week. The winner gets to be class helper!”
I smiled. Miss Katie sounded smart. I chatted with my daughter on the walk home, fixed her a snack once we got there, and then dutifully quizzed her on a long list of words until it was time for dinner. And Evie was right: she was a good speller.
Her excitement lifted some of the weight from my shoulders. Once Evie was tucked in bed, I took the spelling bee flyer and pinned it to our family corkboard, then noted the date of the spelling bee in my calendar. It would happen on the third Friday of October.
Hailey watched me from the sofa, a mug of tea cupped in her hands. “You look deep in thought over there,” she told me.
I sank down beside her. “I was just thinking about having to tell Evie that I found her father,” I admitted. My eyes slid over to the flyer pinned to the board. “It’ll be a shock.”
Hailey hummed. “As much of a shock for her as it will be for him.”
“I wonder…”
“You wonder?”
It felt like a cop-out, but I still said, “Maybe I should wait until after the spelling bee to tell her. She’s so excited about it.”
Hailey was quiet for a moment, and I turned to see her watching me thoughtfully. “And after the spelling bee, when she has the school holiday play? Or after the next big event?”
“I know,” I said, “I’m just delaying the inevitable.”
Hailey sipped her tea with one hand, her other making slow sweeps over her bump. “No,” she finally said, “maybe you’re right. It’s only seven weeks away. It would give you time to meet with a lawyer, think about your options.”
“Find a new job,” I added.
“That too.”
Hailey leaned her head against my shoulder. “Rough week. ”
“You can say that again.”
“Rough week,” she repeated.
“Har-har,” I intoned, rolling my eyes.
Hailey, a frequent purveyor of dad jokes, cackled. “No but really. How are you holding up?”
“With great difficulty.”
“Any more sightings of Father Boss?”
“Can we come up with a different nickname? That one makes it sound like I had a child with a priest.”
“Mr. Dad. Sir Daddy. Secret Daddy Boss Man.”
My lips twitched. “Hailey. Stop it.”
“Sir Daddy isn’t bad,” she said, tilting her head to the side.
“Sir Daddy sounds like we’re about to dress in head-to-toe latex and go to an underground sex club.”
Her brows lifted. “Well…”
I threw an arm over my face as I slumped down on the sofa, groaning as I laughed. When I peeked under my elbow to meet Hailey’s eye, she was grinning.
“Feel better?”
“No,” I lied. “I feel worse.”
She patted my thigh. “You’ve always been a terrible liar, Carrie.”
Cole had said that to me when we first met. I swallowed past a sudden tightness in my throat and sat up on the sofa. “What am I going to do? Like what am I actually going to do?”
“You’ll wait for this consultation with Seth’s friend next Wednesday, go to work, and take care of Evie.”
“You make it sound so simple. ”
“Because it is,” she said as she threw her arm around my shoulders.
I leaned my head against hers and let out a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “I can do that.”
I spent the weekend with my kid, then went to work and did my thing. I saw Cole in passing on Monday, then sat through a meeting about the month ahead on Tuesday. He brooded at the far end of the table, fingers tented as various departments reported to him, and I focused on taking detailed meeting minutes while avoiding his dark gaze.
When we exited the meeting room, he was beside me. He gave me a slight nod. “Carrie,” he said, then slipped past me and walked away. When he waited by the elevator, I made the mistake of looking up. His dark gaze clashed with mine, causing every nerve ending in my body to flare to life.
Then the elevator doors slid open, and he stepped inside before disappearing from view.
My heart thumped so hard for so long that I had to go hide in the washroom for ten minutes. It was pathetic.
Finally, Wednesday rolled around and I managed to leave work an hour early to meet Seth’s lawyerly colleague, a woman named Carla whose gaze was as sharp as the tailoring on her suit. She had dark brown skin and near-black hair, which she’d buzzed close to her head. She shook my hand with a firm grip and led me to a sparsely furnished meeting room that overlooked the busy street below.
She wasted no time in giving me the bad news: “The courts will rule in the child’s best interest,” she said, “and in your case, it’s likely they’ll award at least visitation to the father, if not partial custody, depending on what petition he might file.”
“Right,” I said. I ran my thumbnail along the edge of the table that separated us. “And what happens if I just…don’t say anything?”
“It won’t reflect well on you if you work for him for any length of time without letting him know you’ve had his child.”
“Even though there’s no actual proof she’s his?”
Carla angled her head, deep brown eyes seeing right through me. “Is the child’s paternity in doubt?”
I slumped. “No. Not unless I turned into a queen bee and impregnated myself.”
Carla let out a noise that was half hum, half grunt. The scrunch in her eyebrows told me she was regretting doing this favor for Seth.
I pinched out a smile and explained, “My daughter knows a lot about bees, and therefore I know a lot about bees.”
The lawyer’s expression softened. “Mine’s on an alligator kick right now. Did you know they can regrow their teeth up to fifty times?”
“I did not know that,” I said, grinning. “I’ll tuck that one away for the next time I want to impress Evie with my deep knowledge of fun facts.”
Carla huffed, then tapped her nails on the table. Her face went back to business, but her voice was kind as she said, “There’s not much I can do for you right now. Not until the father knows about the child and we find out what kind of involvement—if any—he’d want in her life.”
“Okay.”
“Our office can draft a letter for you, in case you’re not willing to tell him?—”
“I’ll tell him,” I interrupted.
“If that’s what you want. From our perspective, it’s cleaner if all communication goes through our office.”
“I can’t just pretend everything’s fine and let him get a letter like that with no warning,” I told her. “I just can’t. I’ll tell him myself. In person. Just as soon as I find the right time.”
Evie had insisted on practicing her spelling every day since she’d come home with the flyer. She kept talking about what she could get with the prize money if she won. Her excitement had morphed into determination, and it felt wrong to disrupt her when she was so focused. I’d wait until after the spelling bee. I needed the time to get myself organized, anyway.
“Carrie,” the lawyer warned. “The longer you leave this, the worse it’ll reflect on you if we have to go to court. I wish this weren’t the case, but a long, protracted legal battle will favor the party with the deeper pockets.”
Grimacing, I pushed back from the table. “And that isn’t me.”
Carla pinched her lips and nodded. “Tread carefully, and reach out once you’ve spoken to him. We’ll be waiting.”
I shook her hand and held it together until I was out of her building and on the street, the crisp autumn wind whipping the ends of my scarf. Tears filled my eyes, and I brushed them away with angry swipes of my palms. I stared up at the sliver of sky I could see through the buildings, a blanket of gray covering the city .
Just tell your boss that he’s actually the father of your child , I thought. No big deal. Toss that grenade into the corner office and then walk through the door to watch it blow up in your face.
Laughing mirthlessly, I buried my chin in my scarf and headed toward the nearest subway station. In the end, it didn’t matter that Hearst, Inc. was a meat grinder, and I was a poor little leg of lamb heading for a grisly end.
My fate had been decided seven years ago.
This wouldn’t end well.