19. Allison
ALLISON
Gavin sets the printouts on my desk and doesn’t slide them over until I hold out my hand.
He looks wrecked in a very expensive way.
The suit’s still perfect, but his tie’s gone, and there’s a pale milk spot on his cuff that I watched Henry put there this morning.
It’s not fair that the sight of him still pulls low in my stomach, the shoulders and the rough jaw and the hands that know how to hold our son now.
Wanting him has always had terrible timing.
“Rebecca,” he says. “All of it.”
I read while he stands by the door with his coat still on.
Most of it I already knew in my bones, and seeing it printed out in plain black and white makes my hands shake anyway.
For months I’ve wondered whether I made that first call worse in my memory.
I didn’t make it up. She had his phone, she lied to me, and then she wiped out my second try so he’d never see it.
Then there’s the part I read twice. Right after Rebecca told him my call was “nothing urgent,” Gavin called me back himself. I had the test in my hand when I answered, and I told him there was nothing he needed to know. Shame prickles all the way down my arms remembering it.
By the time I get to the flight warning, my face is burning. I want Rebecca in this office. I want to stand her in front of the bassinet and show her the tiny bruise on Henry’s heel, and ask her if she really figured a first baby would wait around for a speech.
“She had London riding on this,” I say. “And you.”
He shuts his eyes for a second. “Yes.”
I put the pages down. “You fired her.”
“Before I got in the car.”
“London could fall apart without her.”
“It could.”
If he’d walked in here in April and said those same words, told me Rebecca was out of our private life and he’d risk London to keep her out, I’d have gone to London with him.
I’d have called him before the second pink line finished coming up.
But April’s gone, and I’m sitting across from him with a six-week-old and an envelope of my own.
Missing that version of us is a heavy, useless ache.
Henry makes a small creaky noise in the bassinet. He’s in a striped sleeper and one sock, because the other sock vanished this morning in an apartment with nowhere for a sock to hide, and I’ve decided the sock is winning. Gavin looks at him and doesn’t reach.
“Can I?”
I nod. He washes his hands at the little sink, dries them, and lifts Henry without waking him all the way. He tucks Henry’s head into his neck without thinking about it now. Watching it warms me all the way through, and I wish it didn’t.
“She’s going to say I hid him,” I say. “Well, I did.”
“She doesn’t get to use that to cover what she did.”
“Neither do I.”
He looks at me over Henry’s head. I make myself say the whole thing, because if I only say half of it I’ll be doing exactly what she did.
“Rebecca picked up my first call and deleted my second one. Then you called me yourself, and I lied to you. She came here when I was twenty-eight weeks and scared me half to death about what telling you would cost, and then she left, and I still had weeks and weeks before Henry came. I didn’t call you.
” My voice wobbles, and I push through it.
“She made it easier to keep my mouth shut. She didn’t make me do it.
I wanted you to come home because of me, and when you didn’t, I made you pay for it.
I told myself I was protecting Henry, and I was. I was protecting my pride too.”
Gavin’s arms tighten around our son, and then he catches himself and loosens them.
“I’d have come home if I’d known.”
“For Henry.”
“For both of you.”
“You knew about me, Gavin.”
He doesn’t try again. He just takes it, and I watch it go all the way down.
I find the flight page again and tap it. “And she lied about the window. But you had Captain Ellis’s number in your phone. You could’ve called your own pilot. You could’ve asked to see the weather yourself. You could’ve walked out of that room the second I asked, without any warning at all.”
“Yes.”
“You believed her because what she told you let you stay.”
His face goes gray. I can see him hear it, and know it’s true, and not reach for a single excuse.
“She lied to you, and you let her, because it meant you got to stay,” I say. “She scared me, and I let her, because it meant I didn’t have to call you.”
He sits down in the visitor chair with Henry on his chest. For a while the only sound is the circulation fan out past the glass, and a delivery truck backing up somewhere in the yard.
“I’m sorry,” he says. He’s looking straight at me, not at the floor. “I’m sorry I made Rebecca easier to reach than you. I’m sorry I stayed for the party. I’m sorry I got angry and answered it by showing up at your door with security. I did those. Nobody did them for me.”
I believe him. That’s the awful part. I believe he’s sorry, I believe firing her cost him more than he’s telling me, and I believe he loves Henry and still loves me. And none of it changes what’s in the envelope on my desk. I have to press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to keep from crying.
“It was never only her,” I say.
“I know.”
“Do you? Every emergency in our marriage was yours, and every change was mine. Your job didn’t move.
My life did. Your people could get to you any time they wanted, and I had to make an appointment.
Rebecca took advantage of that, but you’re the one who set it up that way.
” I hold his eyes. “You got rid of her. That doesn’t tell me you’d pick up the next time I call. ”
He’s quiet for a second. “What would?”
He’s not asking for a shopping list. He actually wants to know, and I don’t have an answer to give him.
“I don’t know.”
I take the divorce papers out of the envelope and slide them across the desk, and my pulse is thudding in my ears.
He reads the first page without moving anything but his eyes.
My name, and then his, and the words Complaint for Divorce above both of them.
Henry shifts on his chest, and Gavin hitches him higher.
“Has this been filed?”
“This afternoon.”
“You decided before you ever saw the report.”
“Yes.”
“Did any of it change your mind?”
I think about the anatomy scan, and the storm, and the first day and a half of Henry’s life.
“It changes what I know about her,” I say. “It doesn’t give me back what I lost.”
He shifts Henry higher on his shoulder, picks up the divorce papers in his free hand, and holds them against his hip like they’re one more thing he has to carry now.
“What time is Henry’s next bottle?”