Chapter 20
Saylor
I drive for forty minutes before I realize I have nowhere to go.
That’s the thing about being far away from the place I know as home.
No childhood streets to cruise down, no mate’s house to show up at unannounced, no bar where the bartender knows my order and doesn’t ask questions.
I have a borrowed truck, a half-tank of petrol, and a county full of roads I only know because they lead back to the same place.
So I drive in circles. Past the hardware store where I bought the cabinet hinges.
Past the farm stand that sells the tomatoes Mum likes.
Past the elementary school with the playground where I sat on a bench two weeks ago and watched kids on the swings and thought about what it would feel like to bring our daughter here.
To push her on those swings. To be the kind of man whose biggest problem on a Saturday morning is making sure a four-year-old doesn’t launch herself into orbit.
Our daughter. The phrase formed so easily, as though she already existed. As though she was already ours.
I pull into a petrol station. Kill the engine. Sit there with my hands on the wheel and my forehead against my knuckles and try to untangle the mess inside my chest.
Celeste offered to pay for Mum’s surgery.
That’s the fact. Everything I said after that—every sharp word, every accusation, the sugar mama comment that I want to claw back out of the air—that was pride.
Not the good kind, the quiet kind that holds your spine straight when the world pushes back.
The bad kind. The kind that would rather let your mother suffer than admit you can’t fix it yourself.
Mum was right. She’s usually right. The guilt isn’t about protecting her.
It’s about protecting me. From the truth I’ve spent four years running from: I was driving.
The other bloke had no headlights on, was speeding, and the road was dark.
I did everything right according to the book but none of that matters because I was behind the wheel and Mum was in the passenger seat and now she’s basically bound to a chair.
That’s the equation. That’s the math I do every morning when I help her from the bed to the bathroom and pretend it doesn’t cost me anything.
Celeste sees the cost. That’s what terrifies me.
She sees all of it, raw, and she stays anyway.
She doesn’t just stay, she reaches in. She tries to help.
And I slapped her hand away because accepting help would mean admitting I’ve been drowning, and admitting I’ve been drowning would mean letting go of the only identity I’ve held onto since I was twenty-two years old.
I fix what I break.
I’m the boy who takes care of his mum.
What if I could be more than that?
What if it’s time to do the impossible?
I start the truck and drive straight home.
The house is dark when I pull in. Not the warm, every-window-glowing dark that greeted Celeste a few hours ago.
Dark dark. The porchlight is off. The kitchen windows are black.
The only light comes from a thin line under Mum’s bedroom door, which means she’s either reading or she’s fallen asleep with the lamp on, which she does more often than not.
The kitchen is clean. The Thai containers have been put away. Someone wiped the table down. The normalcy of it hurts more than the mess would have.
Mum’s door is cracked open. I push it gently.
She’s asleep, the paperback tented on her chest, the lamp still on.
I ease the book off her, fold the corner of the page she’ll scold me for folding, set it on the nightstand.
I pull the blanket up to her chin and turn off the lamp, watching shadows reclaim the corners of her room.
She stirs. “Saylor?”
“Yeah, Mum. Go back to sleep.”
“Did you apologize?” she asks in the dark.
“Working on it.”
“Work faster, love.” Within ten seconds her breathing evens out, and I stand there in her doorway and love her so much my ribs ache.
I close her door and walk through the dark house. Celeste’s car is still in the driveway, so she’s here. But she’s not in the kitchen. Not in the living room. Not in my bedroom.
The nursery door is open.
It’s the spare room at the end of the hall, the one with the south-facing window and the good morning light.
The one Celeste and I talked about at two in the morning with our legs tangled together—Montessori shelves along the far wall, the crib near the window, a reading chair in the corner so she could feed the baby in the sunrise.
Pale green walls. A mobile made of fabric scraps from her old collection, the designs that meant the most. We planned it the way you plan something you believe in. Detail by detail. Thread by thread.
Celeste is sitting on the floor beneath the window.
Her back against the wall, her knees drawn up, my jacket still around her shoulders.
She’s not crying. Her face is dry and still.
But the stillness isn’t calm. It’s the kind that comes after the crying stops, or before it starts, or in the space where crying should be but the body has decided it can’t afford it.
I know, the second I cross that threshold, that something has broken beyond the fight we had.
“Lessi?”
She looks up. Her eyes find mine in the dark. She holds my gaze for three seconds, and then she says it.
“We lost.” Her voice is flat. Quiet. Sanded down to nothing. “The judge ruled. Eleanor gets the baby.”
The words hit me in the chest and keep going. Through the ribs, through the lungs, through the place where I’d already started building a room for this child inside myself.
“Janet came by,” Celeste says. “Off the record. The will stands, but the guardianship clause was just a recommendation. The judge decided Eleanor was more suitable. Biological grandparent. Stable finances. She even paid for the surrogacy, Saylor. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“So.” She exhales and stares at the empty room. “No more baby. You’re off the hook.”
The hook. As though this were an obligation.
As though I were here under contract, fulfilling a role, playing house until the arrangement expired.
She doesn’t mean it that way—or maybe she does, a little, because the woman I love is sitting on the floor of an empty room that was supposed to hold a crib and she’s hurting in ways I can’t reach.
I know better than anyone, severe pain makes people admit things in the dark they’d never say in the light.
I don’t answer right away. Instead I look at the dresser against the far wall.
The one I sanded and repainted two weekends ago, the one I was going to mount a mirror above once I found one the right size.
There’s a black marker on top of it. A Sharpie.
I’d been using it to mark the wall for picture hooks—measuring the spacing, penciling dots, then tracing them in marker so I wouldn’t lose them.
I pick up the marker. Pop the cap. Walk over and sit down on the floor next to her. The hardwood is cold through my jeans. Our shoulders almost touch. The window above us lets in a thin wash of moonlight that turns the empty room silver.
“Give me your hand,” I say.
She looks at me. Suspicious. Exhausted. Wanting to trust me and too tired to verify.
She gives me her hand and I hold it steady.
I uncap the Sharpie and draw a thin black line around her left ring finger.
Slow, careful, the way you’d handle something irreplaceable.
I complete the circle. Then, on top, where a stone would sit, I draw a small heart.
It’s not a good heart. It’s lopsided, slightly too large, the kind of heart a kid would draw on a Valentine’s card for their mum.
But it’s there. A ring made of ink on the hand of the woman I love, in an empty nursery, on the worst night of her life.
“Do you know the story about the man in the flood?” I ask.
She stares at her finger. At the wobbly heart. She doesn’t speak.
“There’s this bloke, yeah? Devout man. Prays every day.
One day, a flood comes, water’s rising, he climbs up on his roof and he prays.
‘God, save me.’ Within the hour, a rowboat comes by.
Bloke in the boat says, ‘Hop in, I’ll take you to safety.
’ The man on the roof says, ‘No thanks. God will save me.’ So, the water keeps rising and the guy keeps praying.
After a bit, a motorboat comes. Same thing.
‘Hop in.’ He says, ‘No thanks, God will save me.’ Water’s up to his chest now.
A boat won’t do. This time, a helicopter flies over, drops a ladder.
‘Grab on!’ they call. Once again the bloke says, ‘No thanks. My God will save me. He’s coming. ’”
I pause. Celeste is watching me. Still holding her hand out, the marker ring drying on her skin.
“Who saves him then?”
“No one. The man drowns. Dies. Gets to heaven. Stands in front of God, furious. He shakes his fist at him and says, ‘What good are You? I prayed every day! I believed in You! Why didn’t You save me?’ And God looks at him and says, ‘Mate, I sent you two boats and a helicopter.’”
The corner of her mouth twitches. Not a smile. The muscle memory of one.
“Cute story.” She nods, defeated.
“Celeste, the point is, I’ve been the idiot on the roof,” I admit.
“Praying for a way to fix Mum’s surgery.
Praying to feel like I’m enough. Praying for someone to make me believe I deserve more than guilt and a toolbox.
And you, Celeste. You’re my boat. You’ve been my boat this whole time, and I’ve been standing on the roof telling you I don’t need a ride because I’d rather drown than admit I can’t swim. ”
Her breath catches. A small, involuntary sound. The crack before the dam.
“I’m not rich,” I say. “I can’t buy you a ring yet.
I can’t buy much of anything, honestly, and that used to be the thing that kept me up at night—all the ways I couldn’t match your life.
But you know what? I am wealthy in the things that count.
Like how much I love you. Like how certain I am that this”—I gesture at the dark room, the empty walls, the two of us on the floor—“is exactly where I’m supposed to be. ”
I lift her hand. The marker heart is dry now, slightly smudged at the edges. Permanent enough to last a few days. Temporary enough to fade.
“That’ll eventually wash off,” I say, “But I’ll keep drawing it until I can find a real one. A small one, but real. I don’t know how. I’ll figure it out. But that’s my promise to you.”
She looks at the ring. Turns her hand in the moonlight. The heart catches the pale glow and holds it.
“I’m so sorry about Whit,” I say. “And the baby. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Celeste.
I want to reach inside and hold your heart because I know it’s about to break apart.
But try to remember it doesn’t erase what we’ve built.
And it doesn’t change what’s ahead. If you want to be a mum—” I turn to face her fully.
My hand on her knee. My eyes on hers. “Then let’s do it.
You and me. Our own family. Not because someone wrote it in a will. Because we chose it. With each other.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The house settles around us. Somewhere down the hall, Mum shifts in her sleep and the bedframe creaks—a small, domestic sound, proof that we’re not alone even when it feels like it.
“Do you actually want this?” Celeste’s tone is careful.
Guarded. Protecting something she can’t afford to lose again.
“Or do you just pity me? Because from where I’m sitting, I’m an older woman whose company just imploded, whose best friend is gone, who just lost a custody case, and who is—by any objective measure—the saddest person you’ve ever met.
You don’t have to save me, Saylor. That’s the whole point of what you said tonight.
You don’t want to be saved and neither do I.
So if this is a rescue mission, tell me now. ”
“It’s not pity.” I say it simply because simple is all I have left.
“And it’s not a rescue. It’s destiny, Celeste.
You’re my boat. But here’s the part I didn’t say before.
” I take her other hand so I’m holding both.
“I’m your boat too. That’s how it works.
We don’t just save each other. We refuse to let the other one drown. ”
She looks at me. At the marker on her finger. At the empty room that was supposed to hold a baby and now holds only us and the quiet wreckage of a plan that fell apart and the first, fragile scaffolding of a new one.
I kiss her. Slow this time. Not the quick peck from the driveway, the compressed promise between two people mid-fight.
This one is unhurried. Tender. The kind of kiss that doesn’t demand anything, that just says: I’m here.
I’ll be here tomorrow. And the day after that, and the one after that, for as many days as you’ll let me.
When I pull back, her forehead rests against mine.
“Tomorrow is going to be hard,” I say.
“I know.”
“And the day after.”
“I know that too.”
“But tonight, you’re not doing any of it alone. Yeah? We’ll sit in the gray area together.”
“Gray area?” she asks.
“Something my mum used to say. The gray area is when you’re at the end of something awful breaking apart, but you’re also on the cusp of something beautiful coming together. All you can do is sit with it. That’s hard for a lot of people, to have hope when everything seems bleak.”
Celeste looks at me like she’s looking into my soul. Weighing something, sizing me up. A kiss on the cheek tells me she finds me more than worthy to be by her side. “The gray area isn’t so bleak if you’re sitting in it with the right person.”
I nod. “Exactly.” Her hand tightens around mine. The marker heart presses between our palms—a ring drawn in the dark, a promise made on the floor, a future sketched in Sharpie that will fade from her skin long before it fades from her heart.
We sit there. Two people on the floor of an empty room, holding hands in the moonlight, letting the worst day end the only way it can.
Together.