He grinds his palm into his eye. “I get it. We’re exhausted. This can’t go on. We’re going to get through this. We’re going to get Reagan back, and then we’ll have lots and lots of babies together.”
I wrap my arms around him and pull him in so he doesn’t see the terror in my eyes. So he doesn’t see the fact I’d rather die than have Heather Evans and her frightening epiphanies showing up on my proverbial doorstep—and God, I pray that’s all it’ll be.
Heather was right. I have a secret.
James would like to have lots and lots of babies together.
And what Heather knows is that we’ve never had a single one.
4
James
Days bleed by with no Reagan, no Ota, no sleep, and no rest from the barbaric media. Some dark force in the universe had slit me open like an old pillow, sending everything that once held me together off into space. The nexus of who I really am blew away like feathers, and yet that dark force insists on the constant vacuuming of my soul. There is nothing left but grief and agony.
We stepped from one pile of shit to the next. That nut job Heather Evans has set up a GoFundMe and already we’re at over a hundred thousand dollars.
“We don’t need this money,” I lament, tapping my finger to the screen. “What the hell are we going to do with it, anyway? It’s blood money. I don’t want it.”
Allison comes over in her sickly green robe, her hair disheveled. We’ve devolved to bathing under a strictly as-needed basis, and since there’s not a soul we want to see outside of our daughter, our hygiene has hit rock bottom.
“Neither one of us is employed if you haven’t noticed,” she points out. “I’m pretty sure the money we have saved will dry up within a year.”
The money we have saved is a misnomer, but I know better than to correct my wife without infusing her first with coffee. And that seems to be why my father is still hanging around. He’s been our butler in every capacity, and for the first time I can honestly say it’s a pleasure. I’ve never needed him like I do now. God knows we’ve been through it all together.
Allison shuts the laptop over my fingers. “Don’t look at it. I hate it. And I hate her.”
“Son,” Dad calls me over with a tick of the head.
“I’ll be right back.” I touch my hand over my wife’s, and for the first time in years it feels like a genuine display of affection.
“What’s up?” We head out back to the dusty earthen-scented soil that’s rich with humidity. A heat wave in late October. Reagan would have loved it. Would have. I slap my hand to my forehead to keep from slipping to that dark place that calls to me as enticing as sleep. “God help me.”
“I’m here,” Dad says it with such sincerity I give a half-hearted chuckle, first one in as long as I can remember.
“You’re not God.”
“I’m close enough.” Those mirror blue eyes of his, that face, my face in thirty years’ time. Dad has always been a preview of what I might look like some day. “How are things going between you and Allison? There’s no more talk of divorce, I take it? Rumor has it, there’s talk of babies.” He offers a congratulatory slap to my back.
“No, she just panicked. Our only concern is Reagan.”
“Now that you got some time alone, don’t you think the two of you should get on a right path together?”
I look over at him, bewildered where this might be coming from. “Reagan is not at the sitter’s, Dad. And we’re not on vacation. She’s missing. So excuse me if Allison and I aren’t up for wooing one another in the interim.” My eyes close involuntarily as I let out a stiff breath. “Look, I know you mean well. Everyone is saying things that don’t make any sense. We’ve all hit a wall.” I stagger out into the yard a few feet and spot her hula-hoop buried under inches of grass, the periphery yellowing like a halo and the pain of not having my child here safe with me is suddenly too much to bear. “God, when will this end?” I roar out in grief as I let the heat bite through my clothing.
He grunts out something between a groan and a laugh. “The reporters have come by sniffing in the mornings when I take my walk.”
My lids spring wide at the thought of my father, the marriage counselor, carrying on a conversation with any of them.
“You didn’t say anything, did you?” That’s right. I don’t even need to preface it with the subject matter. We both know the topic, dead and buried as it may be.
“Oh no. Heaven’s no.” He slaps the back of his neck and offers up a sheepish look. “But a few have asked about your siblings. Seems good news travels fast.”
Good news. That’s his verbal way of whistling Dixie.
“Shit.” I stalk past him and head back into the kitchen to find Allison holding up my phone, that curious frown embedded on her face.
“Who’s this Hannigan?” Her lips twist at the screen. “And why doesn’t he think we need IVF? As if it’s any of his damn business.”
I snap the phone out of her hand and head into the living room. Shit.
“Don’t mind him.” I hear my father say in his inappropriately cheery tone. He’s gone from coffee butler to a dancing devil in a single bound. “I got him a little worked up. My fault. I’ll take the blame on this one.”
My father is so fixated on gluing the frayed edges of my marriage back together he has no clue he just covered for my mistress and me.
Mistress. I hate the word. It sounds like something off the cover of one of those regency romance novels my mother used to devour. Something old and archaic like a courtship or taking an evening constitutional. I don’t have a mistress. What happened with Hailey last summer was just an off moment for me. A moment of abject weakness driven by the almost certainty that Allison and I were about to throw in the towel. She didn’t make a secret of it.