Chapter 16 Gabriel
Gabriel
Iwake in the morning from the first real rest I’ve had in more than six weeks to Sydney, freshly showered and sitting on the edge of our bed next to me. Solemn and quiet, she waits with a wide-tooth comb in her hand.
It’s such a role reversal that I double blink to be sure my mind isn’t playing tricks. The proximity alone is enough to bring a grin to my face. “‘Morning, sunshine.”
“You wake up h-happy,” she says.
I yawn, sit up, and run my hand through my hair, my voice gravel from my long sleep. “That depends on whether you’re next to me.”
She scowls. “Don’t flirt.”
“That was flirting?”
“The m-muscle flex and . . . smile and . . .” She trails off, then rolls her lips inward. Her color darkening, she thrusts the brush in my direction. The moment it’s in my hand, she abruptly gives me her back. “Please.”
Still grinning, I watch her every move, searching for signs that she’s remembered me, but she keeps her face turned away and her hands tight in her lap. And my smile fades.
After breakfast, my cautious optimism turns to reluctant acceptance when she makes a shooing motion with her hands and says, “Go. Work. Don’t . . . h-hover.”
Two hours later, I glance up from my computer and suppress a moan when Sydney, her hair falling over her shoulders in two French braids, joins me in the library.
The last time she walked into this room wearing braids like that, she dropped to her knees, and I wrapped them around my fists while she—
Stop. I shift in my seat to hide the immediate semi that pushes behind my zipper. Intrusive memories of our past sex life aren’t helpful.
If I’d known how badly those braids would kick me in the balls, I’d have figured out something else for her hair. Like a nun’s habit.
Nope. That wouldn’t work either. It just makes me picture role-play.
She comes to a stop within about six feet of me, then stalls, looking lost. What am I meant to do here? Welcome her into a room in her own home? Won’t that make her feel like she’s in someone else’s house?
Another five heartbeats of my indecision and her silence pass. I have to say something. “Do you need the computer?”
She shakes her head.
“I can transfer the latest reports from the Nest & Wing Foundation to the tablet, if you’d like to see them. It’s a charity you and I started about a year ago.”
She moves closer, her brow furrowed lightly. “What kind of charity?”
“The tagline is ‘Safety to grow. Support to fly.’ It’s a program designed to bridge the gaps for kids aging out of the foster system so they’re not left on their own at eighteen.
It provides homes, job training or education, transportation, health insurance .
. . basically, the kinds of things kids in traditional families get from their parents when they ease into adulthood.
When they transition to independence, it’s a family environment to come home to for weekends or a home-cooked meal or holidays.
Someone on call to talk to about anything from what to do if your engine light comes on to an enthusiastic ear to listen to good news about a promotion.
We encourage and give them guidance on ways to create healthy support systems in their lives. ”
“An emergency contact?”
Concerned by her odd intensity, I reach for her hips to pull her onto my lap before my brain catches up. Abruptly, I drop my arms before I accidentally paw her. “Yes. There’s an emergency contact system in place. There’s no aging out of it. They have it as long as they need it.”
She stands stock-still, barely blinking.
“Sydney? What’s wrong?” I told her about the charity because it usually lights her up. She can talk about it for hours. It was one of her conditions, front and center on our prenup, along with keeping her own apartment.
I expected learning about it to delight her, not devastate her.
She shakes her head but shows no sign of being interested in explaining what’s upset her.
I snag some Kleenex from the box on the desk and stand, offering them.
She takes the tissues and does something that, prior to her captivity, I’d never seen her do.
Face red and nose running, she cries her heart out.
Desperate to offer comfort, I lift a hand. “Can I hold you?”
She shakes her head.
“I’m sorry. I thought hearing about Nest & Wing would make you happy.”
“I—” She chokes then sniffles. “—am happy.”
“I can tell,” I say with gentle sarcasm.
“Did you know me . . . when I aged out?”
“I didn’t meet you until after you graduated from college.”
“I got accepted, though, with a s-sc—” Her face tightens in frustration as the word fights with her mouth. “I had money to pay?”
How had we done all of this for other people, without me thinking about what it meant for her? That she was healing herself by helping others. “Yes, you had a full-ride scholarship.”
The shudders that jerk through her almost look like adrenaline shakes.
By the time I met her, the uncertainty and fear of that time was in her past, but it probably doesn’t feel like history to her now.
For her, it was last month. Every little piece seems to hit her at a different time, as though her brain is protecting her from absorbing too much information too quickly.
She had to have gone to college to become an engineer, but it must not have felt real. Or maybe she hadn’t remembered what I told her.
I thought of the Nest & Wing Foundation as something she wanted because, even though she was lucky and found a way to build a future for herself, she saw so many foster kids around her end up homeless or trafficked or in prison. I never really saw her in the kids we help. She was different.
Sydney was resilient and made it on her own. She was talented, ambitious, and fierce, with a take-no-shit attitude. She was tough as nails and was always going to come out on top because she was strong. She wasn’t vulnerable the way these kids are.
Except, she was. She was desperate, terrified, and one torn meniscus or major illness away from losing everything. Even whatever temporary home she’d found.
It puts her refusal to give up her apartment when we married in a new light. She lived with me but insisted on having a backup plan. At the time, it bothered the hell out of me.
“You attended Blackwater State University on a soccer scholarship. You eventually moved off campus with your friend, Clarissa Harcourt, and my sister, Bronwyn. You’re still close to them.
After undergrad, you completed your master’s at Columbia while working for my father in one of his research and development departments.
You’re only a semester away from finishing your PhD.
You and I met about five months after you graduated from BSU. ”
“You’re my e-emergency c-contact?” she asks.
I thought that feature of the program was something practical, like having a lawyer on retainer. Never in my life have I not had the ability to pick up the phone, say, “I need you,” and not know my family was coming, sometimes to their own detriment.
“Yes, but you have close friends who are like sisters to you too. They call your phone every day, waiting for you to answer. My parents and siblings would be here if you needed them. Any one of us would answer the phone at two in the morning and show up for you, no questions asked. But yes, I’m your emergency contact. ”
She nods. “As long as we’re married.”
I huff. “As long as we live. You’re my family.
I’m yours. That may not be how it works for some people, but if we weren’t together, I’d still be here for you.
Clarissa, Bronwyn, Franki, and Janessa were yours before we married.
You’ll always have them too. You’re not alone and never will be again.
If you didn’t want to be here with me, you could stay with one of them. ”
It’d kill me if she left, but the thought of her feeling trapped makes me sick.
“Can you send me the report?” Her speech is halting and rough, but clear.
“Sure.”
I pass her the electronic tablet. She curls into the monstrosity we call a chair then accepts the files I send her. Frowning, she scrolls through them. Then, slowly, her shoulders relax.
My phone alerts me with a message.
Wifey: Is the program already in two states?
My lips curve. I’m right here. I look over to find her watching me as she waits for a response.
“Currently, we have programs in Pennsylvania and New York, but we have plans to expand nationally in the next two years,” I say.
She turns back to her iPad, and I return to my email inbox. Three minutes later, another iMessage pops up.
Wifey: Did you see the request to add childcare, so the kids who are parents can work or go to school? It seems like an oversight to have missed it in the first place.
I look back her way. “I did. I’m sure we’ll discover more than one place we can improve.
I imagine it’ll evolve over time. We’re working on figuring out a way to keep siblings together too.
Especially when they have younger ones who are still in the system.
It’s a big project. We’re just getting started. ”
The speech therapist called her problems speaking apraxia. She seems to struggle sometimes to coordinate making her mouth form words. The thoughts, themselves, are still there. In writing, she’s every bit as eloquent as she ever was.
Wifey: What is this?
She sends a screenshot of a folder.
“Those are the kids we’ve lost,” I say quietly.
She frowns. “Lost?”
“One to depression last year. A couple to addiction. Prison. Some have broken the rules too many times or too severely to be considered a safe housemate for others. Some just”—I shake my head—“disappear and never come back. They keep me up at night, sometimes, wondering what we could do differently or—” I shouldn’t be talking about something like this with her.
She needs peace and for me to stay positive.
She nods. When I say nothing more, she goes back to reading the files. Eventually, the messages she sends slow, then stop.
A little while later, I glance up to find her sleeping with her legs curved to the side and her hand curled under her cheek. With baggy clothing covering her thinner frame and her braid hiding the sharper curve of her jaw, she looks exactly like Sydney from six months ago.
I turn back to the report in front of me. The report. I’m working in our vacation home, when Sydney and I never do that here. We both spent notoriously long hours on the job, and the time we took for R & R was sacrosanct. Balance kept both of us steady.
Now, I work here because I have to do something to keep from smothering her and because our companies require consistent oversight.
I’m the last thing from a micromanager, but the best team members are ambitious. And ambition can lead to a tendency to circumvent ethics in the single-minded pursuit of a goal. Everyone needs checks and balances.
A message from the security officer at the front gate pops up on my phone. My chest floods with relief, then I send my sleeping wife a look of guilty concern. She’s not ready for these visitors.
Leaning back, I work the kinks out of my neck and jaw before I reply: Let them in. I’ll be right there.
Before I leave to locate our visitors, I drape a cream-colored throw blanket over Sydney and remove the tablet from her lax fingers and place it on the table beside her.
With any luck, she’ll remain asleep until I get our surprise visitors settled into the bungalow at the edge of the property. She’ll never even know they were here.