Page 112 of Last Summer

You don’t even know the half of it.

Amira:

There’s more? Do tell.

Ella:

[Expletive]

Amira:

What is it?

Ella:

We’re still recording.

[End Recording]

CHAPTER 36

Six Weeks Later

Late May 2019

Damien sits in his office chair in PDN’s San Francisco headquarters. He faces the window that overlooks the murky gray water. The Bay Bridge sprawls below, grappling the shores like an Olympic gymnast doing the splits. On the other side of the bridge, planes take off from the Oakland Airport. They lift into the sky, disappearing into low-lying clouds.

In his hand, he flips a flash drive end over end. A backup to the drive he gave Ella. He always keeps a second copy. It’s the nature of his business. Files can crash and data can corrupt in a snap. One string of bad code can erase a lifetime’s worth of work. Ella’s motivated forgetting was not part of their original plan, the one they devised last summer when she first received the Nathan Donovan assignment on their return from the Maldives.

If there’s anything Damien regrets happening on their trip, it’s telling Ella about his issue. Unlike what he told her when she got back from Alaska, he had actually revealed his sterility when they were in the Maldives. He told her in a heated reaction to Ella’s own confession: she’d admitted that she always wanted kids. She’d forgotten to pack her birth control and thought it would be a good time to try to have a baby. They’d been married for a while. She’d thought maybe, by then, he might be open to the idea. Maybe he’d want to start a family.

Ella had blindsided him. He had no idea she wanted children.

He should have confessed he couldn’t give her any before they married. He should have stuck with his usual refrain: he didn’t want kids. Because as soon as the confession about his sterility left his mouth, he regretted it. Ella would leave him, just like Anna had.

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