36. Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Six
Trent
I ’m so rattled from Emily’s visit and don’t have enough work to distract me, so I roll up to Grady’s studio at the old train station to decompress. When I enter the building, the receptionist, Lola, grins at me.
“Trent Castillo, are you following in your brother’s footsteps now? Going to record a song or two?”
“Not much of a singer,” I say, going to the fridge and grabbing a soft drink. “What are you still doing here?”
“Sarah Telling is coming tomorrow with one of her proteges from Center Stage to record some kind of demo track. I’m just getting everything in order before I head out. Grady’s in the studio, if you want to head back. No one else is there.”
“Thanks.” I crack the can and wander down the hallway to where the recording studio is located. There’s an apartment here for all the famous people who do fly-by-night visits to record something before going back to LA or NY or some other city. There always seems to be someone here.
Grady isn’t in the booth. Instead, he’s in the part where people normally record, his guitar resting on his knee, a pencil in his hand, and paper on the music stand, scribbling away as I pull open the door.
He’s a producer, songwriter, and an occasional recording artist. His last album blew up, but he had no interest in going on tour.
“Emily come to see you?” Grady asks without looking up.
I freeze in the doorway. “What do you know?”
“Just come talk to me,” Grady says, setting the pen on the music stand and setting his guitar back on the stand.
“Who are you writing for?” I ask, avoiding the obvious topic of conversation.
“Sarah Telling,” he says. “That’s confidential, obviously. Not sure if what I’m writing will get used or not.”
I slide into one of the few comfortable chairs in the room and sip my drink. Grady doesn’t say anything, and I know he’s going to outwait me.
“Em’s pregnant,” I say.
“Congratulations,” Grady says. “Maggie’s pregnant too.”
“She is?”
“Yep. Castillo cousins growing up together.”
“Emily was supposed to be telling everyone she used a donor,” I say, somewhat resentful, even if it’s not justified. She was right in the shop today—it doesn’t take much to put two and two together. It’s just that I don’t know what to do with how Emily and I made four without fully realizing it.
“You were living with her, man. Did you really think when she announced she was pregnant that no one was going to raise their eyebrows?”
“I was renting a room.”
“Were you? What’d you pay her with? Dick?”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m going to guess that you’re not taking the news as well as both of you might have hoped.”
“Definitely not as well as she hoped,” I admit. “I’m not sure what I expected. It’s going to sound fucking ridiculous, but when I agreed to all this, all I knew was that I didn’t want anyone else to have her. Saying that out loud makes me sound like a dick.”
“Makes you sound like you’ve had some pretty significant feelings for her for a while.”
I absorb his comment, and when I let it settle, I think he’s probably right.
Every time I went to pick Emily up from a date, I felt a little vindicated that she couldn’t find anyone she wanted to be around more than me.
That at the end of those nights, she was with me.
Back then, I had no desire or interest in analyzing that feeling, but I can see now that it was there.
“I know some part of you thought you could keep the paternity of Emily’s baby a secret, but all secrets come out in time. We both know that. Do you really want it to be a secret? You don’t want that life with her?”
Grady and I poke fun at each other all the time, and the sincerity in his voice makes me realize he understands that nothing about what’s happening is a joke. That it’s very real and very overwhelming.
“The way I feel about Maggie,” Grady continues, “I wouldn’t let anything or anyone come between us. And I sure as hell wouldn’t be okay with anyone else raising my kid.”
“Yeah, but you’re you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on, Grady. Rockstar. Celebrity songwriter. Friend to the stars. There’s nothing seedy or bad about being associated with you in this town, in the world. Even you fucking up your run for mayor didn’t tarnish your shine in this town.”
“Ah,” he says, as though it’s clicked for him. “This is about you going to jail.”
“Of course it is. And it’s about how my past just won’t fucking let me go.”
“It won’t let you go, or you won’t let it go.”
“Now you sound like Emily.”
“If everyone is saying the same thing, then maybe there’s something to it.”
“I got brought in for questioning last week. Em was brought in for questioning. They asked people who work for me questions about her and her relationship with me. Those things happened to her because of me.”
“So you think the sum contribution that you’ve brought to her life is that negative experience?”
When he puts it like that, it seems stupid. Of course it hasn’t all been bad. “No, I’m just saying that something bad happened to her because of me.”
“Was she arrested?”
“No.”
“I’m just trying to figure out your logic here,” Grady says. “It seems to me like you’re letting the cloud of your past self hang over you. And I’ve been there. Punishing myself for past mistakes at the expense of my future happiness. I have been there .”
“You just had to figure out you were being an idiot,” I say.
Grady stares at me.
“It’s not that simple.”
Grady sighs and runs a hand down his face. “Have you thought about going to therapy?”
“No,” I say, and then I swallow down my pride. “Em mentioned it to me earlier.”
“Maggie and I went to couples therapy when we first got back together. I…” His voice cracks.
“I did some serious damage, and we needed to figure out a way through it, beyond it. Going into a marriage, into a life together with any lingering resentment seemed foolish. I’m in this with Maggie for a lifetime.
” He takes a deep breath. “Mia went to a lot of therapy before she came back here to be with Tyler and Victoria. She still meets with her support group online or in person when she can. Pasha went to therapy when his fiancée in Russia died. It’s okay to need other people to help you sort through complex emotions, through complex experiences. ”
I rub my face, but I don’t say anything in response. “You and Maggie never told me you were going to therapy.”
“We both knew we loved each other, but we also knew we had a lot to work out together. The way I treated her when we were kids was not okay. And the way I was when I first got back also wasn’t okay.
I had to acknowledge that, and we needed to figure out a way to move forward together.
You know, I almost lost Maggie because I was trying to protect her from the job offer I had.
I didn’t want to put stress on her that she didn’t need if I wasn’t going to take the job.
Now, she and I don’t have any secrets. It’s how I knew about Emily—honestly, probably before you—sorry, about that. ”
“I told Em that I might move back to Utica.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t see how I can make it work here.”
“With her?”
“With this town.”
“You’re going to need to give me more than that. Wasn’t the shop doing well?”
“It was until I got taken in for questioning. Might as well have been arrested with the way people have responded. Today was a graveyard.”
“It was closed for a few days. It’ll take a bit for word to get out—about everything.”
“How often is the truth louder than a lie?”
“Good question. I think if you consistently show up, even those people who never heard the truth start to understand the truth. They can see it reflected in who you are. That’s what you were doing before, and it was working, right?”
“I just don’t know.”
Grady picks up his pencil and twirls it across his knuckles a few times. “If this past week hadn’t happened, if Dan the snake had never materialized, and I’d asked you what you wanted from your life, what would you have told me?”
Emily. Amir. A baby .
It’s right there without me having to even consider it. What we’d had together in that house for the last few months had been the happiest, most content I’d ever been. I had the girl. A kid who looked up to me, and the potential to be better each day.
“I love her,” I say, my voice cracking. “I’ve never loved anyone like I love her.”
“Then you fight like hell to keep that. You don’t throw it away.
You don’t set it aside. But the fact that we’re sitting here, that you’re not with her, means you’ve got work to do.
Your fight isn’t out there,” he says, pointing to the door, “it’s in here.
” He touches his chest and then his head.
“You get those two things aligned, and you’re good, man. ’Cause she loves you too.”
I put my head in my hands, and I’m barely holding myself together. “You really think I can have that? You think I deserve that?”
Grady rises off his stool and comes to my chair, hauling me out of my seat and into his arms. I can’t hold it in anymore, and a sob escapes.
“I love you, man,” Grady says as he claps me on the back. “And I think you deserve Emily and Amir and your shop and a chance to be a good dad to this baby. What you don’t deserve is to keep punishing yourself and letting other people punish you for a mistake you already paid for.”
I squeeze him tight, and I wonder whether it’s really possible to let go of the weight that I’ve been dragging behind me since I was nineteen and the police raided my house.
I’ve been seeing Amber, the therapist Grady recommended and offered to pay for, for the last few weeks, and I’ve been surprised at how I’ve been starting to see my life differently. It’s been weird to reframe my experiences just by talking about them.
When I got out of jail years ago, I was offered some reintegration support, but I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t planning to be a husband and father. That bridge had been blown up and couldn’t be repaired. Who’d want someone like me?
“Tell me about you and Emily,” Amber says.
“What do you want to know?”
“When you first came, you stated that being ‘good enough’ for her was a goal. So today I’d like to explore what that relationship has been like up to this point.”
I try to figure out where to even start, how to categorize her and us. “I fake dated her younger sister in high school.”
“The one who helped you learn how to read.”
“Yeah, but Em and I never really connected. We didn’t really know each other. Not until we worked on a fundraiser together almost two years ago now.”
“The one for Little Falls after the flood?”
“That’s the one,” I say. “She was helping to organize it, and even then, we hung out a bit. But the night of the concert, something just clicked .” I snap my fingers.
“We were standing on the side of the stage, and I made her laugh. Her dad had just died, and she was clearly struggling, but I got her to laugh. When I looked over at her and saw her smile, I just thought—that’s it.
” It’s the first time I’ve ever admitted to myself, let alone out loud, that the lightning strike happened in that moment.
But looking back on it, I never saw Em the same after that.
Sure, we were still friends, but she was the friend for me. The one I’d show up for no matter what time or where she needed me.
“Was that connection mutual?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “We hung out a lot. She called me when she needed something—something fixed, Amir looked after, picked up from a date.”
“Picked up from a date?”
“Yeah,” I say, realizing that might seem weirder than it was. “She was doing this dating experiment thing, but the guys all sucked.”
“And how’d that make you feel?”
“I was glad none of them held her interest.”
“Why?”
“You know,” I say with a little laugh, “I think it might have been because I was already half in love with her.”
“And what are some things you think you’ve done to express that love?”
I sit back in my chair, surprised by the question.
The obvious ones come easy. “I agreed to father her baby, and I did a bunch of tests so she wouldn’t have to worry about that baby.
” Then I think about it some more. “When she got Amir’s genetic tests back, I held her while she cried, and on the anniversary of her husband’s death, I went to the cemetery with her. ”
“If I told you that those would be things most people would consider as adding value to someone’s life—being that system of support—what would you say to that?”
I take a deep breath and then release it, really letting myself consider her words without getting defensive or looking for an alternate picture of things.
My fingers are gripping my knees hard. “I could see that.” My chin trembles, and I blink away tears.
“It’s just really important to me that I don’t make her life worse. ”
“I understand that,” Amber says, and her voice is gentle.
“Let’s explore that some more. Because, like we talked about before, how we frame our experiences makes a difference in how we respond to them, how we move forward from them.
Tell me about some of the other experiences you’ve had with Emily. ”
And so I do. I lay it all bare. Every joy and sorrow over the last two years, and I don’t sugarcoat what’s happened, but I also try not to downplay any of it either.
Maybe it’s possible that I can make Emily’s life easier in some ways and harder in others, and that eventually those two things do balance each other out.
That I don’t have to give the negative more value or weight, even if that’s what I’ve grown accustomed to doing.
The truth is, if I can find a path forward, one that takes me to her doorstep, I’ll put in the work to get there, carve the path from rock with my bare hands if I have to.
Because I know that if I step back through her door again, I have to be ready to handle it all. I can’t walk away a second time.