Page 40 of Sexy as Sin
“She was beautiful, too, I’ll bet,” Willow said. “How did you meet her?”
He smiled. “At a bar, though we made up a better story for our mothers. And, yeah, she was beautiful.” Nothing at all like Willow. Brunette and curvy. Or call it what it was. She wasbuilt.She’d been wearing a peacock-blue dress that hugged her curves, sitting on a barstool with her legs crossed and her hair down, and he’d gone right there. He didn’t share that. It was still a good memory, though, even after all this time. No caution back then, both of them confident and heedless and so sure they could make their lives wonderful.
“Oh, well,” Willow said. “It happens. Everybody’s twenty-five once, hey.”
“Nice excuse,” he said. “Except that I was thirty-two. Thirty-five when we got married, and I’d been around the block and back. We’d been dating for three years. I’d done my homework, that was for sure. I’d thought it through, and I was sure. She checked off all the boxes.”
“I can’t believe it didn’t go deeper than that,” she said.
He turned the mug of tea in his hand and stared down at the cooling liquid. “You know what? I’d like some of that wine you brought over. How about you?”
“I didn’t think you drank,” she said, uncrossing her legs with a flash of thigh and standing. Nothing like Nia at all, which was either a very good thing or a very bad one. He wasn’t even sure anymore. “Never even seen you crack a beer.”
“I don’t. Much. I don’t normally break my leg, either, so there’s that.”
A couple minutes, and she was back with a bottle and two glasses. “Small Gully Black Magic Shiraz. Recommended by my mate Kevin, who’s sommelier at a very posh place indeed in Melbourne these days. It’s right for the stew, but he won’t be happy that I didn’t decant it.” She twisted the cap off and poured two glasses with the same neat, economical motions she displayed when she cooked, and he watched her do it and appreciated the sight, and the break. When she sat again, she tucked a leg under herself, curled into the basket chair, touched her glass softly to his, and said, “Here’s to life, hey. Messy stuff. Tell me more about her. About Nia. She was brilliant, and she was beautiful. What else?”
He was a fool to tell her. He needed to do it anyway. He twirled the glass in his hand, then took a sip. Velvety rich, deep, dark, and complex, the wine swirled down into him like secrets and smoke, softening the aches and smoothing the way. Black magic indeed. “As ambitious as I was, too,” he said, “or more so. She wasn’t counting on getting pregnant so soon, but she turned out to be as efficient about that as she was about everything else. It happened barely six months after the wedding.”
“Oh.” Willow had paused with her glass halfway to her mouth. Now, she set it down. “Wait. You have a kid?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she said again. Faintly. “You didn’t want it.” Wondering, as clearly as if it had been printed in a bubble above her head,Why would you tell me this?Very good question.
“I did want it. We both did.” He took another sip of wine and steeled himself to say it, now that he’d started. “Our little girl died.”
“Oh.” Her hand was over her heart. “Oh, Brett. I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Silence for a long, long minute. Why had he told her? He didn’t talk about this. Maybe it was the bats. When he saw something like that, he’d flash, for one heart-stopping instant, on swinging somebody up into his arms to look at them. Somebody sweet and smart andhis.Somebody who’d be thrilled to see real bats, and who wouldn’t be scared, because he was right there, keeping her safe. His daughter.
“Tell me,” Willow said, “if you want to. There’s a reason you mentioned it. It’s on your mind. Tell me how in the world that could be your fault, because it’s so hard for me to believe that you wouldn’t take care of anybody you loved.”
“It’s not, of course,” he said. “Not logically. Nobody’s fault.”
He stopped, and she didn’t say anything, so he took another swallow of wine and plowed ahead. Once you’d committed, you had to see it through. “Nia got pregnant, and I did what I thought I should do. I doubled down, work-wise. After my dad died, things were... hard. I didn’t expect them to get any easier, then or ever. Knowing I was going to be a dad just made that feeling stronger. I knew something could happen to me, and I needed to make sure they were both taken care of. Nia was going to keep working, and I’d already done very well, so it wasn’t logical to feel so much pressure, but I did anyway. Chalk it up to testosterone, or to whatever you like. I was putting together my biggest project yet at the same time, up in Bellingham. High-growth city in north Washington state, on the coast,” he explained at her blank look. “Just starting to grow then, and I knew it would be big. Outdoor recreation, active retirees, escapees from California. I had it all on the line, biggest risk of my career—until then, anyway, because I keep doing it—and I was traveling a lot to make it happen.”
“So she fell pregnant, and you were working too much,” Willow said when he paused again. “And she felt neglected? And by the way, you’ve said ‘logical’ twice. I don’t think feelings are always so logical. At least mine aren’t.”
He had to smile. “You’re right, of course. And, no, I don’t think that was it. She was working long hours herself, feeling like she needed to leave everything in good shape and worried about losing her spot. She felt as pressed as I did, because she came from the same kind of place. Her parents were immigrants, and she’d fought hard every step of the way and earned every promotion. It was our priority, work. We had that in common. We didn’t see past it, either of us, not then. Especially me. Sins of omission. Not paying enough attention. Not seeing what mattered.”
He could hear Nia’s voice, as he had for months after it had happened, playing and replaying in his head. He’d been on the fifty-seventh floor of the Columbia Center, just starting a meeting with an investment group. Eleven-fifteen in the morning when he’d felt the buzz of the phone in his pants pocket, been distracted for a split second, and then resumed his presentation. He’d forgotten about it until an hour later, when he’d shaken hands all around and been escorted to the elevator bank with the barely-damped-down fizz of triumph coursing through his body. He’d sold them. He knew it. Hefeltit. He was riding high.
He was headed to the lobby when he pulled out his phone to call her and saw it. Three missed calls from Nia, and two from his assistant Brenda.
The car glided to a stop, and an Asian man beside him stepped out. Glasses, neat charcoal suit, red power tie. Lawyer, probably. Floor 32 lit up on the indicator, then thedingas the doors closed again and the indicator blinked off. He watched it, recorded it like he was behind glass, even as he hit the button to redial his wife.
“Brett.” Her voice was high, sharp, missing the lower register notes, and the elevator started down again with barely a hum. “Where were you? I’ve called and called. You need to come to Ballard now. They think something’s wrong with the baby.”
Afterwards, he couldn’t remember a single minute of that drive. At the end of it, he’d walked down the shiny-floored hall like it was a treadmill, never-ending, followed a nurse back into Labor and Delivery the same way, and found Nia on a bed, pale and sweating, her face taut, her belly barely mounding the white sheet, and a machine beside her recording two heartbeats. One regular and steady. One... not. A nurse worked to put an IV into Nia’s arm, her movements sure and unrushed, but there was an urgency to them all the same.
This was an emergency. This was bad.
“Check out the abs,” Nia had joked to him only the week before, poking at her taut little belly. “You’ve got the hottest pregnant wife of any of the boys. Aren’t you lucky?”
He’d kissed her andhadfelt lucky. Now, he looked at that not-big-enough belly and felt lightheaded. Why hadn’t he asked? Why hadn’t he doublechecked? He always doublechecked.
