12. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The call comes at four in the afternoon from a number I don’t know, and I almost don’t answer, because for two days every unknown number has been a reporter or Wyatt calling from a phone I’ve blocked, and I am so tired of defending myself to people I don’t owe anything.
I answer anyway. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’ve been sitting at my desk under her drawing of the house doing nothing for hours and any interruption is a mercy.
“Is this Adrian Ashbourne?”
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Ashbourne, I’m calling from Cedar Hill Medical. Your wife, Brooke Ashbourne, was brought into our emergency department a little while ago. You’re listed as her emergency contact.”
Everything in me goes very quiet and very cold at once.
“Is she okay? What happened? Is she…”
“She’s stable, she’s conscious, she’s talking. I can’t give details over the phone, but she’s asking, well, she’s here, and you’re the contact on file, so I wanted to reach you. If you’re able to come in.”
I’m already standing. I’m already looking for my keys. “Twenty minutes.”
“There’s no need to rush and drive unsafely, sir, she’s stable…”
“Twenty minutes,” I say again, and I’m out the door.
I don’t remember the drive. I remember pieces of it, the elevator, the parking structure, running a yellow I shouldn’t have run, but mostly I remember the single sentence going around and around in my head, you’re listed as her emergency contact, and what it means that I still am.
Brooke left me. She’s divorcing me and she won’t take my calls.
When a hospital reached into her phone or her wallet or her file for the one person to call when everything goes wrong, my name was still there.
She never changed it. I don’t let myself make that mean anything, because I’ve spent two years making things mean what I wanted them to mean, but I hold onto it anyway, all the way there, that my name was still the one they called.
The emergency department is bright and loud and smells like antiseptic and fear, and I give my name at the desk in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine, and a nurse walks me back through a maze of curtains.
I’m bracing for the worst kind of news the whole way, a car, a fall, a word I don’t want to hear, and she pulls back a curtain and there’s Brooke.
She’s sitting up in the bed, pale, an IV in the back of her hand, her interview clothes folded on the chair beside her and a hospital gown where the gray blazer used to be.
Laura is in the chair holding her other hand, and when she sees me her face does a complicated thing, relief and warning at once.
Brooke looks up, and for half a second before she remembers to guard it, there’s a look in her face I haven’t earned the right to see anymore, and then it’s gone, and she looks back down at the blanket, and she doesn’t say anything at all.
“You came,” Laura says quietly. Not warm, just noting it.
“Of course I came.” My voice cracks. “What happened? Are you okay? Is she okay?”
“I’m right here, Adrian.” Brooke’s voice is flat and tired. “You can ask me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I fainted. On a sidewalk. Some strangers called an ambulance.” She says it like a weather report. “I’m fine. It was nothing. They’re being cautious.”
But she’s not looking at me when she says it, and Laura’s grip has tightened on her hand, and there’s a particular silence in this little curtained space that tells me nobody’s saying the actual thing yet.
The doctor comes in before I can figure out what it is. She’s young and brisk and she has a chart, and she glances at me. “You’re the husband?”
I feel Brooke flinch at the word. “Yes.”
“Good, you should hear this too.” She looks between us, and the careful edge in her professional calm makes my stomach drop before she’s even said it.
“So, Brooke, everything on the workup looks reassuring. Your blood pressure’s come back up, the fluids are helping.
The dizziness and the fainting, given everything else we’re seeing, are almost certainly related to the pregnancy, which is very common in the first trimester, especially if you haven’t been eating or sleeping well, which,” she glances at the chart, “sounds like the case.”
The word lands in the middle of the room and just sits there.
Pregnancy.
I don’t move. I don’t think I breathe. I look at Brooke and Brooke is looking at the blanket, and I understand from the way she is not reacting, the way she is holding absolutely still, that this is not news to her.
That she already knew, or already suspected, that she has been sitting with this alone in a hospital bed waiting for me to walk in and hear it in a room full of strangers.
“I, sorry.” My voice comes out wrong. “Can you, I’m sorry, can you say that again?”
The doctor’s expression softens a fraction, realizing what she’s walked into. “She’s pregnant. I’m sorry, I assumed you both, I’ll give you two a minute.”
She sets the chart down and slips out through the curtain, and Laura stands, murmurs a word about coffee, and follows her, and squeezes my arm once on the way past, and then it’s just Brooke and me and the beeping machine and the word.
For a long moment neither of us says anything.
“You knew,” I finally say. Not an accusation. Barely a sound.
“I figured it out today.” She’s still looking at the blanket. “Before the interview, actually, I was already, I don’t know. And then after, on the sidewalk, it just, it all added up at once, and then the ground did the thing.” A humorless breath. “So. Surprise.”
“How far along?” I ask, and I hear how careful I’m being, how I’m holding my voice level so it doesn’t spill.
“A couple of months. Early. They said early.” Now she does look at me, and her eyes are steady and hard and daring me to do the wrong thing. “You can do the math, Adrian. You were there.”
And I do. I do the math, once, and it’s not hard, because there was only one night it could have been, one night in a long cold stretch of nights where I was gone before she woke and home after she slept, one night near the beginning of all of this where I read to her until she fell asleep on my chest and neither of us was thinking about the launch or the promo or Layla or any of the wreckage that was already coming for us.
Our last good night. The last night I was actually her husband before I let the work take me.
That’s the night. It’s the only night it could be.
My jaw works and I have to look away for a second, at the IV pole, at the curtain, at anything, because the size of it is coming at me all at once, that on the last night we were really us, before I threw it all away, we made this, and I didn’t know, and she’s been carrying it alone through the worst weeks of both our lives while I stood in yards making speeches.
“Okay,” I say, when I can. “Okay.”
“That’s it?” There’s an edge in it now, brittle. “Okay?”
“No.” I pull the chair closer, the one Laura left, and I sit, slowly, watching her face for permission the whole way down, and she doesn’t tell me to stop.
“No, that’s not it. That’s not even close to it.
I just needed a second, because I’m trying very hard right now not to make this about me, and it turns out that’s a muscle I never built. ”
A flicker crosses her face, surprise, maybe, that I said the true thing out loud, and then it shutters again, because she has learned the hard way not to trust the moments where I say the true thing.
“Don’t,” she says quietly. “Whatever you’re about to do, Adrian, whatever speech is loading up behind your face right now. Don’t.”
“I’m not doing a speech,” I say.
“You’re always doing a speech.”
“Okay. That’s fair.” I sit back in the chair, put my hands flat on my knees where she can see them, and I make myself be quiet, which is the hardest thing I’ve done in weeks. “Then you talk. I’ll listen. For once.”
She studies me for a moment, as if she’s checking the offer for a trap, and when she doesn’t find one she takes a breath and she says the thing she’s clearly been assembling since the ground came up to meet her.
“This doesn’t change anything.” Her voice is steady, and quiet, and absolutely certain, and it’s the most sure I’ve heard her sound about anything in months.
“I need you to hear that before you get any ideas, because I can see them starting behind your eyes. This, us, the divorce, none of it is different now. I’m still leaving.
I still want out. What you did, all of it, the last two years, it still happened, and a baby doesn’t reach back in time and unhappen it. ”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, actually, because I know you, and I know what you’re going to try to make this mean.
” She shifts against the pillows, wincing a little, and I have to sit on my hands not to fuss over her.
“You’re going to want this to be the thing that saves us.
The plot twist. The reason we’re actually meant to be, look, a baby, it’s a sign.
And it’s not, Adrian. It’s not a sign. It’s biology and terrible timing and one good night a long time ago, and it does not come with a marriage attached. ”
“Brooke…”
“Let me finish.” She holds up her hand, and I stop.
“If you want to be in this child’s life, you can be.
I’m not going to keep you from your kid, I’m not that person, and God knows my child deserves a father who’s actually there, which is its own conversation we’re going to have to have.
So yes. You can be around. For the baby.
But that is the only door that’s open. Not the other one.
The other one is closed, and you being good with the baby is not going to reopen it, so if that’s your plan, being wonderful about this so I soften, I need you to know right now that it won’t work, and it’ll just make everything harder for both of us. ”
She stops. She’s a little out of breath, and her hand has come to rest low on her stomach without her seeming to notice, and I look at that, at her hand there, and I feel the whole rest of my life reorganize itself around this room.