16. Kirk
— ? —
Kirk
I wake up with Andrea in my arms.
I don’t move. I just lie there, the warmth of her body pressed against mine, watching the early morning light filter through the hotel curtains. Her breathing is slow and even, her face relaxed in sleep in a way I haven’t seen in weeks.
She’s so beautiful. She’s always been beautiful, but pregnancy has added a glow to her, a softness.
I rest my hand low on her belly, over the faint new curve that only shows when she’s lying against me like this.
I can’t feel the baby yet - Andrea says even she can’t be sure what she feels is real, that whatever’s there is still too small and too deep to name - but I leave it there anyway, greedy for the day that changes.
Our baby.
The reality of it hits me all over again. I spent weeks believing that child might belong to another man. Weeks treating Andrea as if she’d betrayed me, when she’d never done anything but love me.
She shifts in her sleep and her thigh slides over mine, and every good intention I own goes up in smoke. Waking her with my mouth on her shoulder would be so easy. A repeat of last night, slower, her saying my name the way she used to.
You don’t get to want that yet. You get to lie here and be grateful she stayed.
So I lie here. Grateful. Wanting her anyway.
Andrea stirs against me. Her eyes flutter open, and for a moment she looks confused. Then she sees my face, and her expression shifts. Not quite a smile, but not the cold anger I’ve been living under either.
“You’re still here,” she says.
“Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know.” She stretches, wincing slightly. “Part of me expected to wake up and find out last night was a dream.”
“Was it a good dream?”
“Parts of it were.” She meets my eyes. “Other parts were - complicated.”
“I know.” I brush a strand of hair from her face. “I know last night didn’t fix everything. But I meant what I said, Andrea. One day at a time.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I want to believe you.”
“That’s a start.”
We lie there in silence for a while, watching the light change as the sun rises higher. I don’t push for more. More conversation, more promises, more anything. Right now, this is enough. Just being beside her is enough.
Eventually, Andrea sits up. “We should get going. Checkout’s in an hour, and I want to say goodbye to Jenna before we leave.”
“Of course.” I watch her climb out of bed, the curve of her body in the morning light, the planes and angles I’ve memorized over years of loving her. “Andrea?”
She pauses, looking back at me.
“Thank you. For giving me another chance.”
Her expression softens. “Don’t thank me yet. We have a long way to go.”
“I know. But I’m ready to walk it. However long it takes.”
She nods once, then disappears into the bathroom. The shower starts, and I allow myself a small smile.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not trust. But it’s a crack in the wall, and that’s more than I had yesterday.
I’ll take it.
***
We drive back to the city separately. Andrea with Melissa, me alone in my car. But when we said goodbye in the hotel lobby, Andrea let me kiss her cheek. And when I asked if I could come to Melissa’s apartment later this week, she said yes.
Small steps. But they land like leaps.
In the lobby, before we split toward separate cars, we stood by the luggage cart and made actual plans, the concrete kind, the kind with days attached.
Thursday: dinner at Melissa’s, her rules, her menu, her interrogation format.
Saturday: the first joint session with my therapist, both of us on the same couch.
He wrote them in his phone while I watched, and then he turned the screen to show me the entries, as if submitting evidence.
“Look at that,” he said. “A future. In writing.”
I spend the drive thinking about what comes next. Andrea said she’s not ready to come home yet, and I understand that. Our house is full of memories, good and bad, and until we’ve rebuilt enough trust to face them together, it makes sense for her to stay with Melissa.
But I can still be present. I can show up every day. I can prove with my actions what my words couldn’t.
When I get home, the house is different. Still empty, still quiet, but the silence no longer presses down the way it did. The rooms feel like rooms waiting for people instead of rooms mourning them.
I head straight for the nursery. The walls are still bare. I never finished decorating after Andrea left. But the furniture is there. The crib. The changing table. The rocking chair.
I pull out my phone and search for paint colors. Yellow, Andrea mentioned once. She wanted yellow.
I find the perfect shade, soft and warm, and order enough cans to do the whole room.
Then I call my therapist and schedule an extra session for this week.
One day at a time. One step at a time.
I can do this.
I’m prying the lid off the first paint can when my phone buzzes against the dropcloth. Unknown number. Florida area code.
I don’t know anyone in Florida.
I let it ring out, and the voicemail notification appears on the screen, a dare.
My thumb hovers over it. Then I press play, and my mother’s voice fills the empty nursery.
“Kirk, darling. It’s your mother. Don’t delete this. I’m staying at the Grandview through Sunday, and there’s a matter we need to settle before I leave for good. Come alone. You owe me that much.”
The message ends. The paint fumes turn suddenly hard to breathe through.
I owe her that much.
I stand in my daughter’s half-painted nursery, holding the phone, and realize I don’t know what I owe my mother anymore. But I know one thing.
Whatever happens at the Grandview, I’m not going alone.
***
Andrea
The Grandview Hotel lobby is designed to make people feel small, and it’s very good at its job.
Marble floors polished to a mirror shine.
A chandelier the size of a compact car. A grand staircase sweeping up to a mezzanine where a harpist is playing for a charity luncheon, because of course there’s a charity luncheon, because Ethel Graham would never stage her last stand anywhere without an audience.
We sit in the car in the Grandview’s circular drive for one full minute before the valet reaches us.
“State the plan,” Kirk says.
“We hear her out. We say the true things once, without raising our voices. We don’t take any bait with Katherine’s name on it. And whatever she’s staged, we leave together, on our feet, before she picks the exit music.”
“And if it goes sideways?”
“Then it goes sideways with both of us in it.” I check my lipstick in the visor mirror, war paint applied to a general’s standard. “That’s the whole strategy, Kirk. There’s no version where one of us is alone in a room with her again. Ever. That’s what she’s never planned for.”
The valet opens my door.
Kirk’s hand finds mine as we cross the lobby. His palm is damp.
“You don’t have to do this,” he says for the fourth time since the car.
“She summoned you alone to a hotel where half the city’s donor class is eating salmon.” I squeeze his fingers. “That’s not a goodbye, Kirk. That’s an ambush. You don’t walk into an ambush alone.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“I’m pregnant, not fragile. And she doesn’t get to be the reason I hide anymore.”
His jaw works. Then he nods, and we walk in together, and I watch heads start to turn near the mezzanine stairs, one after another, a wave of recognition rolling ahead of us.
The luncheon crowd works fast. By the time we’re ten steps into the lobby, Marjorie Whitfield has repositioned herself at the mezzanine rail with a champagne flute and an unobstructed view, and two women from the hospital board have abandoned the valet line entirely.
Nobody approaches. Nobody leaves. The Grandview has hosted a thousand charity events and exactly this many public executions, and everyone in the building can smell the difference.
“Last chance,” Kirk murmurs. “There’s a side exit past the concierge. We could be eating waffles in fifteen minutes.”
“She’d win.”
“She’d win,” he agrees, and his shoulders set, and we keep walking.
Ethel is seated in the lobby lounge in a cream suit, positioned in the exact center of the room with her back to a marble column, teacup in hand, as staged as a portrait - and she is not alone.
The woman beside her is tall and polished, honey-blond hair in a low twist, the kind of understated pearl earrings that cost more than most cars. She has the posture of a lifetime of riding lessons and the smile of a person who has been told her whole life that she is the reasonable choice.
I’ve never met her. I know her instantly.
“Katherine Ellis,” I say under my breath.
Kirk stops walking. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Kirk, darling.” Ethel rises, arms opening, voice pitched for the room. “You came.”
“You said you were leaving for good.” Kirk doesn’t move into her embrace, and her arms hang there for one long, public second before she converts the gesture into smoothing her jacket. “You said there was a matter to settle. Settle it.”
“There’s no need for that tone.” Her eyes slide to me, and the warmth drains out of them wholesale. “And I asked you to come alone.”
“You’ve had a lot of requests over the years, Mother. I’m done filling them.”
“Kirk.” Katherine stands, extending a manicured hand. “It’s been too long. You look tired.”
“Katherine.” He doesn’t take the hand. “Why are you here?”
“Ethel asked me to come.” Her smile stays perfectly in place. “She thought you might want a friend present. Someone who’s known you since before - all of this.”
“All of this,” I repeat. “You mean me.”
Katherine’s gaze passes over me the way you’d inventory a room you’re thinking of renovating. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Andrea Graham.” I offer my hand. “Kirk’s wife.”
The pause before she takes it is a full sentence.
“Of course,” she says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“I’ll bet you have.”