20. Elliott
— ? —
Elliott
Three Days Later
I swim up out of the dark.
It isn’t a fast process. More like climbing a ladder that keeps adding rungs, reaching for the light that flickers somewhere above me, getting closer and then falling back and then climbing again.
Everything hurts. My chest, my stomach, my head, my throat.
I feel like I’ve been taken apart and put back together by someone who wasn’t entirely sure how all the pieces fit.
But I keep climbing.
Because somewhere up there, past the pain and the darkness and the fog, I can hear her voice.
Odette.
She’s talking to me. Has been talking to me for what feels like forever, her voice a constant thread pulling me back toward the surface. I can’t make out the words, not most of the time, just the rhythm of them, the rise and fall, the way she pauses sometimes like she’s waiting for me to respond.
I want to respond. I want to open my eyes and see her face and tell her I’m okay, that I’m here, that I’m not going anywhere. But my body won’t cooperate. My eyelids are too heavy. My mouth won’t move.
So I listen. And I climb.
The first thing that comes into focus is the light.
Bright. Too bright. I try to turn my head away and the movement sends pain lancing through my chest so sharp that I hear myself groan.
“Elliott?” Her voice, closer now. Real in a way it wasn’t before. “Elliott, can you hear me?”
I try to speak. Nothing comes out but a croak.
“Don’t try to talk. Just open your eyes. Can you open your eyes?”
I try. It takes everything I have, every ounce of strength I didn’t know I had left, but I manage it. My eyelids flutter open, and there she is.
Odette.
She looks terrible. Pale and exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She’s wearing a hospital gown under an oversized cardigan, and there’s a bandage on the back of her hand where an IV must have been.
She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Hey.” Her voice breaks. “Hey, you’re back.”
I try to smile. It comes out more like a grimace.
“Water,” I manage.
She reaches for a cup on the bedside table, holds the straw to my lips. The water is cold and perfect, sliding down my throat like mercy.
“The doctor said you might be confused when you woke up,” she says. “Do you know where you are? Do you remember what happened?”
I try to think. The memories come in fragments, jumbled and out of order. A parking lot. A man. A flash of metal. Pain, sharp and sudden, and then nothing.
“Stabbed,” I say. The word sounds strange in my mouth. “Someone stabbed me.”
“Yes.” Tears are streaming down her face now. “In the parking lot outside the diner. You were getting me a milkshake and someone attacked you and I thought...” She chokes on the words. “I thought I lost you.”
“Still here.” I try to squeeze her hand, but my fingers barely move. “Still here.”
She laughs through her tears. “You scared me. You scared me so much.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Just don’t ever do it again.”
“Odette.” It takes everything I have to get her name out, and then the rest comes anyway, because I’ve spent three days somewhere dark clawing my way back toward her voice and I’m not going to waste the first thing I say.
“I love you. I need you to hear it while I can still say it. I love you. If I’d died in that parking lot the last thing you ever heard from me would have been a joke about a milkshake, and I can’t stand that, so I’m saying it now.
I love you. I’ve loved you longer than I had a word for it. ”
“Elliott.” She’s crying openly now, gripping my hand in both of hers, pressing it hard against her mouth. “I love you. Do you hear me, I love you, I’ve been sitting here for three days terrified I’d never get to say it to your face again.”
“You’re saying it now.”
“I’m saying it now. I love you. Don’t you ever make me almost lose you again.”
For a moment neither of us can speak. She presses her forehead to mine, careful of the tubes, and we just breathe, the machines beeping around us, both of us alive, both of us here, and it’s the most desperate and the most certain I’ve ever felt in my life.
Then I ask, “The baby?”
Her face changes. Softens. She takes my hand and presses it against her belly, which is bigger than I remember, rounded and firm under my palm.
“She’s fine,” Odette says. “We were so worried, but the doctors say she’s perfect. Strong heartbeat, good movement, exactly where she should be.”
“She?”
“It’s a girl.” She’s smiling now, really smiling, the first real smile I’ve seen since I opened my eyes. “We’re having a daughter.”
A daughter.
The word settles into my chest, somewhere between my broken ribs and my battered heart. A daughter. A little girl with Odette’s eyes and her mother’s strength and her father’s...
Her father.
The thought stops me cold.
I’m not her father. I’m not anything, legally, biologically, officially. I’m just the man who happened to be there when her mother’s world fell apart. I have no claim to this child, no right to call her mine, no standing to be anything other than a bystander in her life.
But I want to be more than that. I need to be more than that.
“Odette.” My voice is rough, barely a whisper. “I need to say something. Before the drugs pull me under again.”
“What is it?”
“The baby.” I force my eyes to stay open, to hold her gaze.
“I know she isn’t mine. Not by blood. Not by law.
But I want her to be. I want to be there for every middle-of-the-night feeding and every scraped knee and every first day of school.
I want to be the one she runs to when she’s scared and the one she fights with when she’s a teenager and the one who walks her down the aisle someday.
I want to be her father. Not because biology decided it, but because I’m choosing it. Because I’m choosing both of you.”
Odette is crying again. But she’s smiling too, that strange combination of grief and joy that seems to follow us everywhere.
“You can be her father,” she says, and then shakes her head, fierce, correcting herself.
“No. You’re her father. Not can be. Are.
You’ve been since the moment you held my hair back over a paper bag.
Since you slid that ultrasound picture into your wallet like it was something holy.
She’s been yours since before I even knew she existed.
” She takes my face in her hands, careful and desperate at once.
“Blood doesn’t decide that. You do. You already did.
You’re her father, Elliott, and no court and no cell and no Fairbanks is ever going to tell my daughter otherwise. ”
My throat closes. When I finally get the words out they come cracked and wet.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” I say. “Not the name. Not the money. Not any of the things Laurence spent his whole life clawing for. Just this. A family. You, and her, and a front door that’s ours.
” I press my forehead to her belly, to our girl.
“I spent my whole life being the one nobody chose. And you chose me. You and this baby chose me. I’ll spend every day I have left earning it. ”
“You already have.”
I try to laugh, but it tears at my stitches and I have to stop.
“Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”
“Sorry. I’ll try to be less funny.”
“Impossible.”
She’s about to respond when there’s a knock at the door.
Cat leans in, her face tired but relieved.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “But I thought you should know. They arrested him. Laurence. An hour ago.”
Odette doesn’t turn her head. She’s still looking at me, her hand still holding mine.
“What did they get him on?” I ask.
“All of it.” Cat steps into the room, her voice quiet but satisfied.
“Margaux told the police the truth. That he was never with her that night, that he made her lie for him. That was the only thing keeping him out of a cell. Then there’s his shirt, soaked in your blood, that he hid in a bag in her closet and never dreamed she’d open.
And every phone at the Whitlock dinner caught him threatening the two of you and admitting, out loud, that he sent that tape.
” She pauses. “Three different ways to bury him. He isn’t getting out. Not this time. Not ever.”
I wait for Odette to react. To gloat, or celebrate, or at least acknowledge that the man who’s been terrorizing her for months is finally going to face consequences.
She doesn’t.
She just keeps looking at me, her thumb brushing over my knuckles, her eyes bright with tears.
“Odette?” Cat says gently. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard.” She finally glances over her shoulder. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m better than okay.” She turns back to me. “He doesn’t matter anymore. He never really did. All that matters now is this. Us. Our family.”
Our family.
I close my eyes. The drugs are pulling at me again, dragging me back down toward sleep. But this time it doesn’t feel like drowning. It feels like resting. Like I finally have permission to let go, because I know she’ll be here when I wake up.
“Odette.”
“Yes?”
“Take me home.” The words come out slurred, half-asleep already. “When I can walk again. Take me home.”
She squeezes my hand.
“Always,” she says. “Always.”