Page 70 of The Deepest Lake

“You should tell someone,” I say, even though I don’t know what there is to tell, because it seems like the right thing to say to someone who needs a therapist or a lawyer—knowing Eva, probably both.

Her voice is hoarse and high-pitched, unpleasantly childlike.

“I can’t.”

“I really think you should try.”

She looks over her shoulder again before turning back to me, pulling my hand into her lap, entwining our fingers. “I won’t say it more than once, so you need to listen.”

“Okay.” I face forward, ignoring the discomfort in my hand as she squeezes.

“I lost Adhika before she came to term. At twenty-five weeks.”

“What?” That’s the single, dumb word that drops from my open mouth. I can’t help it. I’m remembering the last chapters of her memoir. There was no mention of Adhika being born that early. “She was born premature?” I stop myself from asking: And died months later?

“No. She was stillborn.”

“At . . . at home?

“No, at the hospital.”

I imagine Adhika as Eva described her on the page: healthy, chubby, normal, at least until she died unexpectedly, of sudden infant death syndrome.

“But in the book . . .”

Her voice drops. “Forget about the damn book for a minute.”

“But,” I say, unable to think of anything but the book, which made no mention of a stillbirth. “Adhika? What went wrong?”

“You remember the part when we go to the hospital, because I’m spotting?”

“Yeah.”

“That part was mostly true.”

But not the important part. Eva wasn’t spotting. She was hemorrhaging. There was nothing to be done.

Things got more complicated a week later. By that point, Eva’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were all blowing up with thousands of fans asking why Eva hadn’t posted her daily updates. Was something wrong?

“Richard and Jonah told me to keep the blog and social media updates going. Just be vague for now. But a writer can’t be vague. So I did the work. I wrote the scene.”

“The scene of you coming home, after the bleeding stopped? When you and Jonah have breakfast in bed?”

“That one.”

“It was one of my favorites.”

“Thank you,” she whispers. “It was just so . . . comforting. To write it the way it should have been. The yogurt with fresh berries, the orange juice—Jonah’s with bourbon. The way he took the brown bag with my bloodied underwear out to the trash can. The way I talked to unborn Adhika and told her how she’d scared both of us, but him, especially. My new love, who until that moment hadn’t fully realized how much he wanted to be a father.”

I think about the details—which ones are probably true, which entirely false. The bloody underwear and the bourbon: true. The idea that Adhika was still alive: false. But the breakfast in bed and the idea that Jonah was now more committed to fatherhood—those parts were a load of crap.

“People ate it up,” Eva says. “The fact that I’d been offline a week ramped up everyone’s curiosity. It doubled my followers, who’d been worried about Jonah’s ambivalence. This was a good moment for him as a new father, in their eyes.”

She’s smiling ruefully. I want to shout, Not too good a moment for Jonah if it never happened! But I can’t process this yet. I still don’t completely understand.

“Richard had been telling me to keep my platform growing,” Eva says. “He told me to keep doing what I was doing.”

More blog posts and updates followed. She wrote about bed rest, about eating well for healing, about her ever-swelling breasts. She wrote about the true cost of middle-age fertility treatments for AARP’s magazine. She wrote about fifty-something sexual desire for Cosmopolitan. She wrote about her love for Jonah—and the trickiness of third-semester sex—for Modern Love, an essay that was optioned for a television episode.

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