Page 8 of Harboring Secrets
“No, Liam. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”Piper closed her eyes and that was the last we talked about it. Now, as her husband, her eggs were legally mine, as per the arrangements we’d made with the clinic and the lawyers. I should have taken care of this a long time ago, but I’d been sick with grief, nearly mad with it, and the idea of getting rid of the last little bit of her I had left hadn’t been something I was ready to grapple with.
“There, Marsha, he said no. We need to move on from this now.” John shot me a look of relief as he ushered his crumbling wife out of the room.
I needed to vomit. And then to get blindingly drunk.
Carol came swishing over to me when she spotted how John and Marsha left.
“What was that about?”
I shook my head, unwilling to spill the secrets of the grieving. I hoped that one day Marsha would be okay, but I wasn’t going to let any amount of guilt or sympathy goad me into doing something like that.
“Have I been here a socially acceptable amount of time? I would very much like to leave and get totally hammered.”
Carol’s lips twitched into a smile. “That sounds like the best idea you’ve had since you got home. Let me do the talking on our way out, and I’ll have us on our way back home to get wasted by the pool in our pajamas in less than ten minutes.”
Carol was an expert schmoozer. Her time as head of the family company had turned her into a professional escape artist. Whereas I would have gotten sucked into twelve different conversations on the way out, Carol navigated each obstacle with tact and grace and in six minutes we were in an elevator heading down to the main floor.
The familiar black Escalade pulled up and Carol climbed in first, leaving me to follow her. The silence of the car was jarring. Closing my eyes, I leaned back and pulled at my tie until the knot came loose.
“What did Marsha want?” Carol asked, determined to ferret out the truth, so I let her have it.
“I didn’t let her ask, but she wants access to Piper’s frozen eggs.” My eyes popped open and I cut Carol a careful look. “Don’t criticize her; she’s hasn’t handled this well.”
Carol’s lips flattened into a hard line. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Piper wanted them destroyed.” Even if she hadn’t, that felt like the best move, even if I hadn’t been ready to pull the trigger right away. I didn’t know if Piper’s cancer was something that could follow someone else genetically, but I’d watched what it did to her and I couldn’t bear to let that happen to someone else and their family. Even in a future that was so far removed it was impossible to picture.
John and Marsha would shit, but it wasn’t up to them to decide what to do.
“I’d forgotten about her eggs.” Carol was quiet and morose. She’d adored Piper.
“To be honest, so had I.” I let out a sigh. “All she ever wanted was a family.”
I let out an exhausted breath and cursed past me for not dealing with this sooner.
Carol patted my arm as she sighed along with me. “God, this day has been fucking awful. How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t, but not for the reason she was thinking. All day I’d been thinking of nothing but Brodie and how he could have come with me if I’d been out. If I’d have figured out how to ever tell the people around me that I was bisexual. The only person who knew now had a cancer wing named after her. Piper had embraced my bisexuality to the extent that she’d point out men she thought were cute to me.
It turns out that we had wildly different taste in men.
“The problem is,” I’d told her when she’d found it especially hysterical that we were never attracted to the same kind of men. “I’m your type, but I’m not my type.”
She’d taken my secret to her grave.
My condo came into view and I knew Carol wanted to follow me upstairs and fuss over me, but the idea of that made my skin crawl.
The vehicle came to a stop at the curb outside my building. “I think I’d like to be alone, Carol.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“I’m fine. Stop worrying about me.”
She looked me over and gave me a slight nod. “Fine, but you’ll check in with me tomorrow morning.”
I bit back the sassyyes, Momthat was on the tip of my tongue. “Thanks for coming with me today. I couldn’t have faced all of that alone.”
“Whatever you need, little brother. You know that. Now get out of my car. Even if we’re not getting trashed, I still very much want my pajamas and my couch.”
