Chapter 33: Unlikely

“Butterfingers,” Rachel had said, and Dottie had said, “That’s the Stove Top, it’s slippery,” and everybody had laughed and the moment had rolled away under the table like a pea.

Eight hours later it rolled right back.

The guests were gone. Owen had driven Dottie back to the overpass, because she wouldn’t let him take her anywhere else, with a foil tray of pernil and, Rachel was ninety percent sure, a silver spoon. Tessa had left with half a pie and a look that said tell him. Mrs. Ruiz had shooed them all out of her kitchen at ten, wrapped every leftover in two layers of foil, and gone home humming.

Past midnight, Rachel gave up on the guest suite ceiling and went to the kitchen for crackers, in leggings and her old gray sweater with the stretched-out cuffs, and practiced on the way.

Julian, I need to tell you something. Too dramatic. So, funny story. It wasn’t funny.

He was in the living room in the dark, on the long couch by the window, still in the gray sweater from dinner, a glass of water on the floor by his foot. The park was silver under a cold moon. He didn’t get up when he saw her. He’d stopped getting up toward her. He waited to see which way she’d go.

“You’re doing math,” he said.

“I’m not doing math.”

“You get a line right here.” He touched the space between his own eyebrows. “You had it at the table tonight after my extremely moving toast, which you ruined with silverware.”

She sat down at the other end of the couch, sleeve of saltines in her lap, with a whole cushion between them like a fence.

“About the toast,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“You don’t get to say family to me. Not three weeks after I found out you brought me to that dinner like a cheese plate. Not in front of Tessa, not in front of Dottie. They don’t know. They thought it was sweet.”

He took it. She watched him take it, the way he’d taken the shove in the guest suite. “You’re right. I should have said it to you first. Or not at all yet.”

“Not at all yet.”

“Okay.”

She ate a cracker so she wouldn’t have to say anything else. The fence cushion sat there between them. Outside, a cab honked at nothing on Central Park West.

“Can I tell you something?” he said. “It isn’t about the file, and it isn’t an apology. You can say no.”

“Okay.”

“The toast. I meant it, even if I said it wrong. It’s strange because I gave up on that. The family part. A long time ago.”

“Because of Vanessa?”

“Partly. When we were engaged she wanted kids right away. Two by thirty-five, she had a spreadsheet. Nothing happened, so we both got tested.” His voice stayed even, like reading weather. “I was thirty. The doctor used the word unlikely. Not impossible, he was very careful about that. Low numbers, poor motility, some medical words I made him repeat twice. Unlikely.”

Rachel went cold from the feet up. It started in her toes and climbed, like stepping into the Harlem River at night.

“Vanessa was gone four months later. She’d been seeing someone else, so the test wasn’t the whole story. It didn’t help.” He looked at his hands. “I’ve never told anyone that. Owen knows because Owen knows everything. I didn’t tell him either.”

She tried to say something. I’m sorry. Anything. Her tongue felt like a stranger’s.

And under the cold, small and mean, the other voice. The one he’d taught her. Why tonight? Why now, halfway through her month, ten days after he’d sworn a statement that could cost him his board, an hour after she’d thrown family back in his face? A man who could stage a dinner could stage a confession. Is this true, she thought, or is this strategy?

She looked at him. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the floor like it was a long way down.

“Come here,” she said. It came out before she’d decided it. “Not like that. Just. You look like you’re going to fall over.”

He moved slowly, like a man approaching a deer, and when she put a pillow on her knees he lay down along the couch and put his head on it, on her lap, and closed his eyes. Her hand went into his hair on its own. He let out a breath she felt through two layers of fabric.

“I made my peace with it,” he said, quieter. “Built a company instead. Companies only need the other kind of numbers.”

Unlikely.

If Julian couldn’t, then Michael had. If Julian couldn’t, then this little flicker, this thing she had already fallen in love with in a room that smelled like lavender, was a piece of the man who had changed the locks on her in the rain.

Julian turned his head and pressed a kiss to her stomach, through her sweater, right there, right on top of it, light and absentminded.

Then he went still. “Sorry. I didn’t ask.”

“It’s fine,” she said, and her voice did something strange in the middle. “That one’s fine.”

“So whatever happens with us,” he said, already half asleep, the words going soft around the edges, “you’ll never have to worry about that.”

Rachel sat with her hand in his hair and the saltines sliding off her knee onto the rug, and she didn’t move to save them. True or strategy. She turned it over and over, the way she’d turned over the Pruitt invoices, looking for the seam. She couldn’t find one. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It meant she was tired, and he was warm, and she wanted very badly for it to be true.

It had to be true. Nobody would make up a thing like that to win a woman back. It would mean betting she’d never need him to be wrong.

And she needed him to be wrong more than she’d ever needed anything.

He fell asleep in her lap around two. She didn’t wake him. She didn’t close her eyes either. She sat in the dark with one hand in his hair and the other flat under her sweater where he’d kissed it, while the sky over Central Park went from black to gray to the dirty pink of a November dawn.