Chapter Twenty-Three
Casey
STERLING COMES TO ME three weeks after Gretchen’s visit, which we haven’t discussed because I refused to. Sienna is asleep. The estate is quiet in the way it gets after eight, when the medication schedule is done, the monitoring log is updated, and I’ve run out of tasks.
He’s standing in the kitchen doorway. He has the look he gets when he’s about to say something he’s rehearsed, shoulders set and with careful posture. “I need to tell you something,” he says.
I set down my tea. “Okay.”
“The petition Martin drafted. The custody petition.” He pauses. “I had him destroy it yesterday.”
“Yesterday? Not three weeks ago?” That’s as close as I’m getting to mentioning Gretchen.
He winces. “There shouldn’t have been a delay. I should have called him that same day. Honestly, I should have told you it existed the day Martin finished it, and I should have admitted I was never going to file it.”
“You were never going to file it?” I make no effort to hide my skepticism.
He doesn’t flinch from the question. He doesn’t reach for a qualifier or a justification.
“I don’t know. I had it drafted because I was afraid you’d take Sienna back to Asheville and I’d never see her again.
I kept it because having it made me feel like I had control over a situation I couldn’t control.
I never filed it because filing it would have been the thing that proved you right about me. ”
That catches my attention. “Right about what?”
“That I use power instead of trust.” He stops.
“Yesterday, I told Martin to destroy it. He asked me if I was sure. I told him no. I told him I wasn’t sure.
You could still leave tomorrow and take Sienna two and a half hours away.
I’d have no order stopping you and no petition waiting to be filed before you reached Asheville.
He asked me again, and I signed the authorization anyway. ”
“Why?”
“Because being afraid doesn’t give me the right to hold a weapon over you. I’ve been afraid this entire time, Casey. Every day you’ve been in this house, I’ve been afraid you’d leave. The petition didn’t make me less afraid. It just made me a man who keeps insurance policies against his own wife.”
The kitchen is quiet. The clock on the wall ticks.
Sienna’s medication bottles are lined up on the counter, labeled in my handwriting, organized by time of day.
The life I’ve built in this house is visible in every surface, with the medication schedule, the sippy cups, and the bear counting book on the table.
“You’re free,” Sterling says. “You can take Sienna home tomorrow. I won’t stop you. I won’t fight you. I’ll cooperate with whatever custody arrangement Danielle recommends.”
“Sterling—”
“I’m not finished.” He takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter what I want. What do you need?”
He looks exhausted, standing in a kitchen doorway offering me the one thing he’s spent months trying to prevent—my departure.
He’s terrified. I can see it in the set of his mouth, in the careful stillness of his body, and that he’s standing six feet away because he’s learned that closing the distance without permission isn’t his to take anymore.
He’s terrified, and he’s doing it anyway.
“I need to go home,” I say. I miss Asheville, but part of me is curious to see if he’ll really let us go.
“Okay.”
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t ask for conditions, visitation, or a schedule. He says okay as he said it after the night in his office, completely, without negotiation, as though the word costs him everything and he’s paying it willingly.
WE HEAD BACK TO ASHEVILLE a few days later.
Sterling carries the boxes to the car. He hugs Sienna, kneeling on the gravel driveway, holding her carefully because she’s still fragile, still immunosuppressed, and still wearing the purple hat Hettie knitted.
She has a few straggly hairs growing back now though.
“I’ll see you soon, okay?” he says to Sienna.
She nods into his shoulder. He doesn’t know whether it’s true.
He says it anyway because she’s four and deserves to hear it.
It is true. I wouldn’t keep them apart now. Sienna loves him, and he loves her. Love means something.
It just isn’t always enough to take away the pain.
He doesn’t touch me. He stands in the driveway while I buckle Sienna in, check the mirrors, and pull out of the drive. In the rearview, he’s standing exactly where I left him, watching the car until we turn the corner.
The drive to Asheville takes almost three hours with factoring in a potty break. Sienna sleeps through most of it with Bart in her lap.
The mountains come into view after an hour, and I relax in a way that lets me know just how tense I’ve been for months.
This is my landscape. These are my roads.
The hospital where Sienna was born is thirty minutes from my apartment.
The apartment itself is small, mine, and nobody in it has ever told me to get out.
I carry Sienna inside and put her in her bed. I stand in the doorway of my own apartment for the first time in four months, listening to the silence, which sounds different than the estate’s silence. I can’t explain it, but it does.
SIX WEEKS LATER, STERLING moves to Asheville.
Not into my life but into the city. He takes a rented house thirteen minutes away, which I know because Marnie looked it up the day he signed the lease and called me to ask if I wanted her to drive down from Charlotte and perform a wellness check on my sanity.
“He moved to your city,” Marnie said when I declined.
“He moved to his daughter’s city.”
She snorts. “That’s what he told you?”
“That’s what he told Danielle’s office when he filed the address change. I haven’t spoken to him except a few text messages or to answer the phone for Sienna to talk to him.”
“Good. I’m not as worried about your sanity. Don’t let him come crawling back.”
I laugh as though the idea is ridiculous and pretend I’m not still wearing his ring. Marnie doesn’t know that. I’ve never told her about my stupid inability to completely remove it.
He runs the firm from a laptop and a rented office over a bakery on Haywood Road. Dana Whitlock manages the Charlotte office now. He flies down when strategy requires it. He has quietly restructured his entire professional life around a thirteen-minute drive to his daughter.
He asks for time with Sienna through me. Every time. He never assumes. When I say today, he says okay, and he doesn’t escalate, doesn’t send a follow-up text, or route a request through Danielle. He says okay and waits.
I keep waiting for the other version of him. The one who drafts petitions, points a cadre of attorneys at me, and builds instruments of control but calls them precautions. That version doesn’t appear. As time passes, I start to wonder if that version is going to.
He shows up. That’s what he does best. He show up to Sienna’s hematology appointments and sits in the back row.
He learns the medication schedule without asking me to teach him.
He knows Sienna’s counts because he’s listed as her father on the medical records and Zoom calls Osgood himself sometimes.
He shows up in other ways too. He changes my flat tire in a rainstorm one afternoon when AAA is two hours out. Another time, he fixes Hettie’s storm door because it sticks, and she mentioned it over coffee when he arrived to pick up Sienna for an outing and sat with us for a few minutes.
What he doesn’t do is pursue me. He doesn’t flirt. He doesn’t touch me. He never brings up Charlotte or the night in his office. He never mentions the ring.
I don’t understand this, and it’s making me kind of insane.
ALEC’S OFFICE IS ON the third floor of a medical building near Mission Hospital.
I haven’t been here since before Charlotte.
I’ve been on a leave of absence, well beyond FMLA allotment, and I need to decide what to do about that.
I have decided, which brings me here to kill two birds with one stone, as the saying goes.
The waiting room smells like antiseptic and carpet cleaner.
The receptionist recognizes me and smiles. “Are you back?”
I give a vague answer and ask for Alex. He comes out a minute later, wearing a white coat over a blue shirt and a tie with colorful hot air balloons from a different era, with a stethoscope around his neck.
It’s the professional uniform of a man who spends his days saving children’s lives.
He looks exactly as I remember, calm, present, and attentive in a way that makes you feel like the only person in the room.
I missed him, but not enough. Not in the way I should have. Not the way that would have made it impossible to just exchange texts and emails, as we did during my time in Charlotte, instead of calls full of longing.
He deserves better than that.
We sit in his office. The door is closed. There’s a photo on his desk of a hiking trail I recognize, the one near Craggy Gardens he told me about on our second date.
“I should have called sooner,” I say.
He smiles, completely understanding. “You had a lot going on.”
“That’s not why I didn’t call.”
He waits. Alec is good at waiting. He’s a pediatric hematologist. His entire career is structured around waiting for counts to come up, for treatments to work, for the body to decide whether it’s going to cooperate.
I don’t know how to start it, so I just plunge in.
“I was genuinely attracted to you. I genuinely liked you. I do genuinely like you. I wasn’t using you as a placeholder, and I wasn’t looking for someone to fill a gap.
You were the first person in four years who saw me as a person and not as a medical crisis, and that mattered. ”
He’s frowning. “But...?”
I shake my head and lock at the picture of the hiking trail instead of him. “I can’t do this. I’m not emotionally available. The last four months took everything I had, and I need to be alone.”