18. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The three of us put Olivia back to bed together.
I don’t plan it that way. But Callum follows us up from the lawn, silent, keeping his distance, and when we reach Olivia’s room he hovers in the doorway like he’s not sure he’s allowed in. Olivia sees him and reaches out one small hand.
“Daddy too,” she says. “Both of you.”
So both of us.
We stand on opposite sides of her bed in the dark, tucking the same blanket, our hands almost touching across the quilt. The one-eared rabbit goes back in the crook of her arm. Olivia’s eyes flutter, heavy with interrupted sleep and the comfort of having both of us there.
“Will you stay?” she murmurs. “Both of you, will you stay?”
“We’re here, baby.” I smooth her hair back from her forehead. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Her breathing deepens. Evens out. She’s asleep again within minutes, the nightmare forgotten, safe between the two people she trusts most in the world.
Callum looks at me across the bed.
In the dim light from the hallway, his face is all planes and shadows. I can still feel his mouth on mine. Can still feel his hands on my skin. The memory of it pulses between us, unfinished, impossible to ignore.
He tilts his head toward the door.
I follow him out.
We make it as far as his room - our room, the one we share and don’t share, with its bed and its fold-out couch and all its careful distances.
He closes the door behind us, and suddenly the space feels smaller than it ever has before.
The air feels heavier. The tension from the boathouse hasn’t dissipated; if anything, being alone has concentrated it.
“Nichole-”
“We should talk,” I say, at the same time.
We both stop. The silence hums.
“That,” I say carefully, “on the dock-”
“I know.”
“We can’t just-”
“I know.”
He’s standing by the window, backlit by moonlight, his hands in his pockets like he’s trying to keep them still. I’m by the door, my back against it, the whole room between us.
It’s not enough room.
There’s not enough room in the world for what I’m feeling right now.
“Putting her to bed together,” he says quietly. “The two of us, like that-”
“I know.”
“It felt-”
“I know.” My voice breaks. “Callum, I know.”
And that’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem.
Because standing on opposite sides of Olivia’s bed, tucking her in together, our hands almost touching in the dark - it felt like family.
It felt like home. It felt like the thing I’ve been hungry for my whole life and never let myself believe I could have.
It felt real.
And I don’t know what to do with real.
“Ask me something,” he says suddenly.
“What?”
“Ask me something. Anything.” He turns from the window, and his face is open in a way I’ve never seen it. “I’ll answer it. Once. No deflecting, no half-truths. Just… ask.”
The question rises up before I can think it through.
“Olivia’s mother.” The words come out raw. “You wouldn’t tell me before. Where is she, really?”
I watch him process the question. Watch him decide whether to retreat behind the walls he’s built, the way he has every other time I’ve asked. Something moves across his face - fear, maybe, or the decision to finally stop being afraid.
“There was never a wife,” he says. “And never a mother. Not the kind you’ve been imagining.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never planned to marry. You know that. But I wanted-” He stops.
Starts again. “I wanted a child. I knew I wasn’t going to have one the traditional way.
Not because I couldn’t, but because I didn’t want…
I didn’t want what my parents had. The arrangement.
The performance. I didn’t want to build a family on that kind of lie. ”
“So what did you do?”
“I told my mother I was going to adopt. Alone. She was furious. She said-” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “She said I was collecting a stray. That I’d regret it. That no Lippitt had ever done something so undignified.”
“But you did it anyway.”
“I did it anyway.” He’s looking at me now, holding nothing back. “My mother put me in front of a private adoption. All correct, all legal, all fast. Faster than I expected, actually. Three days after I signed the paperwork, a nurse put a newborn in my arms.”
My breath catches.
“She was days old,” he says. “So small I was terrified I’d break her.
And she was crying - she’d been crying for hours, they told me, wouldn’t stop for anyone - but when they put her in my arms, she just…
stopped. She looked up at me with those dark eyes, and she stopped crying, and that was it. That was my whole life, in one second.”
A cold, creeping recognition.
“I didn’t ask questions,” he continues. “I didn’t want to know where she came from, or who her birth parents were, or why someone was giving up a healthy newborn. I just wanted her. I wanted her so badly that I didn’t let myself wonder.”
“Adopted,” I say.
The word lands in the space between us.
“Yes.” He’s watching me carefully now. “Olivia is adopted. I thought you knew - I thought everyone knew - but you never asked, and I never…”
He trails off.
I’m not hearing him anymore.
My body has gone very, very still.
Days old. She was days old.
I’ve known this child for months. I’ve bathed her, dressed her, held her through nightmares. I’ve celebrated her birthday - her sixth birthday, on the seventeenth, on the day my daughter would have turned six.
The same day.
I never asked. That’s the thing I can’t get past now. I’ve been in this house for months, loving this child like she was my own, and I never once asked the simplest question in the world: whose was she, before she was his?
Because you don’t look at a living child and go hunting for a dead one.
Because grief makes you a coward.
Because-
“Nichole?”
I blink. Callum has moved closer. His face is concerned, uncertain.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” The word comes out automatic. “Yes, I’m fine. I just - I didn’t realize. That she was adopted.”
“Does it matter?”
“No.” Yes. “No, of course not. I just-”
“Your turn.”
I stare at him.
“You asked me something,” he says. “Now I get to ask you. That’s how this works, right? We trade truths?”
I should say no. I should protect myself, hold the pieces of my story close where they can’t hurt anyone. But he just handed me something - the truth about Olivia, the admission he’s never made - and I can feel the scales between us, waiting to be balanced.
“Ask,” I hear myself say.
“The daughter you lost.” His voice is gentle. “You told me when. You told me how. But you never told me why you were alone.”
The question sinks into me like a stone in water.
“I wasn’t always alone,” I say. “There was a father. Once.”
Callum doesn’t move.
“I was twenty-one. Halfway through nursing school. Finally going somewhere, finally building something.” The words are coming now, pulled out of the locked room I’ve kept them in. “And I got pregnant.”
I move to the window. I can’t look at him while I tell this.
“He didn’t want it. Didn’t want me, once there was a baby attached. He was gone before I started to show. Just… gone. Like I was a problem he could solve by not being there to see it.”
“Nichole-”
“I kept her anyway.” My hand presses against my stomach, remembering.
“Because she was mine. Because I wanted her, even when it cost me everything. I walked out of a lecture hall one afternoon and never went back, because my parents died in an accident and there was no one else, and suddenly I had a thirteen-year-old brother to raise and a baby coming and no one in the world to help.”
The ocean moves in the darkness beyond the window. I can hear it breathing.
“I was twenty-two and alone when I had her.” I close my eyes. “Four-eleven in the morning. I heard her cry. I heard her, Callum. They let me hold her for a few minutes - not long, just long enough to see her whole face and know, all the way down to the floor of me, that she was mine.”
“What happened?”
“They said they had to weigh her. They took her out of the room.” My voice has gone flat. Dead. The way it always goes when I talk about this. “Forty minutes later, they came back and told me she was gone.”
Silence.
“They never brought her back,” I say. “They said seeing her would only make it harder. They said there was no body, nothing to bury, that I should try to rest. They said-”
I can’t finish.
I feel him come up behind me. Feel his warmth at my back, not touching, just there.
“Six years,” I say. “Six years, and all I have of her is four minutes and the sound of her crying down a hall I couldn’t follow her down.”
His arms come around me.
I don’t pull away. I should - I should protect myself, should maintain the distance, should remember that this is a contract and nothing more - but I can’t. I’m so tired of protecting myself. I’m so tired of carrying this alone.
He holds me. I let him.
And over his shoulder, staring at the dark wall, I hear it again.
Days old. He carried home a newborn that was only days old.
I already know what day Olivia was born. I’ve known since the balloons, since the party, since the worst day of my year turned out to have this child’s name written across it.
The seventeenth.
The same day.
I start, very quietly, without deciding to, to count backward.
Three days. He said it was three days between signing the paperwork and receiving the baby.
If Olivia was born on the seventeenth, and she was only days old when he got her-
Stop it, I tell myself. You’re doing the thing the grief counselor warned you about. You’re seeing ghosts. You’re building a resurrection out of coincidence.
***
Later - much later - we end up in his bed.
Not the couch. Not the careful distance we’ve been maintaining. The bed.
It happens the way things like this happen when you’re exhausted and raw and you’ve just handed each other pieces of yourselves that no one else has ever seen.
I reach for him and he reaches back, and the tension from the boathouse, the interrupted wanting, the weeks of sleeping ten feet apart - it all crashes down at once.
He asks if I’m sure.
I say yes.
He asks again, because he’s Callum, because he needs to know he’s not taking something I’m not offering.
I pull his mouth to mine and show him.
This isn’t like the boathouse. The boathouse was desperate, urgent, a wildfire catching. This is slower. Deeper. He touches me like I’m something precious, something he’s been waiting his whole life to hold. When I try to rush it, he stills my hands.
“Let me,” he says against my skin. “Let me do this right.”
So I let him.
I let him map every inch of me with his hands and his mouth and his devastating patience.
I let him find the places that make me gasp, the places that make me shake, the places I didn’t know I had until he discovered them.
I let him worship me, which is a word I never thought I’d use about myself, but it’s the only word that fits.
And when I finally come apart under him, I’m crying.
I don’t mean to be. The tears just come, released by the intensity of it, by the vulnerability, by the feeling of being seen completely by another person for the first time in my life.
He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t panic. He just holds my face in his hands and looks into my eyes and says my name like it’s something sacred.
“Nichole.”
“I’m okay.” I’m not sure if that’s true. “I’m okay, I just-”
“I know.” He kisses the tears on my cheeks. “I know.”
Afterward, we lie tangled together in sheets that smell like both of us now. His hand traces my spine like he’s memorizing a coastline. The contract sits in a drawer eleven feet away, and neither of us says a word about it.
“Ask me something,” I murmur.
“Haven’t we traded enough truths for one night?”
“One more.” I look up at him. “Ask me one more.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his fingers still moving along my back.
“What would you have named her?” he asks. “Your daughter. If you’d gotten the chance.”
The question slices through me. No one has ever asked. No one has ever known to ask.
“Rose,” I say. “After my mother.”
His hand stills on my spine. Then he pulls me closer, tucking my head under his chin.
“Rose,” he repeats quietly. “That’s beautiful.”
I close my eyes.
And I try very hard not to think about the numbers I can’t stop counting in my head.