Chapter 2 #3
“I was about to say it’s a calculated thing to do.
Decent and calculated aren’t mutually exclusive, especially with a Buchanan.
” She plucked the giraffe from Fern’s grip, inciting an outraged squawk, and immediately handed it back.
A negotiation tactic. Kinsey ran her relationships the way she ran experiments — with variables and controls and a hypothesis she’d defend to the death.
“He gives up the vote, he looks like the good guy, he removes the one thing you could use to discredit the process. Now you can’t complain about bias.
And he gets to stand there looking noble while you get angrier and angrier about a man who’s technically playing fair. ”
“You think he’s gaming it.”
“I think he’s a Buchanan. They don’t give things up. They reposition.”
I wanted to argue with her. I couldn’t, because she was probably right.
But something in the way he’d said It’s the right thing to do — flat, unperformative, like he was stating a fact he’d arrived at by himself and didn’t need anyone to congratulate him for — snagged in my mind and wouldn’t let go.
I changed the subject. “What did she eat today?”
Kinsey let me change the subject, which was how I knew she was worried.
We talked about Fern — the pureed sweet potatoes she’d tried for the first time and rejected with a face of betrayed fury, the way she’d started reaching for things with both hands, the sound she made when Kinsey sang to her that was either delight or a request to stop.
Normal things. Small, warm, real things that existed in the half of my life Liam had never touched.
He didn’t know about Fern. That fact sat in the center of my chest like a stone I carried everywhere.
He didn’t know he had a daughter. He didn’t know about the pregnancy I’d discovered six weeks after I discovered the affair, at eight weeks along, sitting on the bathroom floor of a furnished apartment I’d rented the day I left.
He didn’t know about the ultrasound Kinsey drove me to, or the birth she held my hand through, or the three a.m. feedings where I’d rocked his daughter in the dark and whispered promises about the life I’d build for her that would never depend on a man who thought the rules didn’t apply to him.
I’d told myself it was protection. And it was — protection for Fern, who deserved a mother who wasn’t shattered, and protection for me, who would not have survived Liam Buchanan knowing about the baby during the divorce.
He would have fought for custody. Roland would have mobilized lawyers.
The Buchanan machine would have churned into action and I would have been ground to dust by it, because that was what the machine did to women who tried to keep things for themselves.
But there was something underneath the protection. Something I didn’t look at often because looking at it felt like touching a wire.
I had kept his daughter from him.
Not for a week, not for a month. For over a year.
Through the pregnancy and the birth and the first smile and the first laugh and the first time she slept through the night.
Every milestone. Every ordinary day. I had built Fern’s entire world without him in it, and I had done it on purpose, and I could justify every second of that choice, and it was still the kind of secret that would detonate everything if it ever came to light.
And he was two miles away. Sitting in his Back Bay apartment with no idea that the woman he’d broken had given him the thing he’d always wanted — a child — and hidden her like a treasure in a city he owned.
Fern fell asleep in my arms at seven-thirty. I carried her to the crib in my bedroom — we shared the room because the apartment only had one bedroom and the grant money wasn’t here yet — and stood over her for a long time in the half-dark, watching her breathe.
She had his face. His jaw. His dark eyes. But when she slept, she was all mine.
“You’re staring,” Kinsey said from the doorway. She’d pulled on her coat. Tuesday was her late lab night, and she had cultures to check.
“I’m allowed to stare at my own baby.”
“You’re allowed. You’re also spiraling.” She crossed the room and squeezed my shoulder. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t need to know. You’re doing fine.”
“I told him the last fifteen months have been hell.”
“They have been.”
“But if he ever finds out about Fern, he’s going to replay that sentence and know that I was standing there talking about what he doesn’t know while actively keeping the biggest thing from him. And the moral high ground I’ve been standing on will cave in.”
Kinsey was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “You’re not on the moral high ground, Hal. You’re on the survival ground. There’s a difference.”
She kissed the top of my head the way she’d been doing since grad school, when late nights in the lab turned into early mornings and we’d take turns being the one who was falling apart.
“Lock the door behind me. Eat something that isn’t a crab cake. And stop thinking about Liam Buchanan.”
I locked the door. I ate the leftover pasta she’d made the night before. I checked on Fern twice.
I did not stop thinking about Liam Buchanan.