Chương 2
That small movement hurt more than I expected.
“Did you know you were pregnant when you left me?”
She closed her eyes for a second.
The bus brakes screamed.
“Grace.”
The doors opened.
People began getting off.
A woman carrying grocery bags squeezed between us and apologized.
Grace moved the stroller toward the bus.
I caught the handle.
She froze.
“Let go.”
“Answer me.”
“Let go of the stroller.”
The boy’s face tightened.
I released it immediately.
Grace rubbed the handle with her thumb as if smoothing something invisible.
I hated myself for frightening the children.
I hated her for making them strangers.
I hated the rain, Amelia’s waiting table, my mother’s certainty that Grace had always been wrong for me, and the fact that some part of me had already begun rewriting three entire years of my life.
The little boy stepped onto the bus first.
One girl followed.
Grace lifted the other child, then pushed the stroller toward the ramp.
I stood there uselessly.
“Grace, please.”
She stopped.
The driver glanced at us through the mirror.
“You boarding, sir?”
“No.”
Grace looked over her shoulder.
For the first time, the anger left her face.
What replaced it was worse.
Fear.
Not fear of me.
Fear of what came next.
“I tried to tell you,” she said quietly.
Then she got on the bus.
The doors closed between us.
I stood in the rain while the bus pulled away.
My phone vibrated.
Amelia.
Where are you?
I stared at the message until another appeared.
Ryan, everyone is here.
I typed three words.
I can’t come.
The typing bubble appeared instantly.
Then vanished.
Then appeared again.
I did not wait for her response.
The bus had reached the next light.
My car was in a garage half a block behind me, but by the time I got there and fought down three levels of concrete, the bus would be gone.
I opened a rideshare app with shaking fingers.
The driver assigned to me was six minutes away.
I canceled and ran.
The medical center was only four blocks north.
If Grace was taking the children there, I could reach it before she disappeared.
My shoes filled with water before I crossed the second intersection.
At thirty-eight, I was not built for sprinting through downtown traffic in dress shoes.
By the third block, my lungs burned and my left knee had begun complaining about an old college injury I usually pretended did not exist.
I kept going.
A woman under an awning shouted that I had dropped something.
I turned.
The ring box lay in a puddle behind me.
For one absurd second, I considered leaving it there.
Then I ran back, picked it up, shoved it deep into my pocket, and kept moving.
The bus was pulling away from the curb when I reached the medical center.
Grace was already inside with the children.
I followed them through the revolving doors and nearly collided with a security guard.
Warm air hit my face.
The lobby smelled like disinfectant, wet coats, and burnt coffee.
Children sat beneath painted clouds while cartoons played silently on mounted televisions.
A father in work boots slept with his chin against his chest.
A woman was arguing quietly with someone from an insurance company.
For the first time, the possibility that one of those children was seriously ill settled over me with real weight.
I found Grace at the registration desk.
The boy stood beside her holding a small stuffed dinosaur.
The two girls were trying to press their palms onto the wet floor prints left by other children’s boots.
Grace saw me in the reflection of a glass partition.
Her eyes closed.
“Of course you followed me.”
“I’m not leaving.”
The receptionist looked between us.
Grace lowered her voice.
“You cannot do this here.”
“Then give me five minutes somewhere else.”
“I don’t have five minutes.”
The receptionist cleared her throat.
“Ms. Bennett, they’re ready for Noah upstairs.”
Noah.
The boy.
Grace thanked her.
I repeated the name under my breath.
Noah looked at me.
One of the girls whispered something to her sister and giggled.
Grace gathered their coats.
“Who’s Noah seeing?”
She ignored me.
“Grace.”
She turned so sharply that a strand of wet hair stuck to her cheek.
“Pediatric oncology.”
The words stripped every other thought from the room.
Noah stared at his dinosaur.
Grace’s mouth trembled once before she forced it still.
“He has leukemia,” she said.
The elevator doors opened behind her.
Then she added, almost too quietly for me to hear, “And if you really are going to make this about being their father, Ryan, you should know that you might be the only person who can help save his life.”
The elevator doors stayed open while I stared at her.
A nurse inside reached out and held the button before they could close.
Grace looked exhausted suddenly, not the kind of tired that sleep fixed, but the kind that made a person seem thinner around the eyes.
“What do you mean, save his life?”
Her hand tightened around Noah’s dinosaur.
“Not here.”
“You just told me my son has leukemia.”
“I told you Noah has leukemia.”
The distinction hit me hard enough that I almost laughed.
It would have been the wrong kind of laugh, the one people make when something is too large for the body to hold.
“Is he my son?”
Noah looked up again.
Grace saw him watching us and stopped.
Her whole posture changed.
Whatever answer she might have given disappeared.
She turned to the nurse.
“Can you take us up?”
The nurse glanced at me, then at Grace.
“Family?”
Grace hesitated.
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “It’s complicated.”
The nurse had probably heard worse things before breakfast.
She nodded toward the elevator.
“You can sort complicated out upstairs.”
We stepped inside.
May you like
The girls immediately argued over who got to press the button.
One of them, the one with Grace’s softer face, won by pressing three different floors before Grace caught her wrist.
