Chapter Eighteen
Casey
STERLING’S DONOR WORKUP clears on a Tuesday. Dr. Osgood calls me with the results while I’m sitting on Sienna’s bed reading her the bear counting book for the eleventh time. The cardiac clearance passed, the infectious-disease panel was clean, and the collection is scheduled for next week.
I thank her and hang up. Sienna asks me why the bear still can’t count.
I tell her some bears are slow learners.
I sit there holding the book with a four-year-old on my lap, a phone in my pocket that just confirmed the man down the hall is going to save my daughter’s life, and a feeling I don’t have a name for.
I should feel relief. I do feel relief, somewhere underneath the rest of it. Sienna will get the transplant. The donor is viable. The timeline is holding. Everything I’ve spent eighteen months fighting for is going to happen.
The relief should feel pure, but it doesn’t.
Sterling is the one who can save her, which means this action gives him leverage.
He might not chose to use it yet, but I’m sure he’ll someday have his family attorney file that custody petition.
It makes me think of the four years of silence, and the living room where he told me to leave.
Sterling is going to lie on an operating table while they draw marrow from his pelvis. That marrow is going into my daughter. I’m going to stand in a hospital room watching his cells save Sienna’s life because mine couldn’t.
I don’t want to need him. I’ve spent four years building a life defined by not needing him. I need him anyway, and the needing feels like losing something I promised myself I’d never lose again. I trust him to save our daughter, but I don’t trust him not to try to take her from me.
I FIND OUT ABOUT THE tutor on Wednesday.
Sterling hired a tutor. A reading specialist, credentialed and experienced with medically fragile children.
She’s scheduled to start Thursday. He arranged it through the transplant center’s family services coordinator, who apparently exists and who apparently takes calls from Sterling Hollingsford at 7 a.m. because he calls people that early expects them to answer.
He didn’t ask me.
He arranged it as he arranges everything else I’ve not pushed back on.
It’s efficient, unilaterally, and with the assumption that speed justifies skipping the conversation.
We were only married six months, but I’ve seen him doing it a number of times with his business colleagues, and with me since we came to Charlotte. Now he’s doing it with my daughter.
I find him in his office. The door is open. He’s at the desk with his laptop and a stack of papers that probably represent more money than I’ve earned in my career. He looks up when I stop in the doorway.
“You hired a tutor.”
“A reading specialist. The transplant coordinator recommended—”
“You hired a tutor for my daughter without asking me.”
Sterling closes the laptop. He stands up, clearly moving into his negotiation stances automatically. I’ve watched him do it with everyone whose position he needs to manage. Now he’s doing it with me.
“Sienna is going to miss months of developmental milestones during conditioning and recovery. The specialist works specifically with transplant patients. She’s been vetted by the center.”
I wave a hand. “I didn’t ask whether she’s been vetted. I asked why you didn’t ask me.”
“I should have talked to you first. I thought moving quickly mattered more than consulting you, and I had the connection to make it happen.”
“Everything needs to happen quickly with you. You decide what’s needed, you make it happen, and the people affected find out afterward. That’s how you run your fund. That’s how you ran our marriage. That’s not how you make decisions about my daughter.” My voice is rising.
“Our daughter.”
Neither of us moves past the word. He’s earned exactly half of it.
I’m not going to pretend he hasn’t, but the half he’s earned doesn’t give him the right to schedule a tutor, arrange a specialist, or restructure Sienna’s day without mentioning it to the woman who’s been making every decision about this child for four years.
“She’s four and sick. Let her be four. Let her be a child for a while after the transfusion. ”
“Reading is important. A good education is essential for the world she’ll be living in.”
There it is. I’ve been expecting it, but it still stuns me for a minute. “You’re world, where four-year-olds who might still die are expected to learn how to read early.”
His eyes narrow, and he seems like he might be reconsidering his choice. “She’d be in preschool right now if she weren’t sick, so what’s the difference?”
“She might be in preschool, or she might still be home with me if I could arrange my schedule. If she were in preschool, it would be a Montessori style, where she’d get to play outside and have all the experiences she can’t right now because of a fragile immune system.
It wouldn’t be in a structured environment with schedules, expectations, and timelines. ”
His voice is stiff. “There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. She needs to get used to expectations.”
“To fit into your world. None of that matters right now. She might not make it to her fifth birthday if your marrow doesn’t save her.”
He flinches. “It will. She’ll be fine, and she needs to know how to live like a Hollingsford.”
“Because that’s made you so happy.” I toss my hands in the air, anger getting the best of me.
“You have a full custody petition sitting on your lawyer’s desk that you didn’t tell me about,” I say.
“You built a background file on me without telling me. You’re making decisions about Sienna’s education without telling me.
Do you see the pattern, or do I need to draw it for you? ”
Sterling’s jaw works once. “I wasn’t going to use the petition.”
“Then why does it exist?”
He doesn’t have an answer. He stands in his office with his laptop closed, no answer ready. He builds instruments of control and calls them precautions. The tutor is the same impulse wearing a different outfit. I’ll be this mother had something to do with it too.
“You don’t get to do this.” I’m trying to control my anger. “You don’t get to push me out or make decisions about her life because it’s efficient. You didn’t ask me four years ago, and you’re not asking me now. The only thing that’s changed is that now you have something I need.”
“That isn’t what this is.”
I shake my head, torn between sadness and anger.
“It’s exactly what this is. You have the marrow.
You have the money. You have the petition on Martin’s desk.
You’ve always had more than I’ve, and you’ve always used it instead of asking.
I knew you were going to do this. I expected it to be conditions imposed on offering the donation, and you surprised me with your decency there, but I always knew you were going to use this against me. ”
Sterling’s voice drops. “I lost four years with a daughter I didn’t know existed. You made that choice for me.”
“You made the first choice, and you chose wrong. You didn’t ask me if I cheated.
You didn’t give me a chance to defend myself.
You listened while your sister lied, and you didn’t ask me a single question.
You were relieved I’d finally failed you, weren’t you?
You’d been expecting it, and the worst had happened. You told me to get out. So I got out.”
“You could have told me you were pregnant.”
“I told you.” My voice breaks, and I hate it, because I’ve spent four years making sure nothing about him or that night could break me again.
“I stood in that living room and told you I wasn’t leaving alone.
I told you, Sterling. You heard another man.
You heard exactly what your mother wanted you to hear, and you didn’t ask. ”
He looks anguished. “I didn’t know what you meant.”
“You didn’t want to know what I meant. You’d already decided.
By the time I walked in, it didn’t matter what I said.
Your mother and your sister had already fed you a pack of lies, and the verdict was in before I opened my mouth.
You looked at me and saw exactly what your mother told you to see.
What you’d been expecting for six months, apparently. ”
He flinches and looks away but still tries to argue. “That isn’t—”
“I had an ultrasound in my purse with the first picture of our baby at seven weeks. I had just found out that day. I was going to tell you that night. I’d rehearsed the sentence the entire drive home.
I’m pregnant, it’s early, and I want to keep it.
I had the words ready when I walked through the door, but your mother was in that chair, and your sister wouldn’t look at me.
You were standing by the mantel with your arms crossed.
I never got to say it. You threw me out before I could say the one thing that mattered. ”
He swallows audibly, working through the seven weeks, the OB appointment he never knew about that same day, and the ultrasound printout that was in my purse the entire time his mother was sitting in her chair.
He’s clearly counting backward. I can see him working through the months, the timeline, and the pregnancy I never got to tell him about.
He’s surely done it many times by now, but this time the math is destroying him.
He can’t keep pretending he was the victim in all of this.
His face changes, and his expression is raw, filled with pain and despair. He puts one hand on the edge of the desk as though the floor has shifted under him. I don’t help him. I’ve been standing on shifting ground for four years.
“I didn’t know,” he says. The precision is gone from his voice.
“You didn’t ask.” I’m relentless and ruthless, because he deserves it, and I’ve spent four years holding onto this anger and resentment. I’m done carrying any of it. He needs to understand and acknowledge his part in all of this.