Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
HARPER
Two nights later, the pool room is empty when I get there.
I stand in the doorway for a moment. I take in the steam rising off the water and the blue glow from underneath the surface that paints everything in shifting light.
My hand is still warm from the door handle of Caleb’s room, where I stood for two full minutes working up the nerve to knock.
And then didn’t, because my hand wouldn’t do it. My body said not like that, not standing at a door like a child waiting to be let in. Or maybe I’m still just a fucking coward, not knowing how to talk to him after my mini breakdown.
So I came here instead.
Kira said I should get some exercise. Her visits over the past few days have helped unscramble things in my head, even if they also leave me feeling raw. So what’s new?
The pool is a long blue rectangle, and the hot tub at the far end churns quietly to itself, steam rising in slow curls toward the ceiling.
I drop my towel on a chair and sit at the pool’s edge. I put my feet in the water and let the heat work up through my ankles into my calves.
I’m only there maybe five minutes before I hear the door push open behind me. I don’t turn around. I’m already attuned to the sound of his footsteps. Caleb. I’ve been listening to them pacing the hardwood through my door all week.
My chest clenches, but it’s not fear. There’s just all sorts of electrical impulses zipping and zapping everywhere along my nerve-endings at knowing he’s here and I’m here and we’re finally alone together for the first time since the shower.
Part of me was hoping to chicken out on the talking-to-him-part for a little longer. I’m not even sure why.
He’s always so careful with me. I hate it sometimes.
Caleb comes to stand at the pool’s edge about six feet from me. I can feel him looking at the side of my face, doing his inventory. Maybe he’s wondering which version of me showed up tonight.
I’ve only said about five words to him this week, and Bruiser was always in the room with us, too.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I offer as a lame opening.
“Me neither,” he agrees.
He sits. Not next to me, but at a careful distance away.
Which I notice. It tells me he’s been thinking about this eventual conversation too, and worrying about how much space to give me.
Probably doing calculations about every which way it could go, knowing him.
The water ripples around our feet when he puts his in.
We sit like that for a while, just the sound of the jets in the hot tub and the low hum of the heating system and the blue light shifting on the surface of the water between us.
“Kira said I should try talking to you,” I say.
“Oh yeah? Okay.” He nods. Just that. Giving me the room to find the door into a conversation.
The thing about being given room is that sometimes it makes you angrier than being crowded.
I have been in that bedroom for days, and he has been out here making grilled cheese sandwiches and reading Bruiser bedtime stories and going swimming with him. And pacing.
He hasn’t pushed, not once. He hasn’t knocked on my door, or slid notes under it, or done any of the ten thousand things Z would have done to press and make sure I understood how my withdrawal was hurtful to him.
Caleb just—
Waited.
And somehow that is the thing that finally makes me furious.
“I need you to be angry at me,” I bite out.
He turns to look at me, clearly confused.
“I have been in that room for days waiting for you to be angry, and you keep making sandwiches and taking Bruiser swimming and just being—”
My voice is getting high-pitched, and I wave my hand in a tight motion. “I just need you to say the things you’ve not been saying. Because I can hear you not saying them through the wall, Caleb, and the silence is so much worse than anything you could say would actually be.”
Something shifts in his face. His careful patience cracks—only very slightly—at the edges.
“You want me to be angry,” he says with an edge of disbelief.
“Yes.”
“Harper—”
“Say it.” My voice comes out harder than I meant it to. “Nine years. You lost nine years with him. You lost—”
I have to stop and breathe. “You have a son you didn’t know about for nine years, and I knew for days and didn’t tell you. Goddamn it, Caleb, you’re always so fucking careful with me, and I can’t stand it!”
I turn in his direction even though I can’t look him in the eye. “I need you to be furious. I need you to throw it all at me so I can throw it back. Because I’m so angry and I have nowhere to put it. You’re the only person in this building who has the right to be as angry as I am!”
Caleb is quiet for a long moment.
Then, with a control that is clearly costing him, he says, “You knew in Dallas before we slept together.”
“Yes.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t want to know?” His control is fraying now and the words come faster and sharper. What a Goddamn relief to see some of his facade cracking too. “Did you think I’d what—what was the calculation, Harper? What were you waiting for?”
“I didn’t know how to say it.” My own voice rises to meet his. “I had no idea how to look at you and say—oh, by the way, you have a nine-year-old son, and it was all my fault that I was so fucking gullible. Z could—”
“Z is a toxic psychopath.” He spits the words out. “Who you left me for. You left with him, pregnant with our—”
“I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left,” I cry, glad he’s finally giving me the fight I was angling for.
“But you were.” His voice bounces off the wall and back at me. “You were pregnant with my child, and you left and built a life with him instead, and you have never once—in ten years—reached out. You never once in ten years tried to see if I was alive. Never once—”
“I had his baby!” My voice breaks open on the words and my eyes finally flash up to his.
“Or at least I thought it was his baby! Don’t you think I felt like a useless fucking whore, just like everyone said I’d turn out to be?
I had to get a fucking paternity test because he tricked me into thinking I’d slept with him. I was so fucking steeped in shame.”
His eyes go dark. I only realize as I say it that he didn’t have that particular piece of the puzzle yet, but I’m on a roll now and I can’t stop. It all has to be said.
“Plus, I thought you’d already left for Harvard. I had nothing— No money and no family. Just a man I trusted who said he’d take care of us. And you’re sitting here telling me I should have—what? What exactly should I have done, Caleb?”
“You should have trusted me.” Caleb’s voice is raw now, the control fully gone. His eyes reflect the anguish in his voice. “You should have told me you were pregnant and trusted me. You don’t think I couldn’t have gotten over it, even if he was the father?”
That question punches a hole through my guts, but he keeps going.
“I never left, Harper, just on the off chance you might come back someday. I was too terrified that I’d miss you.
I didn’t go to Harvard. I spent my whole life waiting, stuck—because I would’ve sworn I’d known you more intimately than any person can know another.
And how could you just leave me like that? ”
“I didn’t know that.” Tears burn my eyes and I don’t fight them.
“I just knew you were finally getting the life that meant so much to you and your mom. It was her dying wish for you to go there—and for me to leave you alone so you could. Think about it. I was trailer park trash from Grass Valley with a drunk for a mother and no future. I was not going to take you down with me.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make!” he says vehemently.
“It was the only choice I had!”
“No.” He stands up, and the water from his feet tracks across the tile as he puts distance between himself and the hot tub’s edge, like he needs to move or he’ll combust. Or maybe he just needs to get away from me.
“No,” he shakes his head, “you made the choice that felt safest and you called it noble. It’s the same thing you’ve been doing your whole life.” He turns back to look at me. “Running instead of fighting to stay somewhere where you might actually have to fucking feel something.”
The words hit too close to home. I stand up too and hold out a shaking finger. “Don’t you dare.”
“You ran.” His voice has gone quiet in a way that’s worse than shouting. “You ran ten years ago and you’ve kept running for the ten years since. I’m not sure you know how to stop. But at some point, Harper, you have to just—stand there. In the actual thing. Without looking for the door.”
His hands drop to his sides. “That’s what grief is. There’s no exit. Sometimes you just have to stand and let yourself feel it, even when it’s washing over you in waves so high you don’t think you’ll be able to survive.”
Is he talking about what it was like after his mom passed? He had no one. I should have been there by his side, helping him.
But I wasn’t. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
I can defend my reasons all day long, and how I believed Z’s lies, but that means I’m not hearing him or validating the pain he went through.
We were both fucked by life, and if I keep demanding furiously, no my suffering was worse, what pain-Olympics am I really winning?
“I’m standing here,” I say, whole body shaking. “I’m standing here right now, aren’t I? I came out of my room. I came out here, which is the hardest fucking thing I’ve done since admitting I share my son with you, and you’re yelling at me for not doing it sooner—”
“Then fight with me.” He steps close, close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes. His voice is low and rough and not at all patient anymore. “That’s what you said you needed, right? So stop pulling your punches. I’m right here. Let me have it.”
So I do.
“You let me go!” I shout, tears unleashed as I shove him hard in the chest.
It’s an unreasonable accusation. And unfair, especially now that I know Helen died that day.
But I still don’t stop.