22. Ashton
Ashton
Two weeks I’ve left her alone, and two weeks I’ve been working my own son for information like he’s a witness who doesn’t know he’s on the stand.
It started clean. He’d come back from a session, I’d ask how it went. It was normal until it turned weird.
“What’d she wear today?”
“I don’t know. Clothes.” He’s working a loose thread on the blanket. “The gray one, I think.”
“Did she seem tired?”
“She’s always a little tired. She drinks a lot of coffee.” He squints at me. “Why?”
“No reason. Did she eat the snack I prepared?”
“She ate the crackers. She gave me the apple.” A beat. “She fixed my fractions. She laughed at my shark fact, the one about the tank.”
None of it adds up to anything, but I take it all in bed anyway. Her name in Luke’s mouth is as close as I get to her these days, so I keep asking, and he keeps answering, because he likes talking about her.
It’s beneath me. I know it is, but I keep doing it until I ask him one question that’s past the six-year-old’s line.
“Does she ask about me?” His water’s on the nightstand next to the rabbit. “When you two talk. Does my name ever come up?”
He looks at me over the top of the blanket, his little brows furrowing. “Why don’t you just talk to her yourself?”
My hand stops on the lamp.
“It’s complicated, bud.”
“That’s the thing you say when it’s easy and you don’t want to.” He turns onto his side, finished with me. “You ask me every night. Just call her. Her number’s in your phone, I’ve seen it.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s near the top.” He yawns, completely unbothered. “Night, Dad.”
Six years old, and he’s gutted me with two facts and a yawn. I turn off the lamp and stand in his doorway longer than I need to, making sure he’s falling asleep.
The phone goes in the hall and I rush to it before it could wake Luke.
It’s Harrison, and I’d let it ring out if it wasn’t so loud.
“Ashton,” he greets. “I wanted you to hear it from me that I noticed. The household. You sorted it out.”
He’s informing me that he knows Imogen’s gone. His word moves faster than anyone’s in this town, and he’s calling to tick the box.
“It’s done,” I tell him. It’s both a truth and a lie, but I don’t go into details.
“I’m proud of you. I mean that.” A breath.
“I’m not blind, son. I saw your face when she confronted you.
I know you got attached. I mean, how could you not, she’s my daughter after all.
But you did the hard thing, and you put the boy and the company first, and that’s the man I backed when nobody else would. ”
I let him take a victory lap on my behalf for a thing I never did, a strength I’ve never had, because the truth is that Imogen walked out under her own steam, and if it had been my call she’d be waiting for me in my bed right now.
I swallow it whole. He’s got my company in one hand and his good opinion of me in the other, and tonight I can’t afford to drop either.
“Keep your distance from here on,” he continues, the warmth still running, the edge sliding in beneath it.
“I don’t want you getting in touch with her.
She’s got a life waiting for her and you’ve got an IPO to close.
There’s no reason on earth for you two to ever cross paths again. ” He lets it breathe. “We’re agreed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good man.” And he’s gone, pleased, on to the next thing, and I’m left holding the phone and a promise I made to the one man I can’t cross, to stay away from her.
I stand in the hall for a long moment after the call drops. The apartment is quiet. Luke’s asleep. Everything is where I put it, and none of it feels like mine.
He doesn’t know she still tutors Luke three afternoons a week.
If he finds that out, that I kept her in the house in any form after he told me to cut it clean, I lose whatever ground I just won back with him tonight.
So I don’t tell him, and I add it to the list of things I’m keeping from Harrison Rutledge, which is starting to run longer than I’d like.
I don’t sleep that night. I lie there and think about Luke’s question against my promise to Harrison. Every grown-up reason I’ve got to stay away from her is solid. All of them are real, stacked into a wall, but on the other side of the wall it’s her.
By one I quit trying to fall asleep and call Lola, who picks up on the second ring.
“Come sit with Luke,” I tell her. “Now. Don’t tell me the time, I know the time.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she replies without even a hint of argument.
She enters with her own key, takes one look at the coat I’m putting on, but doesn’t say anything about any of it. Instead, she tilts her head toward the elevator, giving me the smallest of smiles that I could’ve sworn were meant to encourage me.
I take the car myself instead of calling a driver, because I don’t want a witness for wherever this goes.
The streets downtown are empty at this hour, lit and glassy, every light turning green like the city’s clearing a path it’ll regret.
I spend the whole drive building a speech, because speeches are the one thing I’ve never been bad at.
By the time I’m double-parked at her curb I’ve got it all laid out.
The apology. The truth about her father.
The case the lawyer wants and the better reason sitting under it.
Everything I should’ve said to her in that hallway instead of standing there and letting her walk.
I lean on her buzzer. Nothing. I lean on it again, longer, and still nothing comes back down, and the patience I drove in with is gone.
So I start hitting the others. All of them, top to bottom, whoever’s home.
A man’s voice crackles out furious, asking who the hell, and a woman after him tells me she’s calling the cops, but somebody three floors up just buzzes me in to make the noise stop, which is all I needed.
I take the stairs two at a time, and then I’m at her door with my fist on it and my thumb on the bell both, waking whoever I wake because I’m past caring.
The door opens.
And the whole speech goes out of my head in one breath, because she’s standing there in an old shirt with her hair down, and she isn’t angry.
She isn’t a single thing I braced for. She’s been crying, or right on the edge of it, her eyes red and huge in her face, and she’s looking at me on her doorstep at two in the morning like she isn’t even surprised to find me there.
Like some part of her left the light on.
I open my mouth to start, but she gets there first.
“I’m pregnant.”