Chapter Five #2
“I don’t want her to be sick!” Eva said through huge, shuddering sobs. “Nothing bad’s going to happen to Samantha, right, boss? I mean, we signed our names in the Book of Rho!”
“You’re… you’re like our older sister,” Heather managed. “We look up to you so much!”
“You’re our hero,” Eva sniffed. “You can’t…”
And before any of us could stop her, Samantha got off the couch.
She got off the couch and went to them.
Gasps filled the room. I’m gonna remember this moment for the rest of my life, I thought.
Samantha—my babygirl, a woman who’d just been handed a coin flip on both her own life and the life of our unborn baby, who’d been holding herself above the abyss by her fucking fingernails since the Call Your Daddy recording studio—crossed the living room in five steps, knelt down on the carpet in her black blazer and bodysuit and gathered up the two crying cheerleaders in her arms.
“Quit your crying, pledges,” Samantha said, a trace of the old Queen Bee rising through her grief. “Your names are in the fucking Book of Rho. You going to embarrass yourselves right now?”
As Heather and Eva’s faces cleared, the realization washed over me like a wave. Samantha wasn’t just talking to them. She meant those words for herself, too.
It’s like Lauren, I thought, a pang shooting through me at the memory. I was a wreck at the funeral. I couldn’t see further than the next five minutes. What got me out of it?
It hadn’t been pretty words or declarations of love, even though Samantha was going to be surrounded by more of those than she could handle. It was my future boss. Daniel.
Daniel telling me he needed my help. Daniel giving me an opportunity to be useful.
God bless those filthy cheerleaders. I’d underestimated them. Because when the chips were down and things were at their lowest, it was them who managed to get the door to the despair my babygirl had sequestered herself inside open a crack.
Who started letting the light in.
The room broke into groups after that. After checking one more time to make sure Samantha was okay (she insisted the best thing Kiki could do right now would be to go full spreadsheets mode), Yukiko joined Mona in the kitchen, both of them opening laptops and getting to work with an energy that shocked me.
Once I’d done a quick round through the room to touch base with everyone, I joined them.
Mona was perched like a gargoyle next to the kitchen island, her fingers flying across the laptop’s keys. Texts slowly rolled in on her phone.
“Don’t tell me to stop,” she warned me, not looking up as I approached.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
A smirk. “Good. I’ve got several plates spinning and I’m cashing in favors. We should have an appointment with the best neurologist on the East Coast by the end of the day. And Samantha’s not going to have to wait for those test results.”
“Mona—”
She glanced up from her work. “Jack, this is what you pay me for. This is exactly why I’m here. I turn our problems into other people’s problems.” She grinned. “Anybody who stands between us and getting Samantha the absolute best care possible is about to have a very big problem.”
“Good,” I said, and now I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Sometimes it was good to have a shark in our corner. “I haven’t forgotten about us, by the way—”
Mona waved the words away with a faint smile. “Your head wife will pencil that in when there’s time. Crisis right now.” She jerked her chin in Yukiko’s direction. “Speaking of which, your princess has something she needs to run by you.”
I could already tell she did. My head wife was too polite to intrude at a moment like this, but there was a question in her eyes. I took a seat on the stool next to hers. “What’s wrong?”
Yukiko rested a hand on her pregnant belly, her lips a tight line. “There’s somebody who isn’t here who should be,” she whispered.
I already knew. “Marcie.”
She was still at the hospital with her father. Tomorrow they’d be moving him to a rehab facility, and I’d been planning to pick her up and bring her home with all the fanfare she deserved. The fact that she’d missed all this was a problem.
“We have to call her,” Yukiko said. “Let her know what’s going on.”
I was already nodding. “She’ll want to leave the hospital now, then.”
Yukiko had already thought along that track. “You need to stay here with Sam,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Mona’s busy; we can send someone to pick her up. Maria and Tasha, maybe. Or Caroline.”
As she said the woman’s name, my gaze traveled back into the living room. Most of the room had gone back to their seats after our impromptu love-in with my babygirl, but one member of our group hadn’t.
Caroline was down on the rug in front of the couch, sitting with her back ramrod-straight, and she was touching up Samantha’s nails.
“Four days,” I whispered. “That girl’s only been working for us for four days…”
“Samantha likes her,” Kiki said, the corner of her mouth curling. “You like her.”
“She’s likable.”
Caroline held both of Samantha’s hands in hers, talking quietly with my babygirl as she worked.
I couldn’t hear the exact words they were saying, but I didn’t need to.
I could see the way Samantha’s expression gradually relaxed—the way the knot of anxiety deep in her guts gradually and slowly unclenched the more normal the conversation became.
Everyone else in our house had decided to give Samantha room. Caroline just walked in, took her wrists and stepped into my babygirl’s personal space like she’d been part of the group for months instead of days.
And Samantha let her.
“Let her know you’re going to call Marcie,” Kiki told me. “We’ll get her here as soon as we can. Marcella ought to be part of this.”
With a nod, I slid off the stool and withdrew.
Caroline smiled at Samantha as I made my way across the living room. “So how does it feel to be the most loved woman in the state of Massachusetts?” she asked casually, running a file across the tip of my babygirl’s right index finger.
“I don’t know,” Samantha said. “I’ll have to tell you in a few days.”
“It’s not going to let up,” Caroline said, like she already knew. “These women aren’t going to give you a single day off from letting you know that. Neither is your husband.” She looked up at me with a smile. “Hey, Jack. Something wrong?”
About a dozen things, I thought, meeting her gaze. But not you.
“I just needed to talk to my babygirl for a second,” I said.
Caroline nodded. “Should I leave you two alone?”
We wouldn’t be alone even if she left the room. “Not necessary,” I said. “Babygirl, I’m going to give Marcie a call and let her know what’s going on. We’ll send somebody to the hospital to go pick her up—”
“No,” Samantha said immediately.
Hmm? I did a double take.
“Babygirl?”
“We’re not telling her like that,” Samantha insisted. “Not Marcie. Not my wife.” She paused, her voice thickening with emotion. “Not my little.”
I’d almost forgotten that Samantha had once been Marcie’s big: her mentor as a pledge in Delta Rho. “Babygirl, she deserves to know.”
Yukiko heard Samantha’s no and came walking in from the kitchen. “Is something wrong?”
Samantha looked from me to Kiki and back again.
“Two things,” she said, in the tone of someone who knows there’s going to be an argument but also has realized they’ve already won it.
“First of all, Marcie’s been in the hospital for days.
Her dad can barely say the word ‘coffee’.
” She wiped a sweaty lock of hair from her face.
“I’m not putting this on her right now with everything else that’s going on.
She needs to get her dad settled in the rehab facility, give him a kiss for luck, and then come back.
Not crying the whole way here in the passenger seat while Maria or Tasha tries to reassure her she’s not a bad person for abandoning her mom. ”
Yukiko sighed slowly, her nostrils flaring. “She might be upset about that. You know she’s been sensitive about being on the outside of things lately.”
We all knew what Kiki was talking about. She and Samantha had the bellies; Marcie didn’t.
Samantha swallowed. “A few days ago, Jack and Mona decided not to tell you, me or Marcie something, because Morning Harbor was happening and we needed you concentrating on that television appearance and not on the fact that nobody could get ahold of Daniel.”
“I’m aware,” Yukiko said, keeping her voice soft. “Are you blaming Jack for something?”
“Never,” Samantha insisted. “But Marcie found out her father had a stroke from a live television broadcast. From the fucking morning news.”
Yukiko blanched.
“I want her to hear it from me,” Samantha said simply. “And I want to be there to hug her the second she realizes what it means and she needs someone to give her a hug as bad as I did when I found out. She doesn’t get the news from a phone call. Definitely not from a text.”
“She’s right,” I said.
Samantha looked up at me. “Daddy, you’re picking her up tomorrow, right? Just you?”
I nodded. “That’s the plan.”
Samantha glanced at the wall. “Then bring her home tomorrow and let me have twenty minutes with her before anybody says anything.” Her jaw set. “She deserves that, after what happened with Daniel. I tell her, not the TV or a phone. That’s the difference.”
“That’s the difference,” Yukiko agreed with a nod.
And that, just as much as her comforting Heather and Eva, was how I knew my babygirl was still in there. The queen of Delta Rho, the spunkiest and most headstrong of my three wives.
“Alright then,” I said. “I’m sure nobody’s going to spill the beans, but make sure Heather and Eva don’t accidentally let anything slip before tomorrow on the group chat—”
“Samantha?”
All of us turned. Dr. Yui Tanaka stood a short distance away, a dish towel over her shoulder and her hands still damp from the clean-up of the kitchen she’d started to facilitate Mona and her daughter’s work session.
Samantha brightened a tiny bit. “Hi, Yui.”