Chương 2
“No.”
The woman beside him made a faint sound of amusement. “She’s very protective.”
Tasha’s shoulders stiffened.
I laid the papers flat on my knees. My hands had begun to tremble, though not for the reason Derek assumed. The magnesium they had given me before surgery still left my muscles weak. I could not stand without help. I had not showered. There was dried adhesive on my chest from the monitors and milk leaking through the disposable pads inside my gown even though my babies could not yet drink it.
Derek had chosen the hour carefully.
“How long have you been moving money?” I asked.
He looked at the woman. She avoided his eyes.
“Harper.”
“It’s a date, Derek. Not a moral question.”
“The account was joint.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
He crouched in front of me, lowering his voice. His cologne mingled with the woman’s perfume until the air felt crowded.
“You need to understand the situation you’re in. You don’t have income coming in right now. You have two babies who are going to need expensive care, maybe for years. You can fight me and burn through whatever you have left, or you can sign and let everybody move on.”
“Everybody.”
His eyes flicked toward the woman’s stomach.
There it was. A future he had already furnished. My coat. My money. My apartment. His new child.
Emma moved beneath the thin blanket inside her incubator. Her heel, no wider than a dime, rubbed against the sensor attached to her foot. The monitor drew green peaks across the screen.
“What happens to Noah and Emma?” I asked.
Derek stood again.
“You’ll have custody.”
“That’s not what the papers say.”
“They say we handle our own responsibilities.”
“They are your responsibilities.”
His mouth hardened. “I can’t do this with you.”
“Do what?”
“Pretend this is normal.”
For a moment I could not speak. The room continued around us. Air hissed through Noah’s support line. A pump clicked. Somewhere beyond the glass partition, another baby began to cry—a thin, startled sound that ended almost immediately.
“What isn’t normal?” I asked.
His gaze settled on the incubators. He looked at them the way people looked at a damaged car after an accident, already calculating whether repair made sense.
“This,” he said. “All of it.”
The woman touched his sleeve. “Derek.”
He shook her off, embarrassed by the warning.
“You were supposed to have a normal pregnancy,” he said to me. “We were supposed to have one baby, maybe two healthy babies, not—”
He stopped.
“Not what?” Tasha asked.
Derek ignored her.
I held his gaze. “Finish the sentence.”
His face changed, just slightly. A tiny retreat. For years I had mistaken those retreats for remorse. They were only revisions.
“I am not equipped for this,” he said.
“Neither was I.”
“You wanted them.”
“So did you.”
“I wanted children. I didn’t agree to spend my life in hospitals.”
Noah’s alarm sounded again.
The woman flinched. Derek did not.
Something inside me, something that had survived the operating room and the sight of my son being carried away before I could touch him, became very still.
Tasha moved toward the incubator. Before she turned away, she glanced at the black dome above the door. The unit’s security camera.
I understood.
“Say it clearly,” I told Derek.
He exhaled through his nose. “Say what?”
“What you’re asking me to sign.”
“I’m asking you to accept reality.”
“Whose reality?”
He looked at the papers, at my shaking hands, at the IV line taped to my wrist. Confidence returned to him because he had mistaken weakness for surrender.
“You take care of yourself,” he said. “They’re your problem too.”
“Too?”
He leaned closer.
“You take care of yourself,” he repeated. “And you take care of them. I’m done.”
Tasha froze with one hand inside Noah’s incubator.
The woman stopped touching her stomach.
Derek straightened, as if relieved to have finally said it.
I heard my grandfather’s voice from years earlier, not as wisdom delivered for effect but as a tired observation over a plate of scrambled eggs. People get honest when they think there’s nothing left to gain from you.
At twenty-two, I had rolled my eyes.
At thirty-one, I asked Tasha for a pen.
Derek’s expression loosened.
“Thank you.”
Tasha did not move.
“The blue one,” I said. “The one clipped to your badge.”
She pulled it free slowly. When she handed it to me, her fingers pressed mine.
“You do not have to sign anything,” she said.
“I know.”
Derek’s lawyer had placed yellow tabs on seven pages. I signed the first one, an acknowledgment that I had received the documents. On the others, I wrote the date and the words signed under protest while medicated and postoperative. Derek watched my hand, not the language.
The final line required a witness. He took the pen from me and held it out to Tasha.
“Sign.”
“No.”
“You watched her.”
“I watched you pressure a surgical patient in a restricted neonatal unit.”
The woman took the pen.
“I’ll witness it.”
“No,” Tasha said.
The woman’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t get to tell me—”
“I do in this unit.”
Tasha reached for the wall phone.
Derek snatched the documents from my lap before she could finish dialing. The movement pulled one page free. It drifted to the floor beside Emma’s incubator.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Documenting a visitor incident.”
“This isn’t an incident.”
“Then you won’t mind security reviewing it.”
May you like
The first uncertainty passed across his face.
I reached for my phone on the table beside me. The screen showed seventeen missed calls from my grandfather’s assistant and four from my grandfather. He had been downstairs when the surgeon told him the babies had come. I had made him promise not to enter the unit until I asked. I had not wanted the Riverside board, the donors, or half the city’s medical establishment learning that Silas Vale’s granddaughter had nearly died in childbirth before I had told my father’s family.
