CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Alex
Now
Riley was at the club. Arthur was at school.
Martina and I sat at the kitchen table with our coffee and the particular quiet of a weekday morning that belonged only to us.
I’d told her the night before. That I had ordered a test. That I was doing it to put a stop to a look Della had not even put into words.
She’d listened without interrupting.
She was still processing this morning. I could tell by the way she held her cup. Two hands. Careful.
“What if you’re wrong,” she said. “About it being nothing.”
I looked at my coffee. “Then I’ll know I was wrong. That’s the point of asking a lab instead of a grandmother.”
“And?”
“I don’t think I’m wrong,” I said. “I think Della sees what she wants to see because she lost a son-shaped hole years ago and a boy walked into it.”
Martina was quiet.
“Riley doesn’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t get this hanging over him unless the paper says he has to.”
“But you’ll know,” Martina said.
“I’ll know,” I said. “That’s the only thing I can say for certain.”
“It will change something for you,” she said. “Whether you want it to or not.”
I looked out the window. The saguaro at the back fence was doing what it always did. Standing there. Unbothered.
“I shouldn’t have offered,” I said. “The test.”
“You agreed to it because you want to know,” Martina said. “Same as Della.”
“What if I don’t want to know anymore?”
“Too late,” she said. Not unkindly. Just accurately.
“I keep thinking about what happens to Riley if it’s not him,” I said. “He’s already loved that boy for months without knowing why it felt the way it did. If the test comes back and says he has no claim to him at all—” I stopped. “I don’t know how you tell a man that. After everything.”
“You tell him the truth,” Martina said. “Whatever it is. He deserves that more than he deserves your protection of him.”
“And if it’s the opposite,” I said. “If it comes back and says he does have a claim. Eleven years he didn’t know about.
Eleven years I took from him without ever intending to.
” My throat tightened around the words. “That’s not a small thing to hand someone, Martina.
That’s not good news wrapped up with a bow. That’s a grief shaped like good news.”
She reached over and took my hand. “Then he grieves it,” she said, “and you let him, and you don’t try to make it smaller than it is because it would be easier for you if he did.”
I wrapped both hands around my cup. “Let me think through it,” I said. “The timeline.”
She waited.
“Arthur turned eleven in March,” I said. I looked at the table. “Riley and I…the last time before I left…it was graduation night. The night my father came.”
“May,” Martina said.
“May,” I confirmed. “And the restaurant in California was—” I counted. “June. A few weeks after graduation.”
She was quiet.
“Three weeks after the restaurant I tested positive,” I said. “That’s consistent with June.” I pressed my lips together. “But it’s also consistent with May.”
“The window overlaps,” Martina said.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Riley and I were always careful. Every time. After everything my parents used to warn me about ruining my life, I made sure of it myself. I wasn’t about to be careless with something that mattered that much.
” I looked at my hands. “So even if the timing lines up for May, the odds of it actually being him are supposed to be next to nothing.”
“Supposed to be,” Martina said.
“Supposed to be,” I agreed. “Nothing’s ever completely certain. I know that. But it’s not nothing either, believing two careful people took precautions and still ending up here, questioning it eleven years later.”
I stared at the table. “If the conception was May, he’s Riley’s. If it was June—” I stopped. “But here’s the thing I keep coming back to.”
Martina looked at me.
“Joshua never questioned it,” I said. “When I told him I was pregnant, he accepted it. Immediately. Without hesitation.” I held her gaze. “He accepted that it was his child.”
She said nothing.
“Which means he believed it was probable and possible,” I said. I looked at my hands. “Which means the child is probably Joshua’s.”
The kitchen was quiet.
Martina looked at her coffee.
“Say something,” I said.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“Think faster.”
“Joshua accepted many things,” she said carefully. “He was not a man who spent much time on the parts of a story that did not serve him.”
I stared at her.
She picked up her coffee. “That’s my thought,” she said.
“You almost sound angry at him,” I said. “At Joshua.”
“I am angry at him,” Martina said, with more heat than I’d expected. “He wrote a night down like it was a meeting and never said a word to you.”
I hadn’t let myself be. I turned the permission over in my mind, tentatively, the way you test the give of ice before you put your full weight on it.
The morning was very quiet.
I thought about Joshua. About the notebook. About wonderful and beginning written in the handwriting of a man who documented everything with the detachment of an auditor.
I thought about what I was afraid of and whether the fear was about the result or about what the result would require of me.
It was both.
I looked at Martina.
“I need to let it happen,” I said. “Don’t I.”
She set her cup down. “Some questions,” she said, “don’t get answered in the asking.”
I looked at her.
“They get answered in the living,” she said.
I’d heard that before.
From her.
At a kitchen table in California with a notebook in front of me and everything uncertain.
I picked up my coffee.
“Okay,” I said.
She nodded.
We sat in the quiet kitchen and drank our coffee and waited for the living to catch up to us.