Chapter 7: She is not nothing

ALEX 𓆩♡𓆪

I was back in my study when Mrs. Baako knocked.

She came upstairs only when something required it. That had been our unspoken arrangement for three years. So when she appeared in my doorway with her hands folded and her expression carefully neutral I set my pen down and waited.

“The girl, sir,” she said. “She collapsed at the gate.”

I looked at her.

“Where is she now?”

Mrs. Baako hesitated for exactly one second which from her was the equivalent of a long uncomfortable pause.

“Mr. Christopher had her brought inside,” she said. “He is asking for you.”

My grandfather was standing at the window of the east sitting room with his hands behind his back when I walked in. He didn’t turn. He looked out at the gate the way he looked at everything, with the patience of a man who had already formed his conclusion and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.

Rose was on the sofa. Someone had placed a cushion beneath her head and a blanket over her with careful hands. Her face was pale. Her breathing was shallow but even. Her bag was on the floor beside her feet exactly where she had set it down herself  which meant she had been conscious long enough to set it down before she went under.

I stood in the middle of the room and said nothing.

“You had her removed,” my grandfather said. Still not turning.

“I had a stranger removed from my property,” I said. “That is not unusual.”

“She is not a stranger.”

I said nothing.

He turned then. He looked at me the way he had been looking at me my entire life,  like he could see the full architecture of whatever I was thinking and had already identified the flaws in it.

“Sit down, Alex.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Sit down.”

I sat.

He moved from the window and took the chair across from me and folded his hands and looked at me with the unhurried certainty of a man who had all the time in the world because he had already decided how this conversation ended.

“Tell me what she told you,” he said.

“She claims the child is mine.”

“And?”

“And I don’t believe her.”

He was quiet for a moment. He looked at Rose, at her face, her bag, the dress she had been wearing too many days in a row,  and then he looked back at me.

“When did she come to your gate?” he asked.

“This afternoon.”

“And before that?”

I said nothing.

“When did you last see her, Alex?”

The question sat in the room. I looked at the wall behind his head and felt the specific discomfort of a man who already knows the answer and does not want to say it out loud because saying it out loud makes it real in a way that thinking it does not.

“Weeks ago,” I said.

“How many weeks?”

I told him.

He nodded once. Like I had confirmed something he had already calculated.

“And she was…”

“Yes,” I said. Before he finished the sentence. Because I did not need him to finish it.

Silence.

My grandfather looked at me steadily.

“Then the arithmetic is not complicated,” he said.

“Arithmetic can be manufactured,” I said. “A test, a story, a well-timed collapse at the right gate.”

“Look at her,” my grandfather said quietly.

I looked.

The bag. The dress. The hollowed face. The specific exhaustion of someone who had been surviving rather than living for weeks. Nobody manufactured that. Nobody showed up at a billionaire’s gate looking like that as a strategy.

I looked away.

“I want a test done,” I said. “A proper one. My doctor, on my terms.”

“Of course,” my grandfather said. “Arrange it.” He paused. “And in the meantime, ”

“In the meantime nothing,” I said. “She stays in the guest room until the test is done. After that we discuss what happens next.”

My grandfather looked at me for a long moment.

“She has nowhere to go,” he said. Not as an argument. Just as a fact.

“I am aware of that,” I said.

He nodded slowly. Then he stood  unhurried, deliberate  and straightened his jacket and looked at Rose one more time before he moved toward the door.

He stopped in the doorway.

“Alex,” he said, without turning.

“Yes.”

“That girl carried herself to this gate alone with nothing,” he said. “Whatever else she is, she is not nothing.” He paused. “Remember that.”

He left.

I sat in the empty room with Rose breathing quietly on the sofa across from me and looked at my own hands and thought about a note I had written in a hotel room weeks ago.

“You’re rare. 

I had meant it when I wrote it.

I was beginning to understand that meaning it was going to cost me something.

Rose stirred. Her eyes opened slowly  disoriented first, then focusing, then finding me across the room. Something moved through her face when she saw me. 

Not fear. Not relief either. Just the expression of someone who has already prepared for the worst and is simply waiting to find out which version of it has arrived.

“You’re awake,” I said.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“A doctor will come tomorrow,” I said. “My doctor. My terms. You will be tested properly.”

She nodded. No argument. No performance of offense.

“And tonight?” she asked.

“Tonight you stay in the guest room,” I said. 

“Mrs. Baako will show you.”

She sat up slowly, reached for her bag, and stood. She was steadier than I expected. She walked to the door and then stopped and turned back and looked at me with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of someone who has nothing left to lose and has found, unexpectedly, that that is its own kind of freedom.

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I know you don’t believe me yet. But I’m not lying.”

I said nothing.

She left.

I stayed in the sitting room alone and looked at the empty sofa and the cushion still indented from her head and thought about what my grandfather had said.

“She is not nothing.”

I poured myself a drink and sat down and began, carefully and methodically, to prepare myself for the possibility that he was right.