Page 19 of The Devil Gets His Due

My heart beats a little faster. I watch the screen as the transducer glides over my stomach. And then…a profile. A nose, a leg, a tiny, fast-beating heart, flickering in and out like a flashlight in a storm.

My throat tightens unexpectedly.

Mychild. Something I never thought I’d see.

“The baby is kind of facing away,” Julie says. “I’m going to start doing the measurements and maybe he or she will turn for us here in a second so we can figure out the gender.” A tiny foot comes into view and a flutter in my stomach matches the movement. I want to see more, so badly, and at the same time, I can feel panic bubbling in my chest. I’m not ready for this to be any more real than it already is.

“That’s okay,” I whisper, my throat clogged with tears. “I don’t want to know.”

It’s already too real.

“Keeley,” she says, her voice soft, “you’re probably going to need some help, you know? It’s a lot.”

Which makes me cry the entire way home because she’s right…it’s a lot. And I’m going to be a disaster at it.

Graham calls that evening.I’m tempted to let it go to voice mail until I think of that tiny flickering heart I saw this afternoon. This isn’t about me or him, and I probably need to start trying a little harder.

“Can we meet this weekend?” he asks. “I’ll come to you.”

If he’s willing to fly all the way to LA, he either wants something or plans to demand something, and I’m not interested. “That seems like a lot of trouble for what you could probably say right here in thirty seconds.”

He exhales. A heavy,wearyexhale. If he’s tired of me now, just wait ’til he gets to know me.

“There’s a lot to discuss, Keeley, and nuance is lost when you’re discussing things by phone. We’ll go to dinner, and that’s it.”

A dinner he’ll spend badgering me, pushing and pushing for whatever it is he wants. For that little flickering heart, though, I guess I can agree.

The restauranthe’s chosen is not, to my vast surprise, the all-you-can-eat, buy one-get-one-free buffet I’d expected. And if Graham is shelling out for this place, he must be after something big.“I’ve bought you this nice steak dinner,”he’ll say,“and now I need you to sign a twenty-page contract agreeing to my demands.”

It’s another tactic I remember from my childhood.“Your father is cooperating,”my mom would say with a sigh.“He must want something.”

And she was always right. So I don’t know what the hell Graham wants, but I wish he’d just texted his request from New York so I could have said,“no,”and also,“fuck you,”without this performative dinner.

I find him waiting in the bar, reading something on his phone. His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his five o’clock shadow looking more like ten o’clock—and the effect is devastating. While I have a thousand regrets about the way my life is currently unfolding, I’ve got to say that simply from a genetics standpoint, I didn’t do so bad. If Graham was anyone else, someone I didn’t know to be a cheap, judgmental asshole, I’d say that he wasappallinglyhot, the kind of hot that probably had women doing double takes all the way through the airport this afternoon.

He looks up suddenly, catching me staring, and awkwardness descends; I’ve never had a guy fly across the country to see me without sex being the entire purpose. I’m not sure how to proceed.Hug? Parisian almost-kiss to the cheek?In the end, we opt simply for a nod—two business colleagues who hate each other but have accepted the position they’re in.

“No offense,” I tell him, “but I was kind of hoping you’d no-show.”

He frowns. “For Christ’s sake, Keeley, this isn’t a dispute in small claims court. It’s a child. Of course I wasn’t going to no-show.”

I’m wondering, again, if I should have just lied through my teeth the night he came to my apartment. My mother’s life would have been so much easier had she just quietly slunk off to raise me without ever involving my father. Instead, she spent the last fifteen years of her life being told,“no”to every single thing she wanted.“No”to a summer in Morocco,“no”to letting me audition for a Disney show, and“no”to letting us tour with her boyfriend’s band.

Have I just signed up for the exact same future? One in which not a single decision is mine?

Graham walks over to the supermodels moonlighting as hostesses to tell them we’re here. They’re the kind of women who act bored regardless of circumstance, but eventheybrighten a bit as he approaches. Sure, they do—he’s big and broad-shouldered and disgustingly handsome, and they haven’t been forced to endure a ten-minute speech from him yet entitled:Just Because I Can Afford to Pay For a Tequila Luge Doesn’t Mean I Should.

He motions me in front of him as we’re led to the table, his hand briefly on the small of my back. When he holds my chair, the stupid fucking hostess has stars in her eyes.

“Your waiter is a little busy right now,” she says only to Graham. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Water, thanks,” he says.

“I’ll have the same,” I reply, not that she seemed to be asking me. She walks away, and I roll my eyes. “You could have gotten a drink. I’m not so tempted by alcohol I won’t be able to resist if I see yours.”

“I stopped drinking. Our night in Vegas was a wake-up call.”

Well, that’s flattering. Marrying me was so horrifying that it made him stop drinking. Of course, it made me stop drinking, too, butI’ma treasure.

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